Germany considering Russian and Chinese vaccines to boost Covid inoculation drive

Germany’s health minister has said he is prepared to consider using Russian and Chinese coronavirus vaccines ahead of an emergency summit to tackle the country’s sluggish inoculation programme.

Just over 2 million Germans have received a vaccine, in stark contrast to more than 10 million in the UK, and Jens Spahn said that if the Russian and Chinese products passed EU safety checks they may be allowed.

“If a vaccine can be considered to be safe and effective, regardless of what country it has been produced in, then it could help with tackling the pandemic,” Spahn said in a newspaper interview. He is under pressure to finally get a comprehensive nationwide vaccine programme off the ground, and was speaking before an emergency vaccine summit that will bring together the country’s leaders together with representatives of the pharmaceutical industry.

Commentators said the fact that the government was even remotely considering turning to Sputnik V and Sinovac, which have not yet been tested to western standards and were never mentioned in Germany’s previous vaccine plans, showed how desperate it was to find a solution.

Participants in the summit have said they hope it will result in a nationwide vaccine plan, after days of ugly wrangling between the European commission and the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca and other suppliers such as BioNTech, over questions of procurement and investment.

The commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, who is under pressure over its apparent lack of urgency, told German television she had spoken to Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, at the weekend, and that they had “agreed to cooperate”. The British government is being urged to consider releasing vaccine stocks to its under-supplied European partners.

The German government has faced mounting criticism from the 16 länder and the medical profession for being too slow and not assertive enough in its attempt to secure vaccine stocks, and for not exerting more pressure on the European commission to do more in the race to save lives.

Legal experts in Germany have sharply criticised a contract between AstraZeneca and the European commission for being vague and incomplete about what the company would deliver and when.

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The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is due to chair the vaccine summit via video link at 2pm German time, to forge a way out of the crisis. She has been forced to admit that her government could have done more and sooner.

Markus Söder, the leader of the southern state of Bavaria, said the vaccine summit had to deliver some clear answers from manufacturers and pointed out the public’s mounting frustration. “We need to know when which vaccine amounts are coming,” he said.

The rate of new infections is slowly falling across the country, but pressure is growing as an increasing number of scheduled vaccine appointments have been cancelled in recent days.

Despite the approval last week by the EU’s medical agency EMA of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Germany’s vaccine commission has continued to insist it will not allow its use for the over-65s because of a lack of testing on that age group, putting additional pressure on its stocks.

BioNTech announced before Monday’s summit that it would increase the stocks it supplies to the EU in the second quarter to 75m doses, around 14m of which should go to Germany.

With German industry called to step up, the pharmaceutical giant Bayer said on Monday it would work in partnership with the company CureVac to produce its mRNA-based vaccine if and when it is approved, but this is not expected to be before the summer.

Spahn, who is under fire over the crisis more than any other German politician having previously been seen to be managing the pandemic well, admitted he was pained by the slowness of Germany’s vaccine programme.

“It pains me, every outbreak in old people’s homes, every death… I see the suffering,” he said. He added that he was hopeful though now that 70% of German care home residents had received a jab, a year after the outbreak of the pandemic in Europe. “I think that is very fortunate,” he said.