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Experts and politicians criticized the German government this Saturday (02.01.2021) for not ensuring a sufficient supply of vaccine doses ahead of the country’s vaccination campaign against the coronavirus.
As a member of the EU vaccine procurement program, Germany relies on regulators at European level who grant the vaccine authorization to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection. But the EU has taken longer than other countries like the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada to give the go-ahead.
So far, only the BioNTech / Pfizer vaccine is allowed in EU member states, but the bloc as a whole only placed an order for 300 million doses in the summer, in the belief that more vaccine alternatives would be available.
Frauke Zipp, a neurologist and member of the Leopoldina Academy of Sciences, criticized German lawmakers on Saturday for their lack of foresight in obtaining vaccines.
“I consider the current situation to be a great failure,” he told the newspaper. The world. “Why didn’t they ask for a lot more shots over the summer just to be safe?” He asked.
BioNTech’s founders said on Friday they were struggling to boost production after being pressured to fill in the gaps caused by the EU blunder.
German Health Minister Jens Spahn, for his part, has evaded any suggestion that the government has not been diligent in its approach to vaccinating the country. “Things are going exactly as planned,” he told RTL broadcaster.
Spahn said he anticipated a deficit at first and that the government would have to “prioritize” who would be vaccinated. He assured that all nursing home residents would receive the inoculation by the end of January.
Vaccination is a “race against time”
For his part, Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn defended the EU’s vaccine strategy on German radio station RBB, saying the commission had secured nearly two billion doses with six different manufacturers.
However, Karl Lauterbach, a health expert for the center-left Social Democrats, told the newspaper Rheinische Mail that Brussels’ failure to buy more of the Moderna vaccine was “regrettable”.
“From the beginning it was clear that the Moderna vaccine was highly effective and could be used by GPs,” he said.
Lauterbach believes it is too late for Moderna’s vaccine to play an important role in Germany’s short-term vaccination needs. He also criticized the EU for not ordering more vaccines from BioNTech / Pfizer from the start.
Bernd Riexinger, co-chair of the socialist Left party, directly asked Spahn to ensure the production of the BioNTech / Pfizer vaccines.
He said that given the spread of the new coronavirus variant in the UK, “a successful vaccine strategy is also a race against time.”
Confinement should not end too soon
On Tuesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet with the presidents of the federal states to discuss a probable extension of the current lockdown, which will end on January 10.
Before those talks, Uwe Janssens, president of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine, asked the government to reconsider its plans.
Janssens told the Rheinische Mail that strict restrictions must remain, even if the government reaches its target of an infection rate of 50 per 100,000 people.
“We intensive care physicians strongly advise that relaxation not be considered until the incidence value is below 25 new infections per 100,000 people per week,” Janssens said.
The current infection rate in Germany is 141.2, according to the Robert Koch Institute. However, this number varies wildly across the country, with some regions of Saxony posting rates of more than 500.
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