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It's not that far yet: A child in Germany will probably be vaccinated against Corona faster than a high-risk patient in Ghana (symbol picture)
Photo: Iris Loonen / Plainpicture
"Biontech vaccine from June for older children, for everyone from September" - what news! And what questions many people ask themselves: How quickly can the children then be vaccinated? Will most parents have their children vaccinated against Covid-19? How many hesitate? When will the other vaccines follow suit? Will older children be vaccinated before adults, perhaps from June, in order to make classroom teaching in schools safer - and how much longer would it then drag on for the parents' generation to vaccinate?
There have been many complaints about the speed of vaccination in Germany.
That is understandable, because vaccines are still in short supply in this country.
Many who want to be vaccinated have to wait.
"It is realistic to have vaccinated all adult Germans who are ready to be vaccinated by the end of July," says Sebastian Dullien, Scientific Director of the Institute for Macroeconomics and Business Cycle Research (IMK) - and it quickly comes to mind: end of July, that's yes Another quarter of a year until the last ones are finally turned.
And if children can be vaccinated soon, will it take even longer?
The following three statements can help to put this supposedly long period of time into a different framework:
The head of the World Trade Organization WTO, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has called on the USA and Great Britain to export corona vaccines.
Why?
Only 0.3 percent of all vaccine doses have so far been given in low-income countries
, said the 66-year-old.
That is not acceptable, says Okonjo-Iweala.
In a panel of experts, the managing director of the development organization "One", Tom Hart, commented on supply in the more affluent part of the world:
The rich industrialized countries have secured a total of 1.9 billion more vaccine doses than they needed for herd immunity in their own countries
said Hart.
An analysis shows that by the end of the summer all G7 countries had met their needs and would then build up stocks with overcapacity.
The Covax program aimed to distribute vaccines more equitably around the world. How badly this has worked so far, said Elisabeth Massute of "Doctors Without Borders" on Wednesday on Deutschlandfunk. "We are shocked to see that Covax has currently distributed 38 million vaccine doses by the end of March; they wanted to distribute 100 million vaccine doses by then."
The already low target of supplying three percent of the population in over 140 countries by the end of June 2021 is likely to be broken
, according to Massute. Instead, only 1.3 percent of the people there could be vaccinated by that date. In Germany, by the way, 1.3 percent of the population were vaccinated once on January 15th, 1.3 percent were fully vaccinated on February 8th.
In Germany, more than a quarter (25.9 percent) of the population has now been vaccinated once, and 7.5 percent have full protection from the second vaccination dose.
This Wednesday alone, more than a million people in the country received a vaccination.
This is a reason to be happy, the longed-for way out of the corona pandemic.
The pace cannot be fast enough.
But it happens on the backs of all those who live in less affluent countries.
And that is a reason to pause, not just give money, but also vaccine - and, as a rich country, help make the world a little fairer.