[ad_1]
meThe Saarbrücken vaccination center has a dozen check-in counters, two large waiting rooms with hundreds of chairs, and countless monitors on the wall. Service counters are waiting for people with many questions. In the lobby and outside, the barriers form long loops of relief. All of this should direct the onslaught of those willing to get vaccinated in an orderly manner. The problem: there is no rush.
Horst Völke, 90, and his son Marko were the first to arrive here for a good ten minutes. The two waiting areas are almost deserted. Doctors, paid 125 euros an hour, are underemployed among the 36 cubicles. The vaccination center was built in two old showrooms in record time, the equipment is excellent and the operation with 120 people costs more than five million euros a year. But it looks as ghostly as a regional airport shortly before bankruptcy – everything is polished to a high shine, there are employees waiting for it everywhere. But hardly anyone is there to use medical services.
200 vaccinations a day in the center of Saarbrücken
The faces of the first vaccinated, those “faces of hope” that Chancellor Angela Merkel evoked in her New Year’s speech, are a rarity because of the vaccine shortage. In the center of Saarbrücken, currently only 200 people are immunized against the virus per day. Ten times more would be possible. Across Germany, the Federal Ministry of Health reported on New Year’s Eve, there were 51,000 vaccinations in one day. In much smaller Israel, three times as many people received their dose at the same time. Ten percent of the population is already being supplied there, with the same Biontech / Pfizer vaccine from Mainz, which is such a rare product in Europe and for whose development Berlin had transferred 375 million euros in funds.
The EU was responsible for ordering the vaccines, and Brussels held back, among other things for cost reasons. However, the federal government and Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) are now being massively criticized. The latter sticks to his claim that the vaccination campaign was “successful” and started according to plan. The director of the clinic, Frauke Zipp, considers that the situation is a “serious failure” of those responsible: “Recently, there were still official memorials. Now apparently it no longer counts all the days in which human lives could be saved,” he criticizes. the doctor from the University of Mainz, who is also a member of the Leopoldina National Academy of Sciences – and therefore also advises the government.
Claudia Lange (Name changed) is also irritated when he hears the Federal Minister of Health, who says that when the vaccination started, he just “shook himself in one place or another.” Shaken? The nurse’s residence, located in Thuringia, on the border with Saxony, has 80 residents. As the manager of the living room, Lange had to prepare vaccines for 27 of them. The home management assignment came in on the Friday afternoon before Christmas and was supposed to start on December 27. So vacation service became a constant stress.
“They told us that those houses would be the first thing they quickly filled out all the forms,” says Lange. The nurse then spent hours under high pressure entering diagnoses, medications, and allergies on anamnesis sheets, laboriously obtaining statements of consent from family members and legal guardians. Finally everything was ready, it arrived on December 27 and ended without incident. No mobile vaccination team was presented and there was no information or explanation. “The disappointment was huge,” says Lange.
Transport errors twice in a row
Fortunately, the number of serious incidents in the largest vaccination campaign in German history has so far been limited. But there are setbacks and complaints in all parts of the republic. In Stralsund, vaccinated people were accidentally given five times the dose because the vaccination team was not properly trained. In Upper Franconia, 1000 doses of vaccine were incorrectly transported twice in a row and therefore destroyed.
The Baden-Württemberg state government complains to neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate that more and more “vaccination tourists” cross the Rhine. Because while Baden-Württemberg has been giving appointments since Christmas Eve, Mainz will not activate its systems until 4 January. The centers will start later.
Time and again, the vaccine shortage causes irritability. At the Frankfurt home of his 88-year-old mother, former Secretary of State at the Federal Ministry of Health, Lutz Stroppe, complains on Twitter that meager doses of vaccines are raffled off with total helplessness. Other nursing homes proceed alphabetically, sometimes the assignment just ends with “M”.
