France's go-slow coronavirus vaccination strategy backfires
PARIS (AP) — France’s cautious approach to rolling out a coronavirus vaccination program appears to have backfired, leaving barely 500 people inoculated in the first week and rekindling anger over the government’s handling of the pandemic.
President Emmanuel Macron was holding a special meeting with top government officials Monday to address the vaccine strategy and other virus developments.
The slow rollout of the vaccine made by Pfizer and the German firm BioNTech was blamed on mismanagement, staffing shortages during holiday vacations and a complex French consent policy designed to accommodate unusually broad vaccine skepticism among the French public.
Doctors, mayors and opposition politicians pleaded Monday for speedier access to vaccines.
“It’s a state scandal,” said Jean Rottner, president of the Grand-Est region of eastern France, where infections are surging and some hospitals are over capacity.
“Getting vaccinated is becoming more complicated than buying a car,” he said on France-2 television.
In France, a country of 67 million people, only 516 people were vaccinated in the first six days, according to the French Health Ministry. Germany’s first-week total surpassed 200,000 and Italy’s was over 100,000 — and even those countries are under fire for being too slow to protect the public from a pandemic that has killed more than 1.8 million people worldwide.
The U.S. and China, meanwhile, have vaccinated millions. Britain on Monday became the first nation in the world to start giving people shots of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, so the U.K. now has two approved vaccines to use.
France started its vaccination campaign on Dec. 27 in nursing homes, because so many elderly people have died with the virus. But facing fears that people with...
