Coronavirus: vaccination of the German population could start already this year



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According to information released Thursday night, the federal Health Ministry has asked provincial governments to begin setting up vaccination centers and provide addresses by November 10 to which the SARS-Cov-2 vaccine can be shipped.

Sixty vaccination centers are planned to be established throughout the country.

Centralization is necessary because the vaccine must be stored at a temperature of minus 78 degrees Celsius, and many GP surgeries do not have refrigeration equipment of this capacity. Federal Minister of Health Jens Spahn recently said in a meeting with provincial health ministers that

The joint development of vaccines by the German biotechnology company BioNtech and the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer is in the final stages of obtaining marketing authorizations.

Referring to the participants in the videoconference, Bild wrote that the leader of the federal ministry stressed that the first vaccines could be administered starting this year. Originally specialized in cancer treatment, BioNTech in Mainz and a development program called Pfizer Lightspeed, based in New York, began in the first weeks of the pandemic. The German Federal Vaccine Authority, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (Bundesinstitut für Impfstoffe und biomedizinische Arzneimittel – PEI), granted permission for human testing of the vaccine in April. Clinical trials also began in the United States in May.

SARS-Cov-2 is spreading rapidly in Germany compared to the summer after the first wave, but with less force than in most neighboring countries. According to data from the Robert Koch National Institute of Public Health (RKI) on Friday, there were 11,242 infections in the past 24 hours, a minimal decrease of 11,287 a day earlier and a significant increase of 7,334 a week earlier. Since the outbreak, the pathogen has been detected in 403,291 people.

The number of deaths associated with the disease caused by the virus (Covid-19) increased by 49 in one day to 9,954. The seven-day moving average of the so-called reproduction rate (R) of the virus is 1.23. This means that for every 100 people infected, they transmit the pathogen to an average of 123 other people. The number of people treated in the intensive care unit for Covid-19 rose by 87 to 1,030 in one day, according to the latest data on Thursday. About 45 percent of them, 459 people, need mechanical ventilation. These data indicate that just 3 percent of the roughly 30,000 intensive care beds are occupied by Covid-19 patients. At the same time, their numbers are increasing rapidly, nearly four hundred from the previous 655 on Thursday.

Cover Image Source: Getty Images



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