New Health Minister Karl Lauterbach spoke of a “significant shortage” of vaccines against COVID-19, revealing that the previous government had ordered fewer doses of vaccines than needed to speed up the vaccination campaign.
“The situation is extremely difficult. I always praised my predecessor. But we have a serious shortage of vaccines for next year. “This is what our census showed,” Lauterbach was quoted as saying by Der Spiegel magazine.
He even clarified that very few vaccines were purchased for the first quarter of 2022, with the result that the quantities are not enough for the campaign to give booster doses.
“There is a lack of (doses) of the vaccine in the important month of the vaccination campaign, while for February and March the situation is not better. “In the last weeks of this year there were only 1.2 million doses of the BioNTech / Pfizer vaccine and in the first week of January as many more will be added,” the new health minister explained. will be reduced to one-sixth compared to before, while in the second, third and fourth week of January there will be a total of 3.6 million booster vaccines.
Mr Lauterbach noted, however, that the US pharmaceutical company Moderna could deliver at least 10 million vaccines a week during this period and promised to contact the two mRNA vaccine companies in person, as well as other countries, if deemed necessary. essential.
According to Spiegel, the state health ministers were “shocked” by the information presented to them by Mr. Lauterbach, in the midst of an outbreak of the pandemic and because of the new Omicron variant.
The Ministry of Health, under its new leadership, announced last week that a detailed inventory of the vaccines available in the country, as well as the contracts concluded for delivery of installments within the first quarter of 2022, would be made.
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