The Dutch government’s vaccine strategy has been flawed, Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Tuesday as he admitted watching on with frustration as other countries’ citizens were given a jab against the coronavirus.
“Because the government’s approach was not agile enough, vaccination will start later than in other European countries,” Rutte said during a debate in parliament.
The Netherlands will only vaccinate its first citizen, a care home nurse, on Wednesday — making it one of the last countries in the EU to begin giving coronavirus vaccines.
Rutte said the Netherlands had assumed the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, which does not require storage at extremely low temperatures, would be the first to get EU approval and that the vaccination program could have been rolled out via family doctors.
However, the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine was the first to be approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), on December 21, and it is more difficult to use in small-scale vaccination centres because it must be stored in dry ice. It can be stored in a normal refrigerator for just five days.
Rutte added that the Dutch rollout campaign was further complicated because approval of the vaccine happened sooner than planned.
“Looking back, it would have been better if I had asked the GGD [Dutch health authority] myself to start earlier with setting up large, central vaccination points,” Rutte said. “We weren’t able to get the GGD spots up and running fast enough.”
Lawmakers lamented the slow rollout, slamming it as “chaotic” and “confusing.”
Far-right politician Geert Wilders, the leader of the biggest opposition party, called on Health Minister Hugo de Jonge to resign. “You are not the right man in the right spot,” he said.
“We lost valuable weeks, and that is unacceptable,” said GreenLeft leader Jesse Klaver. He asked Rutte to appoint a special minister for testing policy to ensure de Jonge could focus on other parts of his job — a suggestion the prime minister later rejected.
The European Commission has warned countries since October that they should prepare for different rollout scenarios in terms of storage and infrastructure.
However, the Dutch lagged behind in planning. One of the main delays was the upgrading of an IT system to allow the GGD to track appointments as well as which vaccine was used on different patients. The GGD also needed to establish at least one mass vaccination point in each of its 25 regions.
De Jonge said Monday that it may have been possible to start vaccinating people “a few days earlier” if he had asked the GGD to begin scaling up preparations at an earlier date.
The minister said he hoped that the vaccination program would be completed by the third quarter of 2021, although much depends on deliveries, he said. “That determines the speed at which you can vaccinate, in both the Netherlands and the rest of Europe,” he said in a letter to parliament on Monday.
The number of positive tests and hospitalizations in the Netherlands is still high, despite a hard lockdown that started on December 15. The public health agency RIVM said on Tuesday that 56,440 people tested positive for COVID-19 in the past week.
At the moment only the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine has been approved for use in the EU. The EMA may issue its ruling on a vaccine candidate from Moderna on Wednesday, and is expected to receive more information from a rolling review of the Oxford/AstraZeneca candidate this month.
Jillian Deutsch contributed reporting.