BERLIN: Europe’s row with AstraZeneca worsened on Thursday with a German recommendation against administering the firm’s Covid vaccine to people over 65 years of age, while WHO experts emerged from quarantine in China to begin a long-awaited probe into the pandemic’s origins.

With countries across the world again tightening restrictions after months of stop-and-start closures to curb virus infections, the economic toll so far was coming into focus with the United States seeing its sharpest contraction in growth since 1946.

Data released by the United Nations on Thursday also said the global tourism sector lost $1.3 trillion in revenue last year.

Given the world’s weariness over the pandemic that has now killed some 2.2 million people and infected more than 100 million, countries have been anxious to resolve bottlenecks in the distribution of jabs.

But the European Union’s efforts have been hit by an announcement from British-Swedish firm AstraZeneca that it could only supply a quarter of the doses it had promised for the first quarter of this year.

The EU has demanded the company meet its commitments by supplying doses from its British factories, but Britain insists it must receive all of the vaccines it ordered — and there are simply not enough to go round.

Adding to the row was an announcement from Germany’s vaccine commission that it could not recommend AstraZeneca’s vaccine for those over 65 since there was not enough data to assess its efficacy.

AstraZeneca and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson immediately defended the jabs, which have already been widely used in Britain on older people.

‘Proud to graduate’

The stakes were also high in Wuhan, China, as World Health Organisation experts emerged from two weeks of quarantine and Washington and Beijing sparred over the probe.

“So proud to graduate from our 14 days... no one went stir crazy & we’ve been v productive,” tweeted team member Peter Daszak after the investigators left their quarantine hotel wearing masks, peering out of their bus window at the gathered media.

China has sought to deflect blame by suggesting — without proof — that the virus emerged elsewhere.

Published in Dawn, January 29th, 2021