In an open letter to North Rhine-Westphalia Prime Minister Armin Laschet (CDU) at Essen University Hospital, the lead physician in charge, Carola Holzer, was outraged that she and her team were now being neglected by four units. intensive care unit from Covid. “How can it be that nurses, doctors, personnel in high-risk areas do not receive a vaccine? Please, we are the ones who should not be absent, who treat risk groups.”
As the spokesman for the Federal Ministry of Health emphasizes, as promised, 1.3 million doses of vaccines had been delivered to the federal states by the end of the year. The only question is why have only 165,000 people been vaccinated so far? Is the valuable substance in the republic’s refrigerators? “On-site logistics are in place, processes are working,” a Spahn spokesman said. According to the latest delivery schedule, just under four million cans should be distributed across countries by early February. During this time, all residents of the home will be offered a vaccination. “That alone will make a decisive difference in coming out of the pandemic.”
Digital “Greyhound Race”
Meanwhile, the chaos is particularly drastic, especially when it comes to making appointments. While Berlin sends notifications to those who have the right to vaccinate by mail, Saarland and most other countries consider this route to be a waste of time. Almost everywhere, those who want to get vaccinated need to make an appointment on their own online, over the phone, or through the app. For people over 80, this is often a challenge without outside help. Especially since the digital “greyhound race” by computer or by phone sometimes goes very wrong.
The 116117 hotline is not available in all countries; callers often end up in lines that last for hours. When booking online at Saarland, the screen froze at first, so the supposed reservations didn’t even exist. This confusion is fatal to confidence in the vaccination strategy. The health policy spokesperson for the Union’s parliamentary group, Karin Maag (CDU), is making serious accusations against the countries: they are “responsible if there has been no vaccine yet,” Maag told WELT AM SONNTAG. “For older people in particular, the obstacles to getting an appointment are often insurmountable.” She hopes the federal and state governments will reach an understanding quickly.
Paradoxical debate on privilege
However, the vaccination campaign launched by Berlin in Germany seems strangely inhibited for an entirely different reason: the government is trying very hard to avoid the impression that a corona vaccination could bring individual benefits. No one should “demand special rights” before all citizens have the opportunity to be vaccinated, Spahn emphasizes. Behind this is the obvious fear of popular anger at alleged “unequal treatment.”
If only those who have already been injected with a vaccine are allowed to fly or visit cafes, outrage could arise at the unfair privileges granted to those who were vaccinated for the first time, as well as the charge of an implicit and objective mandatory vaccination. This is why Berlin doesn’t even want to give the appearance of vaccination incentives. A paradoxical situation, because vaccines are the most powerful weapon against the spread of the pandemic.
But the promise that there will be absolutely no mandatory vaccinations cannot be sustained for long. For example, the government coalition is considering mandatory corona vaccination for individual groups, such as medical personnel. “For certain professional groups, for example in clinics or in the rescue service, dealing directly with vulnerable groups of people, a compulsory vaccination is conceivable,” said Volker Ullrich, CSU legal policy spokesman in the Bundestag, WELT AM SONNTAG. There is a precedent for this: the measles vaccination for certain groups decided by the Bundestag in November 2019.
If this also happened with Corona, the usual suspects would likely take action against a “state vaccination requirement.” But presumably they will either way. Because among staunch opponents of vaccination, among “lateral thinkers”, and right-wing extremist parts of the AfD, the furor over every corona vaccination is so great that it is no longer influenced by any health policy arguments, however plausible. make it a strategy to fight the crown. Should leave.
A survey of sociologists at the University of Basel, which was not representative, but probably reached the part of the “lateral thinker” movement that was still willing to speak, showed: 83 percent of them had already decided in November not to get vaccinated against the virus. Almost two-thirds think that “our natural self-healing powers” are “strong enough to fight the virus.”
Collaboration: Ricarda Breyton, Anja Ettel and Kaja Klapsa
This text is from WELT AM SONNTAG. We will be happy to take them to your home periodically.
Source: Welt am Sonntag
