Germany has just undermined the EU’s vaccine argument

Germany’s vaccine committee has advised the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine only be given to under-65s. The announcement marks a major twist in a week of muddled vaccine reports. On Tuesday, the German newspaper Handelsblatt suggested that German officials believed the Oxford vaccine was only 8 per cent effective for the over-65 groups (no evidence has been produced to support the 8 per cent claim). It has been heavily and extensively rebuffed by both AstraZeneca and the German government.

Yet the German reporter who broke the story doubled down on the claims, raising the stakes as to whether he was making precarious reporting worse, or whether the European Medicines Agency may indeed conclude that the vaccine’s efficacy is too low.

Details are still emerging about why the German health committee has rejected the use of the vaccine for elderly groups. The standing vaccination committee at the Robert Koch Institute has said: ‘There is insufficient data to judge how effective the vaccination is above 65 years.’