Glacial pace of vaccinations threatens Japan’s Olympics

Bloomberg

In the race to vaccinate citizens against Covid-19, Japan should be a front-runner. It has nearly universal healthcare coverage and pharmaceutical prowess, not to mention a pending national election, a large elderly population and the looming Olympics to motivate political leaders to move fast.
Yet it has the dubious distinction of being among the worst performers when it comes to inoculations. Japan has given enough doses to cover just 1.1% of its population, the lowest among the 37 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), according to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker. That compares to 36% in the US and nearly 35% in the UK.
Within Asia, it trails China, India, Singapore and South Korea and is only slightly ahead of lower-income nations like the Philippines and Thailand.
Following Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s declaration of a state of emergency in some areas to tamp down a new wave of infections, some frustrated Japanese are looking enviously at vaccine programs elsewhere and asking why their government hasn’t moved as quickly. After a year of watching devastating scenes unfold in places like the US while the pathogen was relatively contained at home, it now seems like the tables have turned.
“I want vaccinations to proceed at warp speed,” billionaire Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of e-commerce giant Rakuten Inc, tweeted. “Like America.”
Until recently, Japanese could take comfort knowing their country had responded better to the pandemic than its peers in the West. Since there was never a dizzying surge in cases and deaths, they didn’t clamor for Covid-19 shots. But with the Olympics in three months and a third state of emergency upon them, public frustration appears to be growing, raising the pressure on Suga’s government to move more quickly.
He’s now instructed the Defense Minister to use the military to set up a mass vaccination site in Tokyo, the capital city, the first time the national government has directly engaged in vaccination administration — which had been devolved to municipal officials to carry out. Suga faces a party leadership poll in September and must call a general election by October.
Ray Fujii, a Tokyo-based partner at LEK Consulting whose clients include healthcare companies, blames the government’s lackluster preparation for the delay. While a slow supply of vaccines from Pfizer was to blame early on, that’s no longer the case, he said. Japan has likely received more than 15 million doses of the Pfizer shot, according to figures provided by the government in March.
Domestic polls conducted in recent months show as many as 80% of residents want to be immunised, and nearly half of those in a global survey by Ipsos and the WEF said they would get the shot within a month if it were available to them.