BERLIN — Germany’s new health minister, Karl Lauterbach, has warned the country is lacking the millions of doses of coronavirus vaccine considered necessary to keep the population’s defences up over the winter, especially with the predicted rise of the new variant.
Lauterbach said that Germany was on schedule to receive just 1.2m doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine to distribute to vaccine centres and doctors’ practices across the country next week, 800,000 the following week and a further 1.2m the week after.
“But this is far less than the amounts which doctors are asking for every week.” He said Germany was scraping the barrel of its reserves. “The campaign has to roll … but there is literally no more than this there,” he said.
His warning came as the country’s vaccine campaign, seen to have flagged in recent months, picked up a pace, with a record number of 1.5m doses having been administered on Wednesday, bringing up to 70% the number who are now double-vaccinated, and to almost 28% those who have received a booster jab.
Currently the Delta variant is making up around 90% of German infections. However, the more infectious Omicron variant has been detected and is expected to spread widely next month.
Lauterbach, an epidemiologist, who as the health spokesman for the Social Democrats was an active and much relied upon commentator on the pandemic before taking over as health minister from the Christian Democrats’ (CDU) Jens Spahn this month, said he was seeking “as an emergency to buy back” millions of unused vaccine stocks from eastern European countries.
His ministry has confirmed reports that it plans to spend ¢2.2bn on 80m BioNTech doses, via official European Union procurement channels, and to buy a further 12 million doses directly, to ensure, it said, “that we can start the new year in a sensible manner”.
The first cases of the new, far more infectious Omicron variant have been detected in Germany, but the new wave it is not expected to sweep the country until next month.
