Is France ready to come clean on AstraZeneca?

The world beyond the shores of the United Kingdom owes an apology to the AstraZeneca corporation. But nowhere more so than France. 

While the Cambridge-based biomedical giant has produced millions of doses of its highly-effective Covid vaccine not only on time and at cost, but to the detriment of its share price, France has looked on with a scornful eye. 

Much of the opprobrium has sprung from the mouth of Emmanuel Macron, who on 29 January, just hours before the Oxford vaccine was given the green light by the European Medicines Agency, observed to journalists that it was only “quasi-effective” for those aged 65 or older. 

Anti-vaxxers across France, many of them in the older age groups, took this as a warning to avoid the Oxford jab at all costs. Rather than being disappointed by Macron’s analysis, they were relieved. The fact that the vaccine was British (albeit manufactured by a company that is half-Swedish) contributed to public mood, for there is no doubt that the French were dismayed that their own chemists – most obviously at the renowned Pasteur Institute – had failed to come up with a world-beater of their own. But whatever the starting point, the President appeared to have given AstraZeneca his seal of disapproval.     

To be fair, Macron was responding to doubts raised by a group of doctors in Germany, who were concerned that few elderly patients had been included in the tests carried out into the vaccine’s effectiveness prior to its being given the official go-ahead in the UK. But this does not explain why the President didn’t respond to reporters by saying, “let’s wait to see what the EMA has to say”. It was as if he’d forgotten that the agency was about to pronounce or else that his mind, like that of the anti-vaxxers, was already made up.

What he came out with was both damning and revealing: “What I can tell you officially today is that the early results we have are not encouraging for 60-to-65-year-olds concerning AstraZeneca.” But then he went on: “I don’t have any data, and I don’t have a scientific team of my own to look at the numbers.”

So why not say nothing and leave it to the scientists? 

Four weeks later, on 2 March, he did a U-turn, informing the public that not only was he willing to take the AstraZeneca vaccine, but that he recommended it for use across all age groups. 

Once again, he was responding to new information, in this case a study carried out in Scotland that confirmed the Oxford jab as old-age appropriate – an example, perhaps, of the maxim, when the facts change, I change my mind. But it is difficult not to conclude that, like a cushion, he was taking on the shape of the last person who sat on him. 

More generally, Macron’s attitude to vaccines was coloured by an early and unexplained aversion to the idea that science might actually come up with an answer to Covid-19 – an outlook he shared with millions of his countrymen and women. 

In an interview he gave to the online French news site, Brut, on 4 December, conducted across a small table from two journalists and a historian, none of whom, like the President himself, wore a mask, Macron said that he did not yet consider vaccination to be the “heart of the battle” and that he didn’t think it right that the French should be jabbed “matin, midi et soir”. 

“We are not ready to say to people, ‘Get vaccinated, get vaccinated’, with all force at our command and across the entire population. We have another strategy.” 

Later the same day, during a visit to a leading treatment centre in Paris, he repeated his message: “The vaccine is coming. Is that the only answer? No.” 

Britain’s prime minister has taken a lot of flack for eschewing a mask in the early days of the pandemic and for shaking hands with people long after he had been advised to discontinue the practice. But Emmanuel Macron, we can now see, took a broadly similar view.

It was only weeks later, once the comprehensive failure of the European Commission to secure life-saving vaccines had become embarrassingly apparent, not least in France, that Macron changed his tune. Now he was a believer, ready to wash his hands of his former nostrums and to pay belated tribute to Big Pharma. 

Even then, due to what can only be viewed as a constitutional unwillingness to admit that Britain might sometimes get things right, Macron was unwilling to give AstraZeneca his imprimatur. Earlier this month, France, along with Denmark and Ireland, suspended use of the Oxford jab “as a precaution,” pending the resolution of several small outstanding issues. The ban was lifted four days later, but, without any sense of irony, is only to be offered to those over the age of 55. 

The fact that France had, by one estimate, as many as 29 million doses of the British product in storage was neither here nor there. By all means, the President has suggested, take this workaday-wonder if there is nothing else available. But remember the alternatives – not just Pfizer and Moderna, but the upcoming French-made Valneva vaccine and the promised single-shot Johnson & Johnson – so much more efficacious than the dreary old single Johnson on offer from the Brits. 

Macron may well have to eat his words – and soon. His prime minister, Jean Castex (55-and-three-quarters), received his first dose of the AZ vaccine on 19 March and is expected to be given his second shot before the end of April. Around the country, meanwhile, the French are queuing up to be jabbed matin, midi et soir. 

As a 72-year-old living in rural France, I remain unjabbed. When I checked in with the relevant website, I was informed that no fewer than 3,800 people were ahead of me in the queue at our local vaccination centre. 

As the nation’s death toll heads towards the one-hundred-thousand mark (still 27,000 behind the UK), the only ones saying no to AstraZeneca are those who, in spite of habitually returning from their local pharmacy clutching shoe-boxes filled with medicines, believe that vaccines are in some way the Devil’s spawn. To everyone else, AstraZeneca can now be seen for what it is, on the side of the angels.