Erika Inoue, 24, who works at a research group in Tokyo that consults on projects for local governments and businesses, said she was envious of friends in the United States who had received their shots.
“Among my friends’ group, I’m the only one who hasn’t gotten vaccinated,” said Ms. Inoue, who is hoping to attend a friend’s wedding in Tunisia. “I cannot wait.”
Japan, South Korea and Australia have all fallen far behind the vaccination timelines they laid out months ago.
Some wards in Tokyo began administering shots to those over 65 just this past week. In South Korea, where the authorities initially said they would be able to vaccinate about one million people a day, they have averaged closer to 27,000 in the first three months vaccinating. This month, Australian health officials dropped a goal of vaccinating the country’s entire population by the end of the year.
In Australia and Japan, the authorities have blamed supply problems from Europe for the slow rollout. Australia has said the European Union failed to deliver 3.1 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. A spokesman for the European Commission said that only 250,000 doses had been withheld from Australia by Italy in March, but officials in Australia say the reality is that the rest of the doses, blocked or not, simply have not arrived.
Australia has faced further complications as it has advised against giving the AstraZeneca vaccine to people under 50 after reports of very rare blood clots.
In Japan, Taro Kono, the cabinet minister overseeing the vaccination program, has complained that the European Union grants approval on a shipment-by-shipment basis rather than approving multiple shipments at once. “We could get our vaccines stopped by the E.U.,” he said, citing the withheld doses to Australia.
The European Union has authorized shipments of more than 39 million doses to Japan, Patricia Flor, the union’s ambassador to Japan, said in an interview. “I would totally and absolutely reject any statement which would say that the way the vaccination campaign in Japan is going is related in any way to delays or problems in deliveries from the E.U.,” she said.
Supply issues or not, other factors have also led to delays. Japan requires domestic clinical trials of new vaccines, and in both Japan and South Korea, officials have proceeded carefully to persuade people who say they are reluctant to get vaccinated right away.
Kim Minho, 27, a researcher at the Institute of Engineering Research in Seoul, said the government had depended too heavily on measures like social distancing to curb infection rates. “Korea was late to the vaccine party,” he said.
A similar dynamic is true in Japan. Experts said the country might simply have failed to negotiate contracts requiring early deliveries of vaccines doses. In a statement, Pfizer said it would deliver on its commitment of 144 million doses to Japan by the end of 2021. Japan has yet to give regulatory approval to the Moderna or AstraZeneca vaccines, although it has contracted with both companies to buy millions of doses.
Health ministry officials “are professionals about public health,” said Dr. Hiroyuki Moriuchi, a professor of global health at Nagasaki University. “But when it comes to business or contract writing, they are not professionals or experts in this area.”
“If Japan had a firm consciousness that this is a sense of crisis,” he added, “they would not have relied only on health ministry officials” to negotiate such contracts.
Mr. Kono, the cabinet minister overseeing the vaccine campaign, projects that the country will distribute enough doses for the country’s 36 million older people by the end of June. In a news briefing, he gave no projections for when the rest of the population might be inoculated.
Although overseas spectators have been barred from the Olympics, the Games’ organizers have said they will not require athletes, Olympic officials or foreign journalists to be vaccinated in order to enter Japan. On Friday, Seiko Hashimoto, the president of the Tokyo organizing committee, said that unlike other nations, Japan did not plan to prioritize its athletes for vaccination.
In public polls, more than 70 percent of Japanese respondents say the Olympics should be postponed or canceled because of the pandemic. Media surveys have found that close to three-quarters of the public is unhappy with the vaccination delays.
text by The New York Times
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