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AUSTRIA

Austria set to approve AstraZeneca vaccine for over 65s

Despite concerns about its effectiveness, Austria is set to buck the trend of almost all of its neighbours in recommending the AstraZeneca vaccine for people aged over 65.

A pateint receives the AstraZeneca Vaccine Oli SCARFF / AFP

The head of Austria’s Vaccination Board Ursula Wiedermann-Schmidt has said she will ask health minister Rudolph Anschober to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine for people aged over 65 this week in an interview with ZIB 1.

The approval comes despite concerns surrounding the effectiveness of the vaccine. 

Several other European countries have not recommended the vaccine be administered to people over 65, including Germany, Italy, France and Sweden. 

Neighbouring Switzerland has declined to approve the vaccine entirely – and is now considering selling the 5.3 million doses it has already purchased

There has also been resistance to the vaccine from those awaiting vaccination in Austria. Two weeks ago, around 500 staff at Vienna’s AKH hospital signed a petition saying they did not want to take the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The Kronen Zeitung reported it as a “vaccination riot”.

Effective in preventing infections

Maria Paulke-Korinek, head of the vaccination department in the Ministry of Health told  ZIB2 she would wait for the final decision of the vaccination committee.

The vaccine is already approved for all ages over 18 by the European Medicine Agency, but Austria did not previously recommend it for the older age groups due to a lack of data.

Wiedermann-Schmitt said more data had come from the British health authorities which demonstrated the vaccine was effective in preventing infections in older age groups.

She said providing the vaccine deliveries were met, using AstraZeneca for older groups could speed up Austria’s vaccination strategy. 

Austria has ordered two million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, but there were well-publicised delivery problems in the first quarter of the year to the EU, resulting in only 40 million of the promised 90 million doses being delivered. 

On Tuesday EU insiders told Reuters that the company had informed the EU it also expected to deliver less than half the vaccines it was contracted to supply between April and June.

However, the company also issued a statement saying it would try to increase production to stick to its 180 million vaccine doses commitment. 

Austrian Health Minister Rudolf Anschober (Photo by JOE KLAMAR / AFP)

However, despite these setbacks, Health Minister  Rudolf Anschober said in a statement that even if AstraZeneca should actually deliver less in the second quarter of the year, anyone who wants to can will be offered a vaccination by the summer.

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VACCINE

Vaccine scramble: How Spaniards want Covid jabs more than other Europeans

Whilst the EU warns that unused doses due to vaccine scepticism are piling up, Spaniards of all ages want to achieve immunity against Covid-19 as soon as possible, the data shows. 

Vaccine scramble: How Spaniards want Covid jabs more than other Europeans
People queue to get the vaccine in Barcelona. Photo: Lluis Gené/AFP

In Spain, where the Covid-19 rollout has gone from one of the slowest in the EU to currently one of the fastest, pretty much everyone wants to get vaccinated. 

With priority groups almost fully immunised, Spain is still beating daily records with 600,000 to 700,000 doses administered every day. 

The spike in cases among the country’s young population has led several regions to bring forward jabs for teens and twenty-somethings ahead of people in their thirties.

Despite the apparent lack of concern for the pandemic witnessed  in packed squares and streets over the past weeks, young people who have been able to take advantage of the vaccine offer have headed en masse to the vaccination centres. 

When an Asturian youth called Ana Santos told a local newspaper that “after the elderly, it should be our turn to get vaccinated as it’s not as if people in their forties go out, is it?”, her comments went down like a tonne of bricks among this age group, who demanded it was their turn to reach full immunisation first. 

Vaccine scepticism hasn’t been a problem for Spain as it has been for other countries, with President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen launching a warning recently that vaccine supplies are piling up, even though Brussels has reached its target of providing enough doses to fully vaccinate 70 percent of EU adults.

“If we look at the statistics, more and more doses remain unused,” von der Leyen told journalists in Strasbourg.

“This is linked to the fact that there is a greater distribution of vaccines, but in part also due to doubts about vaccination,” adding that it was crucial to reach the most sceptical parts of the population” in the face of the “worrying” presence of the Delta variant.

“Traditionally in Spain, we have had much less resistance or rejection towards vaccines, that’s always been the case,” vaccine expert at the Spanish Association of Pediatrics (AEP) Ángel Hernández-Merino told 20minutos. 

“In any vaccination programme, it’s vital to count on the population being willing to accept the vaccination”.

A June 2021 Eurobarometer study found that 49 percent of people in Spain want to get vaccinated “as soon as possible”, the highest rate in the entire EU (32 percent EU average). 

Whereas an average of 9 percent of EU citizens don’t ever want to get vaccinated, the rate in Spain is 4 percent.  Around 63 percent of Spaniards told Eurobarometer that they couldn’t understand why people are hesitant to get vaccinated and 71 percent said Covid vaccines are the only way for the pandemic to end. 

In Belgium, around a third of the population doesn’t want to get vaccinated.

In other countries where in the earlier stages of the Covid vaccination campaign it seemed  that available doses were easily used up it’s now becoming evident that sprinting through the age groups doesn’t guarantee that everyone is being vaccinated. 

Germany, the UK and the US, all seen as examples to Spain of how to quickly immunise a population, have all seen their campaigns slow down due to hesitancy and the summer holidays.

Spain’s Health Ministry doesn’t give data on how many people have rejected the vaccine and why, but stats do show that already more than half of the population (57.5 percent) have at least one dose and 43.3 percent are fully vaccinated. 

The Spanish government has stuck to its objective of vaccinating 70 percent of the country’s 47 million people before the end of August, even though it did fall short of its June target by more than half a million doses. 

Rather than vaccine scepticism, what’s been holding up Spain’s inoculation campaign have been doubts over the administration of second AstraZeneca vaccines and the decision to keep a reserve in case the country experienced delivery setbacks as it has in the past, with 2.9 million doses in storage reported in late June.

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