All over Europe, governments are feeling the heat over botched vaccination strategies — as is the European Commission. Belgium, which started its coronavirus vaccination plan in earnest on Tuesday, is no exception.
After an earful from opposition lawmakers on Tuesday, Belgian Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke asked the country’s vaccination task force to speed up and readjust its strategy. It’s set to meet on Thursday, with an announcement expected on Friday morning.
The move comes after health workers asked Vandenbroucke to be prioritized for the jab in an open letter dated Tuesday. About 700 residents and staff of care homes have gotten their first shot as of January 2, when the government provided its latest update on the tally. In Germany, by contrast, roughly 317,000 doses have been administered, and about 182,000 in Italy.
The government’s fumbling is a far cry from Vandenbroucke’s pledge on Flemish TV in November that vaccine distribution would be “seamless and fast.”
“If that does not work, shoot me,” he said at the time.
Opposition MPs are now using that rhetoric against him, citing a lack of logistical anticipation, poor communication and insufficient transparency. Lawmakers have been asking him “what is planned in terms of refrigerators, vials and syringes” for more than a month now, said French-speaking MP Sophie Rohonyi from the Défi party in an interview with POLITICO.
“Even if there won’t be a shortage of syringes, there will be a shortage of vials,” she added. “We are also dependent on Pfizer for freezers.”
Yves Van Laethem, an infectious diseases specialist and spokesman for Belgium’s COVID-19 crisis center, said the country is also getting fewer doses than initially promised by Pfizer — only 320,000 instead of 600,000 by late December — forcing the government to make a choice.
“Between choosing the health staff or the elderly, there is no question — the elderly should be vaccinated first!” he said, adding that health workers were less affected during the second wave of the pandemic.
Van Laethem claims Belgium’s relative success in beating the second wave is also a reason why the rollout has been slow, especially in contrast to countries like the United States, the U.K. and Israel.
“Belgium can afford it, without resting on its laurels,” he said. “It’s not in the same situation as in the U.K., where everything is up for grabs.”
Responding to critics, task force spokesman Yvon Englert floated the prospect that the government could revise its vaccination schedule. He has suggested that instead of keeping the second dose of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine aside for residents of care homes, they could instead be given as a first dose to health care workers to speed up the initial rollout. Patients in the first round would then receive their second dose later in January, after Pfizer’s next delivery.
With this revamped schedule, hospital staff should receive the jab by mid-February instead of March; the entire Belgian population could be inoculated by the end of the year.
Such a schedule would deviate from Belgium’s initial vaccination strategy, laid out in early December as three different phases: the first targeting residents and staff of care homes, followed by health care professionals; the second, people over 65, patients between 45-65 at higher risk and essential workers; and finally, the remainder of both the at-risk and adult populations.
Rohonyi welcomes the potential shift in strategy as a good thing, although she sees it as an “admission that the initial strategy was not the right one.”
Helen Collis and Barbara Moens contributed reporting.
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