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Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) in the Bundestag in the morning
Photo: Markus Schreiber / AP
The Executive Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) met with the Prime Ministers to agree new measures in the fight against Corona.
In order to be able to offer many booster vaccinations as quickly as possible, Merkel no longer wants to leave vaccinations to doctors.
SPIEGEL learned this from participants in the round.
Accordingly, the Chancellor brought into play that pharmacists should also be entrusted with the task.
Almost all country leaders rejected the idea.
The tenor: The proposal makes the organization more complicated.
It is important that all efforts are now placed on family doctors and company doctors.
It should be noted in the decision, however, that it is being checked whether other doctors, in addition to doctors, could also vaccinate.
In addition, the vaccination centers should be restarted as quickly as possible.
According to participants, there was a first dispute in the federal-state group about how to deal with the vaccination centers.
Saxony-Anhalt's Prime Minister Reiner Haseloff (CDU) complained that the centers were wound up in the summer.
Merkel rebuked the accusation: It was already clearly communicated at the time that the centers would be shut down - but could also be reactivated at any time.
Merkel is right: Several earlier resolutions define that the vaccination centers can be rebuilt at any time.
Vaccination centers are reactivated
The federal government co-financed half of the centers of the federal states.
When the need fell as the vaccination campaign waned, many places were frozen.
According to the Ministry of Health, more than 150 vaccination centers and mobile vaccination teams had been reactivated by mid-November.
The vaccination centers are to continue to be half financed by the federal government until the end of April.
In addition to the question of how to convince unvaccinated people of the vaccine and how to advance the booster vaccinations, the Bund-Länder-Round is also concerned with a possible nationwide introduction of 2G rules and mandatory tests in old people's and nursing homes.
The group meets in a video conference chaired by North Rhine-Westphalia.
SPD candidate for Chancellor, Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, also takes part.
During the pandemic, the federal and state governments had already met in several such rounds to agree on measures.
The meetings were often characterized by arguments and occasionally lasted into the night.
After that, the agreed measures were not always implemented in the federal states.
mrc / cte / gud
