At the start of the year, many Germans were complaining about a shortage of coronavirus vaccines that could free them from onerous lockdowns and limited social lives. Just weeks later, many are now upset that they’re not getting the vaccine they want.
As people around the world clamor for inoculations, and many countries have seen severe shortages, a preference for a vaccine developed by the German company BioNTech with Pfizer, is causing a pileup in Germany of the shot developed by AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish company, according to state health officials.
Many people — including health workers — are skipping appointments or refusing to sign up for the AstraZeneca shot, which they fear is less effective than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the officials say. As a result, two weeks after the first delivery of 1.45 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine arrived in Germany, only 270,986 have been administered, according to data collected by the public health authority, the Robert Koch Institute. Read New York Times’ story here.
