Why Europe’s AstraZeneca vaccine fumble could be bad news for the U.S.

Forget herd immunity. In Europe this week it appeared “herd mentality” was the dominating force in the battle against COVID-19.

On Monday, Germany raised a red flag, temporarily suspending use of the AstraZeneca vaccine so that it could investigate possible links to blood clots after seven cases of thrombosis occurred in the 1.6 million patients inoculated with that vaccine in Germany; three cases proved fatal. In response, another dozen European countries marched behind Berlin, dropping that vaccine to further investigate and effectively halting already anemic COVID immunization programs.

To date, less than 5 percent of citizens in Europe have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19, compared to 13 percent in the U.S. Hampered by a shortage of doses, “the vaccine rollout in Europe appears more like a crawl-out,” Roland Freudenstein, policy director of Martens Centre, a Brussels-based think tank, told Yahoo News. He says the United States, where 23 percent of citizens have had at least one shot, appears in contrast to be “a glowing example” of how the COVID crisis can be rapidly turned around. Halting the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine further muddied the waters for some Americans, a surprising number of whom have ambivalent feelings about being inoculated.

On Thursday, the European Medicines Agency, the European Union’s regulatory arm, after investigating the matter, again green-lit the AstraZeneca shot, which was co-created by the Swedish-British pharmaceutical company and Oxford University, saying, “This is a safe and effective vaccine.” That assurance prompted most countries to reverse course. French Prime Minister Jean Castex and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson were among those publicly rolling up their sleeves Friday for the AstraZeneca shot. But the damage to public confidence, for the moment at least, had been done.

“The population is scared that this vaccine could be dangerous,” Dr. José Martín Moreno, an epidemiologist and professor of preventive medicine and public health at the University of Valencia in Spain, told El Pais. Europeans, he said, “don’t know what they should believe.” And this comes at the very moment the Continent is being slammed by a third COVID wave: Italy as well as Paris and Hamburg are again under lockdown, a threat looming for all of Germany, France and beyond.