Icon: enlarge
A nurse with the Pfizer / Biontech vaccine
Photo: Frank Augstein / dpa
In view of the slow start of the corona vaccination, the critical voices against the federal government and the EU are increasing.
In the SPIEGEL conversation, for example, Biontech boss Uğur Şahin criticized the European ordering strategy.
“There was an assumption that many other companies would come with vaccines.
Apparently the impression prevailed: We'll get enough, it won't be so bad, and we have it under control, ”said Şahin.
The neurologist Frauke Zipp from the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina even spoke to the daily newspaper “Die Welt” of “a gross failure on the part of those responsible.” She asked why they didn't order more vaccine at risk in the summer: “A short while ago there was official commemoration of the dead, now apparently no longer counts every day on which human lives could be saved.
Patience is now required, ”continues Zipp.
The opposition in the Bundestag also joins the criticism of the vaccine procurement.
FDP General Secretary Volker Wissing also told the “Welt”: “We can see from the example of Israel and other countries that it is possible to vaccinate more quickly.
The federal government has to explain very well why things are going so slowly in Germany. "
Kordula Schulz-Asche from the Greens parliamentary group said that from today's perspective one should have ordered at risk from the over one hundred developers.
However, the Biontech vaccine was still in the test phase in the summer.
Left boss Bernd Riexinger sees it similarly.
The federal government should therefore "quickly issue licenses for post-production of the Biontech / Pfizer vaccine," he said.
That lies directly in the hand of Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU).
The virus mutation in Great Britain makes it clear: "A successful vaccination strategy is also a race against time."
Bet on the wrong manufacturers
The problems in procuring vaccines that are now being felt in Germany are also related to the European Union's purchasing policy.
DER SPIEGEL reported that the EU had relied on the wrong manufacturers: the French company Sanofi and the British-Swedish manufacturer AstraZeneca.
Both had to postpone the approval of their vaccines significantly.
Other vaccines approved today would also have been sufficiently available.
Moderna boss Stéphane Bancel, for example, told SPIEGEL that his company could have provided far more vaccine.
Icon: The mirror
bah / AFP
