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SPD politician Lauterbach: "We'll get a vaccine that protects against the omicron variants"
Photo: Axel Heimken / dpa
In an interview, Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach warned of dangerous mutations in the corona virus.
"Various omicron subvariants are currently developing, which are cause for concern for me," says the politician of the "Bild am Sonntag".
The SPD politician said that the intervals at which new variants replaced the old ones were becoming shorter and shorter.
"This means that we are less and less able to prepare for the mutations." It is possible that a variant that is as highly contagious as omicron and as deadly as delta will emerge.
"That would be an absolute killer variant," says Lauterbach.
Lauterbach wants to combat the threat of corona waves in autumn with vaccine orders.
He expects that a corona vaccine adapted to the Omicron variant can be used from September.
"We'll get vaccine that protects against the omicron variants," Lauterbach said.
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“Our goal is to have as many vaccines as possible for every citizen, no matter which variant comes.” Vaccine against the Delta variant is already available.
Asked that millions of vaccine doses are already threatening to expire by June, Lauterbach said that "at most four million doses" would expire, depending on how many people want a fourth vaccination.
Most recently, Lauterbach had come under increasing criticism because, on the one hand, he publicly gave the big corona warning, but in the cabinet he supported far-reaching relaxation of the corona measures.
Continued high incidence of corona
Meanwhile, the nationwide seven-day incidence has continued to fall, but remains at a high level. A high number of infections also makes it easier for the coronavirus to form new variants and subvariants.
According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the number of new infections per 100,000 inhabitants was 834.3 on Sunday morning.
For comparison: the day before the value was 876.5, a week ago it was 1097.9.
The health authorities in Germany reported 39,784 new corona infections to the RKI within one day.
This is evident from numbers that reflect the status of the RKI dashboard at 5 a.m.
However, experts assume that the RKI does not record all numbers.
This is partly due to the overloaded health authorities and the fact that not all infected people do a PCR test.
Only these count in the statistics.
In addition, several federal states reported no or only incomplete numbers of new infections at the weekend.
According to the new information, 13 deaths were recorded across Germany within 24 hours.
A week ago there were 36 deaths.
The RKI gave the number of recovered people on Sunday as 19,880,300.
The number of people who died from or involved a proven infection with Sars-CoV-2 rose to 132,942.
hpp/dpa/reuters
