Challenges and problems of the vaccination strategy

Since Germany launched its vaccination campaign at the end of December, along with the rest of the EU, it has encountered a series of logistical challenges.

Now, nearly a month into the program’s start, its slow progress is causing frustration and concern among some German lawmakers and healthcare professionals.

Health Minister Jens Spahn had targeted 300,000 inoculations per day, but so far the country has failed to meet that target. Data from the public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute, released Tuesday showed that in the past 24 hours, just over 62,000 vaccinations (the majority of which were first doses) were given.

In total, since Germany began immunizations in all of its 16 states on December 27, nearly 1.2 million people in Germany (the priority groups for now are healthcare workers, residents and the nursing home staff and the elderly) received a first dose of the coronavirus. vaccine and nearly 25,000 received their second dose.

In contrast, the United Kingdom, which was the first country in the world to approve and deploy the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (partly developed in Germany), then the candidate from the University of Oxford-AstraZeneca, launched its Covid vaccination program earlier in December. vaccinated so far over 4 million people with their first dose of vaccine (over 450,000 received their second dose), and exceeded 300,000 vaccinations per day by the end of last week.

The EU has followed a policy of purchasing coronavirus vaccines as a bloc, but some countries, including Germany, have also entered into their own additional purchase agreements.

Nonetheless, supply issues were a problem even at the start of the vaccination campaign in Germany, with a lack of vaccines available in some centers, as well as other difficult logistical issues related to the vaccination of its priority groups, such than the elderly. This has created uneven vaccine deployment performance across the country.

Dr Stefan HE Kaufmann, a renowned immunologist and microbiologist in Germany, and founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, told CNBC on Tuesday that the vaccination process faced challenges from the start.

“The number one priority (in the vaccination campaign) is currently the elderly and people with serious illnesses, especially in nurseries. This process is ethical, but it takes a long time. It also includes health workers and medical personnel in nursing homes and hospitals. Apparently some nursing home staff are reluctant to get vaccinated, ”he noted.

So far, only vaccines created by Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna have been approved by the European Medicines Agency for use in the block. The easiest (and cheapest) candidate to store and transfer from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford has yet to be approved.

Time is running out when it comes to vaccine deployment, especially amid an increase in cases due to more transmissible mutations that have taken hold. Yet Germany has recorded fewer cases than many of its neighbors, registering just over 2 million infections to date. The death toll stands at 47,958.

For the UK and the EU, a key issue is that supply cannot meet the current demand for vaccines, and Germany was no exception, with early reports of people with struggling to get immunization appointments due to a shortage of doses. But vaccine makers have pledged to ramp up production and provide millions of additional doses for delivery in the weeks and months to come.

In the meantime, however, “doses guaranteed for immediate use are insufficient,” Kaufmann noted.

“While so-called vaccination centers have been established all over Germany, there is currently a lack of vaccines for rapid maximum vaccination coverage in these centers. (The hope is that the process will be speeded up once the vaccination is difficult and time-consuming (to, “he said, noting that the speed of the vaccination campaign in Germany” would have been faster if more doses of BioNTech and Moderna had been obtained ”.

“In my opinion, everything should be done to secure more doses for immediate or short-term use. This is all the more important given the increasing incidence of mutant strains which could escape vaccine-induced immune responses. “, he warned.

Germany is not alone in seeing a slow start to its vaccination campaign. The European Commission has come under EU-wide criticism for not purchasing enough vaccines for the block to start with.

Florian Hense, European economist at Berenberg, told CNBC that the approval and procurement process meant the EU was at the back of the pack, or at least behind other countries, including the UK and the states. -United, regarding the reception of vaccines.

“As long as the EU has negotiated with pharmaceutical companies and approved vaccinations on behalf of its member states, Germany’s vaccination campaign would always be ‘anti-German’, regardless of what you associate with that term “he told CNBC on Monday.

“I suspect that subsequent EU approval delayed the start of vaccinations and has since limited the pace of vaccinations per day, as vaccinations are arriving in the EU at a slower rate than they have been. (per capita) in the United Kingdom and the United States. “

It goes without saying that other parliamentarians have criticized the government’s overall strategy. Dr Janosch Dahmen, a doctor and German Green Party parliamentarian, told CNBC he was “very worried because Germany is already late”.

“The progress of the immunization campaign is far too slow and one of the reasons is the shortage of supplies, but the most pressing issue is that the immunization infrastructure reveals multiple problems, especially shortages of personnel, distribution problems in federal states and far too centralized approach, ”he said.

“As a doctor and politician, I am very concerned about the situation here and apart from all the efforts we need to put into a more effective national vaccination campaign, we need to build bridges through testing, self-testing and we need to redouble our efforts in the area of ​​contact tracing, which is another important part of the fight against this pandemic, ”said Dahmen.