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Christian Drosten (archive image)
Photo: Kay Nietfeld / dpa
In the debate about the uncertainty about the vaccination quota in Germany, the virologist Christian Drosten took the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) under protection.
He does not consider the unilateral assignment of blame to the RKI and Lothar Wieler to be justified, said the expert from the Berlin Charité on Tuesday in the podcast "Coronavirus Update" at NDR Info.
The topic is not new either, the RKI has been pointing out the problem for a long time.
Ultimately, the public excitement about the discrepancy was "completely in vain," said Drosten. One has to reckon with the vaccination rate of the general population and not of adults: The difference between the reporting system and an RKI accompanying examination is small and "irrelevant" for the assessment of the overall situation. The accompanying study, a survey, also has some limitations. The official vaccination rate in Germany is currently 65.3 percent. Adjusted, you probably get a little over 67 percent, said Drosten: "The excitement is free, the situation has not changed at all." Drosten has been complaining for a long time that, in his opinion, vaccination rates in Germany are too low.
The RKI announced a few days ago that there were more corona vaccinated people than are recorded in the official reporting statistics.
It can be assumed that up to 84 percent of adults were vaccinated at least once and up to 80 percent fully as of October 5th, according to an RKI report on the subject.
The estimate expressed there is based on citizen surveys and registration data.
The RKI explains in the report that it stands to reason »that the vaccination quota reported in the digital vaccination quota monitoring is to be understood as a minimum vaccination quota and an underestimation of up to 5 percentage points for the proportion of people who were vaccinated at least once or who were completely vaccinated can be assumed." To illustrate: five percentage points in the adult population roughly correspond to 3.5 million people.
sol / dpa