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“Horror” about Jens Spahn and the “beginning of the catastrophic vaccination”
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Israel leads the way in vaccines
Vaccines against the new coronavirus have started around the world. While things are moving slowly in Germany, other countries are more advanced. Most of the vaccines administered to date have been registered in Israel.
“It’s going exactly as planned,” says Federal Health Minister Spahn after the start of corona vaccines. The opposition and even the coalition partners see it differently. Spahn must “control problems immediately.”
reCriticism of the federal government’s corona vaccination strategy continues. “Compared to other countries, Germany should not lag behind in supplying the vaccine,” Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig (SPD) told the Germany publishing network newspapers. Other opposition and SPD politicians also expressed dissatisfaction with the procedure for obtaining vaccines over the weekend, leading to discontent in the CDU. Virologist Christian Drosten considers the criticism incomprehensible.
“We could vaccinate significantly more people if more vaccines were available, in particular to protect older people at high risk from coronavirus as quickly as possible and thus ease the burden on the healthcare system,” Schwesig said.
SPD health expert Karl Lauterbach told the “Rheinische Post” that the government had apparently waited too long for later and perhaps cheaper vaccines. The vice-president of the SPD parliamentary group, Dirk Wiese, expressed himself “horrified” by the federal Minister of Health, Jens Spahn (CDU), on the portal “t-online.de” and demanded that he “immediately check the obvious problems”.
FDP Vice President Wolfgang Kubicki spoke on “Focus Online” of a “catastrophic start of vaccination”. Ecological health expert Kordula Schulz-Asche also told WELT that, from today’s perspective, it would have been better to order “more and different vaccines” at risk.
CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak rejected criticism of the German vaccination strategy. On Twitter, he described the accusations from the SPD ranks as “clumsy maneuvers.” “We should all focus on problem solving,” Ziemiak wrote.
Laschet criticizes “hindsight know-it-all”
Spahn also does not consider the accusations to be justified. “It is going exactly as planned,” he told the “RTL Aktuell” news program on Saturday. 1.3 million doses of the Biontech Pfizer vaccine had been delivered to the federal states by the end of 2020. By the end of January, this number will increase to a total of four million. They are exactly the quantities that it had been announcing for weeks, “with the indication that at the beginning it would be scarce and that therefore we must prioritize”.
CDU President Armin Laschet tweeted that a vaccine would be researched, developed, tested, approved, distributed and used in ten months and would be “a sensational scientific achievement.” “However, as always: hindsight know-it-all and party political pettiness.”
Norbert Röttgen, who is also running for the CDU presidency, told the newspapers of the Funke media group on Sunday that he thought it was right “that German policy has clearly rejected vaccine nationalism.” The vaccine is purchased centrally in Europe by the EU Commission.
Tilman Kuban, director of the Junge Union, admitted difficulties to WELT. “Of course, there are also weaknesses, for example, that individual federal states have not prepared enough to inoculate the vaccine quickly.” In his opinion, federalism “sometimes reaches its limits” in such crises.
Christian Drosten, chief virologist at the Berlin Charité, said of criticism of the vaccine-obtaining procedure that “it is now virtually impossible to evaluate it in retrospect.” The EU had to order the vaccine months in advance and at the time it did not even know “whether the vaccine in question would work,” he told the “Berliner Morgenpost” on Sunday.
Neurologist Frauke Zipp, a member of the Leopoldina National Academy of Sciences, had previously accused the federal government of a “grave failure” with regard to vaccines. “Why didn’t he order a lot more risk shots in the summer?” Zipp asked at WELT on Saturday. With enough vaccine, 60 percent of the population could be immunized in two to three months, he said.
So far, 1.3 million doses of the vaccine from the Mainz company Biontech have been delivered to the federal states. Initially, it will take care of residents of nursing homes and for the elderly, people over 80 years of age, as well as nursing and hospital personnel at special risk. On Sunday, the Robert Koch Institute announced that about 238,800 vaccines had been reported.
