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NRW Minister of Health Karl-Josef Laumann
Photo: Federico Gambarini / dpa
The Minister of Health of North Rhine-Westphalia is calling for general practitioners to be more committed to vaccinating.
"The family doctors now have to vaccinate more, they wanted that," said Karl-Josef Laumann (CDU) according to the "Ärztezeitung".
Because doctors would receive 36 euros per vaccination at the weekend.
"Vaccination on Saturday instead of golf course on Saturday," is his demand.
The Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KV) are obliged to ensure that general practitioners offer patients the third corona vaccination as soon as possible.
Decentralized public structures would have to supplement the immunizations in general practitioners' practices, Laumann demands.
Local vaccination centers in North Rhine-Westphalia should be able to react flexibly to local demand.
The statutory health insurance associations would have to provide the health authorities with a total of 400 doctors.
"We are now telling the health authorities that they can also hire doctors who do not work in the KV system."
According to the minister, around one million people in North Rhine-Westphalia have received the booster vaccination so far. "We have a bow wave of 800,000 who are not vaccinated even though the last vaccination was six months ago," he criticized. That shouldn't be any more. In the old people's homes, the action is already very advanced because vaccination has started early. "If we had waited for the Stiko, we wouldn't be ready yet."
The number of new corona infections in Germany is currently increasing from record to record, and the seven-day incidence has recently reached a new high every day.
According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the value on Wednesday was 319.5.
In view of the rapidly increasing numbers, calls for faster booster vaccinations, the so-called booster vaccinations, have been loud in the past few days.