The World Health Organisation (WHO) has criticised Europe’s Covid vaccine rollout for being “unacceptably slow”. Only 16% of the EU’s population has received the jab, compared with 52% in the UK. BBC News has the story.
The WHO has criticised the rollout of coronavirus vaccines in Europe as being “unacceptably slow”.
It also says the situation in the region is more worrying than it has been for several months.
Vaccination campaigns in much of Europe have been hit by delays and the number of infections is rising.
The EU has been criticised for the pace of its vaccination programme – only 16% of its population has received the jab, compared with 52% in the UK.
But the EU says the UK has had an unfair advantage in contracts it signed with vaccine manufacturers, some of whom are based within the EU.
Last month, Boris Johnson said that the success of the UK’s Covid vaccine programme was because of “capitalism” and “greed”. Concerns on the Continent over the AstraZeneca vaccine’s link to rare blood clots are also thought to have slowed the progress of its jab rollout. A recent survey of 1,053 Danes suggests that, regardless of official assurances that the jab is “safe and effective“, concerns about the vaccine are now widespread in Denmark. Reuters has more.
One in three Danes would decline to get a Covid shot using AstraZeneca’s vaccine, local media outlets TV 2 and Politiken reported late on Wednesday, citing a recent survey. …
The survey, conducted by Megafon among 1,053 persons, showed 33% of Danes would decline to get a shot with AstraZeneca’s vaccine. However, only 7% would decline regardless of which Covid vaccine they were offered.
The WHO’s director for Europe Hans Kluge says that Europe must speed up its vaccine rollout as vaccination “present[s] our best way out of this pandemic”.
We must speed up the process by ramping up manufacturing, reducing barriers to administering vaccines, and using every single vial we have in stock, now.
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