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Vaccination bus on a supermarket parking lot near Hanover: Manageable demand
Photo: Julian Stratenschulte / dpa
At the start of the vaccination campaign week announced by Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn, apparently only a few people were vaccinated.
According to figures from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), only 118,048 doses of vaccine were administered across Germany on Monday.
That was the lowest value on a weekday in more than seven months;
but there could still be late registrations.
On Monday a week ago, there were still more than 153,000 vaccinations.
Noticeably few first vaccinations
During the vaccination campaign week - for which the federal states, municipalities, retailers and various associations and organizations had declared their support - citizens across the country are to be offered simple vaccination options under the motto "#HierWirdGeimpft".
Unvaccinated people are to be approached in a targeted manner in order to revive the faltering campaign.
But the particularly important number of first vaccinations was noticeably weak on Monday.
Only 46,367 first doses were reported to the RKI - almost 27 percent less than on Monday last week.
In the course of the entire vaccination campaign, fewer first vaccinations were given on only two working days than this Monday: at the very beginning, when there was almost no vaccine.
Today the federal and state governments have stored millions of doses that they were not given.
The second vaccinations also went downhill on Monday: 58,709 doses administered, which corresponds to minus 22 percent in a weekly comparison.
The number of third vaccinations was 12,972, around 12 percent lower than seven days earlier.
"It's sad that so little is happening," said Carsten Watzl, professor of immunology at the Technical University of Dortmund, to SPIEGEL.
“Obviously you can't reach the unvaccinated people if you just park a vaccination bus in front of their door.
We have to educate these people better. "
According to Watzl, the current quota of around 62 percent fully vaccinated German citizens is far from sufficient to lift the corona measures, as Denmark has just done.
In the Scandinavian country, only four percent of the particularly vulnerable over 65-year-olds are unvaccinated - in Germany, however, around 15 percent of the over 60-year-olds.
"That's four million unvaccinated older people," said Watzl.
"If we just let everything go now, we could experience a very high wave." That is why Germany must continue to use restrictions to try to slow the spread of the delta variant in order to prevent the health system from being suddenly overloaded.
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