What Angela Merkel can learn from the Queen about vaccine scepticism

You have to feel for Germany. After a fraught vaccine procurement process, not only is the government struggling to persuade its citizens to take the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, but Angela Merkel has now stated that she will not be given the jab on account of her age. 

‘I do not belong to the recommended age group for AstraZeneca,’ the German chancellor told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. It could well be the final nail in the coffin for an EMA-approved, safe vaccine that has cost her country millions.

Merkel’s view may be aligned with government policy – she is 66 and therefore, under the German rules which state that over 65s should not be given the vaccine, she does not qualify for a dose. But the intransigence of her position is also astonishingly naïve. 

As Britain’s monarch takes to the air to encourage others to follow her lead, surely Merkel should have grasped the PR fallout that her remarks would provoke? As it stands, over half the German population when polled say they’d rather wait to receive another vaccine. And who can blame their scepticism after Germany’s establishment figures have spent the last few weeks casting aspersions on its efficacy?

Merkel may be playing by the rules but she has forgone the opportunity to put this widespread German scepticism to bed. Germany's leader now finds herself in an impossible situation. Having procured millions of doses of a vaccine that is providing Britain with a path out of lockdown, she is now fuelling the growing climate of doubt. Much of the German press seems set against the vaccine, with Der Spiegel publishing an article last week entitled ‘The vaccine no one wants’. Merkel’s remarks will hardly dampen the flow of negative headlines.

Both France and Germany are in a precarious position. With uptake perilously low, they risk creating a situation similar to the one president Gerald Ford found himself in when he had to abandon his rollout of a mass flu vaccination programme in 1976. When three senior citizens died of heart attacks after receiving the vaccine, the press went to town on whether the deaths were linked to the jab and the American public became increasingly hostile towards taking it. A number of states even temporarily suspended the use of the vaccine. Like Merkel, Ford had already funded millions of doses when this scepticism took root.

Given the volume of people being given the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine across Europe, an adverse health condition or death is bound to be linked, however tendentiously, to the vaccine at some point. If Europe is starting at a very low base of uptake how will it fare when these stories inevitably circulate?

Britain, in contrast, has a Queen who is prepared to lead by example. When she told NHS health workers on a Zoom call that ‘people ought to think of people other than themselves’, British citizens knew she meant what she said because she has willingly stepped forward to be vaccinated. If more prominent public figures across Europe resolved to set an example, perhaps fears would be quelled. As it stands, it’s very much a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

Indeed, it could be too late to turn the tide. Gerald Ford issued photographs of himself taking the 1976 flu vaccine in an effort to win over the American public, but by that point the public had already made its mind up. Like Ford, Merkel may have missed her moment. And the price of this mistake may be many more months of Covid unrest for Germany.