The blows against the government have ranged from the resounding criticism by the president of the Parliamentary Commission on Health, Erwin Rüddel, about the “arbitrary administration” of the vaccine, to the unbelievable “vaccine lottery in nursing homes to determine who should receive the dose first,” denounced via Twitter by the former Secretary of State, Lutz Stroppe.
They have included the accusation against the Merkel government that it “hasn’t bought enough” doses, made by Dr. Frauke Zipp, a neurologist at the Leopoldina National Academy of Sciences, and the controversy triggered by the remarks of the president of the National Order of Physicians, Klaus Reinhardt, who complained that “the elderly in the nursing homes are not sufficiently protected, and the tests on health personnel are not conducted with the correct regularity.”
It was a very bad start for 2021 for the Minister of Health, Jens Spahn, at the center of the spotlight, in the media for inefficiencies in implementing the roadmap for vaccinations (there were 165,000 on Saturday), which the Germans complain is a pace “far behind Israel.”
What is most concerning is mainly the incessant and frightening increase in deaths, after the record of 1,000 deaths in 24 hours reached at the beginning of last week. It also doesn’t help that Deputy Karl Lauterbach, the SPD’s health expert, had this bleak forecast: “The worst three months are ahead of us. The situation will only improve from April onwards, when we will perhaps be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
This is in agreement with the alarm sounded from BioNTech’s headquarters in Mainz by Ugur Sahin, the company’s founder, who wished to make clear to the experts from federal logistics that the stock produced by his company “is not sufficient for current needs,” putting out an appeal in Der Spiegel for an increase in the number of doses and for the need to diversify the types of vaccine being administered, which are still waiting for final approval by the European regulatory body.
However, the broad-based attack that is hitting home more than any other against the Grand Coalition, led by the “scientist” Angela Merkel, remains the complaint about the miscalculation of the numbers of doses ordered last summer.
“Today’s situation represents a major failure. Why did the central government not take into account reserving a larger number of vaccines for safety at the time of placing the order?”—this was the question raised from the Leopoldina National Academy of Sciences, which is making the rounds of the entire government.
As if that were not enough, the government in Berlin is also accusing them for the long delays in the administration of the vaccine, which “has not arrived in sufficient quantities at the hubs in the capital.”
