There is definitely reason to be dissatisfied with the current vaccination rate in Germany. After all, over the past two and a half months it has become clear that the great shortage of the vaccine is only one reason for this – and the rather bureaucratic organization of the vaccine logistics is the other. So the announcements sound tempting that five million doses a week could soon be vaccinated by resident doctors alone – so far Germany only manages around 1.5 million vaccinations per week.
From mid-April, therefore, in addition to the vaccination centers in the federal states, the general practitioners and specialist practices will also be involved. What is also new is that they can decide for themselves who to vaccinate first.
The new clubhouse will not vaccinate
This is sensible at first, but it also carries a risk: It should not change in such a way that “those who have good contacts with the family doctor are vaccinated,” warned the SPD health expert Karl Lauterbach this week.
DW editor David Ehl
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Will vaccinate the new clubhouse? Anyone who receives the much sought-after invite quickly gets their basic rights back, while normal mortals have to hold out for a few more months?
This scenario is certainly an exaggeration. The doctors can be given the leap of faith that Lauterbach’s fears will remain isolated cases and that the majority of the vaccine doses will be used exactly as it makes sense.
New flexibility
Conversely, we have a lot to gain, because the vaccination campaign is currently entering a new phase: The residents of old people’s and nursing homes and the very old as the most vulnerable risk groups are largely protected, while the quantities of vaccines delivered are increasing massively. This increases the leeway as to who is next in line – the retiree with heart disease, or better first the slightly less prone asthmatic who, however, meets many people at work? No ethics council or vaccination center can make a meaningful decision – but family doctors who know their patients can.
For the individual protection of life, a second consideration can arise in the new phase as to how the sequence of vaccinations should be designed: Because some vaccinations play a greater role in the overall infection process than others.
Where it is now worthwhile to loosen the prioritization
In Saxony, the vaccination sequence is being carefully changed these days. The districts that border the neighboring country of the Czech Republic, which has been particularly hard hit by Corona, are temporarily being supplied with more vaccine than the others. The hope is to build up a “vaccination bar” through faster immunization so that border traffic in both directions no longer acts as a corona revolving door.
At the beginning of the week, the Tyrolean district of Schwaz received an unscheduled 100,000 units of the BioNTech vaccine to contain the South African variant that is rampant there. With another additional delivery of four million BioNTech cans, which should arrive in the EU within two weeks, the EU Commission wants to apply the same principle: Member states should specifically contain clusters close to the border so that borders remain open.
All of the examples mean that, contrary to the original prioritization, young people without previous illnesses are also vaccinated so that an immunity threshold is quickly exceeded locally. If mobility is low at the same time and other protection concepts continue to be applied, then the virus will soon search for hosts locally in vain.
The overriding goal of any vaccination sequence from the start was to save as many lives as possible. In the next phase of the campaign, that means making pragmatic decisions. The path through the pandemic was winding from the start, so one must always weigh up in whose body the available vaccine doses are currently most beneficial for the community.
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