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BERLIN: It will take until 2022 to vaccinate the entire population of Germany against COVID-19 due to capacity limits, according to the head of an expert panel that will help decide in what order people should receive the vaccine.
“If you can give injections to 150,000 to 200,000 people a day, five or six days a week, assuming vaccines are available and people are willing to get vaccinated, then you can calculate how long it will take,” Thomas Mertens, Director of STIKO , Germany’s panel of experts on the use of vaccines, told the Rheinische Post.
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“Then it would take 100 days to vaccinate 15 million people,” he said, according to a summary of an interview to be published by the newspaper on Thursday.
Germany is rushing to set up vaccination centers across the country so that it can start offering injections quickly once a vaccine has been approved in Europe.
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Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech are in a close race to launch their COVID-19 vaccines after both applied for emergency approval from the European Union this week, although there was uncertainty as to whether a launch could begin this year.
Britain approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Wednesday (Dec. 2), ahead of the United States and Europe to become the first country in the West to formally endorse a vaccine that it said should reach the most vulnerable people early in the year. next week.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that between 60 and 70% of the population would need to acquire immunity, either through a COVID-19 vaccine or through an infection, for the government to lift restrictions such as limits on private meetings. Vaccination will not be mandatory in Germany.
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