CTI featured in POLITICO Pro
The below is an excerpt from the POLITICO Pro Morning Health Care newsletter.
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Wednesday 01 April, 2026
COVID-19
PEOPLE AREN’T GETTING THEIR COVID SHOTS — BUT THEY SHOULD: Public health experts are calling for greater uptake of Covid-19 vaccines in Europe, where numbers lag way behind those of seasonal flu vaccines.
“This isn’t on people’s minds,” Leif Erik Sander, head of infectious diseases at the Charité university hospital in Berlin, said. “The vulnerable populations, that should be vaccinated, are not aware of the fact that actually the vaccine recommendations for seasonal flu and Covid are very similar, and that it is now a routine vaccine, just like seasonal flu vaccine.”
A striking difference: According to Europe’s disease agency ECDC, a median average of 8.7 percent of people aged 60 and above got their Covid-19 shot in the EU between 2024 and 2025. In comparison, almost half (47.1 percent) of older people in the EU were vaccinated against influenza the same winter.
Nonsensical: “If the data tell us that the lethality of Covid by age is roughly the same as seasonal flu, then it makes no sense at all to have relatively high uptake of seasonal flu vaccines and really very poor uptake of covid vaccines on the European mainland,” said Jonathan Van-Tam, epidemiologist and former deputy chief medical officer for England.
Lost priority: Despite causing similar rates if illness to seasonal influenza, particularly for high-risk populations, Covid-19 has dropped off the public and political agenda, warned a group of experts at a press briefing by CTI in Brussels on Tuesday. “Flu and flu vaccines is something that people have been used to,” Sander said. “And I think the mindset is, Covid is over.”
Why? It’s a mix of reasons, health experts argue, ranging from Covid fatigue to pure lack of awareness over its continued burden. But some of it is rooted in disinformation and mistrust in vaccines that festered during and after the pandemic.
It’s also harder to see the impact of Covid-19: Unlike the flu or RSV, it isn’t seasonal, said Van-Tam, with more unpredictable peaks and emerging new variants. “It’s more of a steady pressure.”
Patient organizations already try to organize campaigns to boost public awareness, said Juan-Jose Ventura, from Cancer Patients Europe. And policymakers should do the same.
The role of physicians: Health care providers also “need to be more active” in informing people of the risks of Covid and the availability of vaccines, experts said. Offering Covid-19 and flu shots together could help increase uptake, they added.
“The one thing that always tips the balance is a personal recommendation from a trusted health care practitioner,” Van-Tam said.
ROADWORKS WITH MIKE RYAN: A “pothole” in trust in public health turned into a “chasm” during the Covid-19 pandemic, former World Health Organization official Mike Ryan told an Irish inquiry Tuesday.
Do as we say: He said public health authorities didn’t put enough trust in communities. “In general, people manage their own risk,” he said. Ryan, who left his post as WHO Deputy Director-General in 2025, said he could “understand why” authorities took that approach because of the immediate pressure on health systems.