BERLIN / DILLENBURG, Germany (Reuters) – Germans are proud of their national reputation for efficiency and are increasingly frustrated by the slow rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine that has helped scientists develop.
Scarce vaccine supply, cumbersome paperwork, a lack of healthcare staff and an elderly and immobile population hamper efforts to deplete early doses of a vaccine made by American Pfizer and German partner BioNTech gain.
Germany has set up hundreds of vaccination centers in sports halls and concert areas and has the infrastructure to deliver up to 300,000 shots a day, Health Minister Jens Spahn said.
But the majority are vacant, and most states do not plan to open centers until mid-January, as they want to give preference to sending mobile teams to nursing homes.
A day with a vaccination team in the small town of Dillenburg, 100 km north of Germany’s financial capital Frankfurt, shows how meticulous the task is.
The team begins by loading a cooler box with 84 doses of Pfizer vaccine that was thawed at night into a waiting ambulance and leaving for the Elisabeth care home.
There meets the manager Peter Bittermann, who has already handled the necessary forms for the vaccination of residents and staff, and given the space for the administration of shots and the recipients who are monitored after vaccination.
The four-member vaccination team, plus two students, only have a few hours to dispense the temperature-sensitive Pfizer vaccine before it is no longer fit for use.
The German Red Cross needs an extra 350 people to run its local vaccination campaign, said Nicole Fey, spokeswoman for the local district administration.
“We could recruit some, but there can never be enough,” she told Reuters TV.
GERMANY LAGS
In the first two weeks of its vaccination, Germany fired 533,000 shots, just two-fifths of the 1.3 million doses received. Britain, on the other hand, reached the 2 million mark.
Israel, the world leader in terms of population share, covers 150,000 people daily, with its universal and digitally activated healthcare system making it easier to schedule appointments.
Germany’s larger size and federal structures complicate operations, which are also involved in the United States.
Elsewhere in Europe, the decentralization of Spain’s vaccination operations has exposed differences between regions and led to tensions with the central government.
(Graphically – COVID-19 vaccine doses administered 🙂
Germany’s 16 states blame the federal government for not getting enough doses. Doctors in some centers say shifts have been canceled. In Berlin, one vaccination center was opened, which was only closed over the new year due to a lack of shots.
Spahn says the production problems, rather than too few orders, are to blame for the limited supply, after Pfizer and BioNTech halved their production estimate to 50 million doses by the end of the year in December. Each receiver needs two shots.
The government is working with BioNTech to open a new production site in the western city of Marburg, he said. BioNTech’s CEO said last week that the plant in Marburg could be commissioned before the service in February.
“With the capacity we have already created in Germany, we will be able to carry out between 250,000 and 300,000 vaccinations a day – when we need the vaccination,” Spahn said this week.
Germany expects to receive 5.3 million shots of Pfizer / BioNTech and another 2 million doses of a second Moderna vaccine, which has just been approved by the European Union, by the end of March.
Yet it will hardly be enough to cover the 5.7 million people, or 6.8% of the population, older than 80 years.
THE LAST MILE
As in Spain, the state-by-state performance in Germany varies greatly. The top class is Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in the north, with 15.6 vaccinations per 1,000 inhabitants, while Saxony has only 4.4.
In Thuringia, another backlog, state Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow said on Tuesday that many doses sent to hospitals had been returned. “If the brakes go on at a vaccination rate of 30 or 33%, we have a real problem,” he told the radio.
In Saxony, the Ministry of Social Affairs said that lack of consent forms, challenges with route planning, COVID outbreaks in homes and cancellations were delayed at the last minute.
Shots in Saxony were stored centrally until recently, meaning mobile teams had to travel long distances before going to care homes.
Unlike Dillenburg, Saxony is overrun by people who volunteered for the vaccination, said Lars Werthmann, regional logistics chief at the German Red Cross.
“The next giant task is to coordinate all these people,” Werthmann said.
Doctors meanwhile express frustration over appointment booking systems that vary from state to state, saying it causes confusion and diminishes trust.
To speed up the roll-out of COVID-19 shots, Germany needs to spread it through its network of GP practices as soon as there is a vaccine that can be easily stored in a refrigerator, said Burkhard Ruppert, a pediatrician from Berlin.
Germany hopes to apply shots to medical practices in a second phase.
“Our strength in Germany is this outpatient care system,” said Ruppert, who heads a local doctors’ association. “We are not a country with large-scale managed systems like the United Kingdom or Israel.”
“We are in a race against a virus,” he added. “We will only win if we vaccinate as much and as quickly as possible.”
Reporting by Caroline Copley in Berlin and Annkathrin Weis in Dillenberg; Additional reporting by Emma Pinedo Gonzalez in Madrid and Nadine Schimroszik in Berlin; Edited by Douglas Busvine and Jan Harvey