Germany Reveals Covid-19 Vaccine Shortage
Germany Reveals Covid-19 Vaccine Shortage
(Bloomberg) -- Germany’s new Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said he’s in direct contact with manufacturers of Covid-19 vaccines to increase deliveries after discovering the country is short supplies for early next year.
“We have a shortage of vaccine for the first quarter and I have already been working for several days to correct it,” Lauterbach, who took office last week, said late Tuesday in an interview with ARD television.
“I hope I can communicate a positive message about this in the next few days,” he added. “But it’s right that we have too little vaccine and that surprised many when we did the inventory, myself included.”
Germany’s vaccine campaign has been less successful than in other developed nations, with just 69.8% of the population fully inoculated as of 9:31 a.m. on Wednesday. That compares with almost 80% in France and nearly 75% in Italy, according to the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker.
The pace of vaccinations has picked up in recent weeks, with the focus shifting to administering as many booster shots as possible to lift immunity levels and ward off the potentially rapid spread of the new omicron variant of the disease.
Germany may be lacking as many as 60 million doses, Business Insider reported, citing health ministry calculations.
That number is wrong, ministry spokesman Hanno Kautz said at a regular government news conference in Berlin, while declining to provide up-to-date figures on vaccine supplies for next year.
An internal audit has shown that there won’t be enough doses in the first three months of next year to sustain the current pace of inoculation, the ministry said earlier and referred to Lauterbach’s pledge to address the problem.
‘No Red Lines’
Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, didn’t address the vaccine shortage in his inaugural speech to the lower house of parliament on Wednesday. He urged citizens to get their booster vaccinations and called on those who haven’t yet been inoculated to do so as a matter of urgency.
Scholz has backed a target of administering as many as 30 million Covid additional doses between mid-November and the end of the year. Germany is “on the right track” to achieving that goal, and 19 million of the 30 million shots have already been given, he said.
“We will do everything that is necessary” to defeat the pandemic, Scholz told lawmakers in the Bundestag. “There are no red lines for the government.”
Scholz has backed the introduction of mandatory vaccinations by the first quarter of next year, and the lower house of parliament is expected to vote on it in coming weeks.
Lauterbach told ARD that it will probably be impossible to ward off omicron completely, given it’s so contagious, and urged more people to get their booster shots.
“We can assume that vaccination only works really well against the omicron variant after the booster shot,” he told ARD. “The pace of booster shots and especially the number of those who aren’t vaccinated will be decisive.”
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