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merwin Rüddel did not think that the Germans were in such a rush to vaccinate. You have often experienced the opposite. Whenever I was in the constituency, with family and friends instead of chairing the health committee, everyone said they didn’t want to be the first to get vaccinated. CDU member Rüddel replied: “Great, then my chances will increase. I’d like to be the first. “
Justus bender
Policy writer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Morten freidel
Policy writer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
He got excited about the vaccine, the citizens told him something else, “a hundred times”, both in Berlin and in Westerwald. Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn also received letters from nurses. They wrote: “Mr. Spahn, I may get vaccinated, but it’s not the first. I’m not your guinea pig. “
That’s why Rüddel was “genuinely surprised” when there were complaints this week that vaccines were already being administered with emergency approvals in Britain and the United States and not in Germany. He thought: Germans prefer to be safe.
They talked about this at the Union weeks ago. They imagined it was February 2021 and a person would die after being vaccinated. What is meant is: He does not die from the vaccination, but accidentally afterwards. “We vaccinate the high-risk group. It cannot be ruled out that a 90-year-old person with three heart attacks and one stroke is vaccinated in a healthcare center and dies three days later. Of course, this has nothing to do with vaccination. However, it could create uncertainty, “says Rüddel.
Pressure was applied
The tabloid could write: man dies after vaccination. Others might ask: Was it not carefully reviewed? If the answer is that the European Medicines Agency only did a cursory review in December due to pressure, the uncertainty could escalate. That’s why politicians like Rüddel were not in favor of emergency approval. “This is why safety is so important to us. That is why scientific work was not politically pressured ”, he says.
Rüddel says: “To scientific work”. Pressure has already been applied. When newspapers began criticizing the federal government this week, they came up with an argument that did not seem entirely implausible. It said: Every day you get vaccinated saves lives, and the vaccine is a German invention. Regulatory agencies in the United States and Britain have approval criteria similar to those in the EU. Why aren’t we doing an emergency approval? So that the smaller states of the EU do not feel left out? Is it worth sacrificing compatriots for it?
One phrase from November in particular fell on Spahn’s feet. He had said: “As German Minister of Health, it would be difficult for me to explain if a vaccine produced in Germany was vaccinated more quickly in other regions of the world than in Germany itself.” How do you get out of there?
As Rüddel noted, Merkel lobbied in Brussels to speed up the administrative files, but not the scientific examination. Merkel telephoned the president of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who was also interested in accelerating the situation. Rüddel says the admissions committee always meets at the end of the month. It was scheduled on December 29.
The meeting could move forward to December 21 without sacrificing thoroughness. “The initiative came from Germany,” says Rüddel. The drug authority is silent on this. After receiving more investigative data, “a special meeting has been scheduled for December 21,” it simply says.
Tangled up in your own expectations
The fact that Europe is getting vaccinated later than the United States and England is not the result of wasting time. Industry reports the thoroughness with which the European Medicines Agency works. In drug approval procedures, examiners drill down into the raw data from efficacy studies and computer programs look for abnormalities.
Pharmaceutical companies receive detailed inquiries such as: “In data record number 3380, the process seems unusual. Do you have an explanation for this? ”No savings were made in the depth of the tests with the corona vaccine, assure everyone involved. The industry also does not share the impression that people in an EU authority went home after eight hours while people died in intensive care units. We are talking about working people of the first order.
