Jabs alone won’t stop infections

As Western Europe's vaccination rollout gained strength in the early part of 2021, many of the region's leaders touted the shots as their immediate route out of the pandemic.

Press conferences took on an almost celebratory tone as presidents, prime ministers and chancellors announced road maps away from Covid-19 restrictions, hailing their country's uptake rates and speaking colorfully about a return to normalcy.

But as another Covid-struck winter grips Europe, many of those countries are now reversing course.

Ireland introduced a midnight curfew on the hospitality industry earlier this week amid a surge in cases, despite having one of Europe's best vaccination rates. In Portugal -- the envy of the continent, where 87 percent of the total population is inoculated -- the government is mulling new measures as infections inch upwards.

And in the Netherlands new restrictions have come into force, prompting protests that turned violent in Rotterdam on Friday night.

Some might wonder how both things can be true. But as nations are discovering, even a relatively strong vaccination rate is not enough alone to stop the spread of Covid-19 -- and warning signs from Germany and Austria, where infections have skyrocketed in recent weeks -- show the dangers of complacency.

The number of new daily coronavirus cases increased sharply by nine percent globally to 517,600, according to an AFP tally to Thursday.

Nine of the 10 countries where the situation worsened fastest were in Europe, AFP data showed.

No matter how impressive a country's vaccination rate appears, experts insist that vaccines alone can't be expected to halt a country's epidemic.

"The vaccine is controlling deaths -- but what we're seeing is a virus that has established itself as endemic, and in some countries it's made greater progress than others because there have been less rigid controls," said David Heymann, a former executive director of the WHO's Communicable Diseases Cluster

"What we have now is an epidemic of the unvaccinated," said Sam McConkey, head of the International Health and Tropical Medicine department at the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences in Dublin.

Experts stress that the protection against serious illness and deaths remains strong in double-vaccinated people, even without a booster shot.