Germans vexed as coronavirus vaccine rollout lags

KIEL, Germany — It’s been branded Germany’s “vaccine disaster” and you can see one sign of it every Tuesday at 8 a.m. in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein.

That’s when people eligible for a coronavirus vaccination can book an appointment via a website or a telephone hotline — if they’re fast enough. On Tuesday morning, all 15,000 slots for the week were snapped up in just 15 minutes.

It was a similar story the previous Tuesday, when all the appointments were gone after 24 minutes and some users complained that technical issues complicated the booking process.

Those eligible for a vaccine at this stage are people working in the health or elderly care sector and people aged 80 and over. Some have asked how seniors can be expected to be quick enough to grab an appointment — unless they have grandchildren with experience snagging popular concert tickets. (The appointment system is actually operated by an online ticket-seller.)

“Thank you for your great interest!” the website tells disappointed vaccine-seekers, asking them to “please try again” next Tuesday morning.

“The current shortage of vaccines is of course causing exasperation,” said Dennis Kramkowski, a general practitioner who runs the local vaccination center in Schleswig-Holstein’s capital Kiel. The venue, in a modern ferry terminal by the Baltic Sea, is one of about 400 such centers across Germany that have been set up in the past two months.

“People are understandably unhappy because of the few available appointments. But that doesn’t mean that we planned wrongly or purchased the wrong vaccines,” said Kramkowski, speaking through a white face mask. “If the whole world wants access to the vaccine, then supplies are short in the beginning.”

Many Germans aren’t so mild-mannered when it comes to the vaccination rollout.

National media and politicians have spent weeks alleging there has been a “planning disaster” around the purchase and distribution of vaccines. With Germany stuck in its second coronavirus lockdown, which was further tightened last week, critics have accused the European Commission of having bungled the joint European procurement process. They argue Brussels did not purchase enough of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine — the first available jab on the market and an object of national pride because it was developed in Germany.

Strong denials from Brussels and Berlin have cut little ice as the issue has become embroiled in the race to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor and a string of important regional elections.

“It can’t be that in a country that actually invented the vaccine, we end up getting too few doses of it,” Lars Klingbeil, the secretary-general of the Social Democratic Party, Merkel’s junior coalition partner, said last week.

Markus Söder, the powerful premier of Bavaria, warned that other countries like the U.S., U.K. or Israel might “benefit economically” due to their faster access to the vaccine and the higher vaccination rate.

Health Minister Jens Spahn, who is widely seen as a potential candidate for chancellor but came under fire over the bumpy vaccination start, has defended the European Commission’s strategy. He pointed out that Germany is actually getting more doses than many other European countries — for example, 64 million doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, as well as 50 million doses of the Moderna vaccine, the second jab approved for use in the EU.

That’s a bigger share per population than many other EU countries receive because, thanks to its deep pockets, Berlin snatched up some doses from the EU’s joint procurement scheme that other countries were not willing to pay for. In addition, Germany also separately bought 30 million BioNTech/Pfizer inoculations — an approach that triggered strong criticism from some EU partners but was tolerated by the European Commission.

Lagging behind

Spahn has also made the ambitious promise that every German who wants a vaccine will get one by the summer — a target that Germany will only be able to reach if it not only receives more doses but also increases the speed with which they are administered.

Adding to the angst in a country that prides itself on good planning and efficiency: Other countries are rolling out the vaccines faster.

As of Monday, Germany had vaccinated a little more than 610,000 people, which means 0.82 doses administered per 100 people — less than other EU partners like Spain (0.87 doses), Slovenia (1.08 doses) or Italy (1.19 doses). Denmark, the northern neighbor of Schleswig-Holstein, had issued 2.02 doses per 100 people as of Monday. And the U.K. — which procured and approved its vaccines independently from the EU — had reached almost 4 doses per 100 people.

In the vaccination center in Kiel, the problem is clearly visible: Only one doctor, Kramkowski, and his medical assistant, Sina Holzwarth, are currently issuing jabs to about 70 people a day — even though the center could theoretically process up to 1,200 patients each day if it had more vaccines at hand.

“It will take some time to get there,” said Kramkowski, adding that he expects the number of daily vaccinations to increase to 300 a day by next month as supplies are slowly increasing.

Some experts say Germany is issuing fewer vaccinations than it could administer with the supplies it has. Although the country received nearly 2 million BioNTech/Pfizer doses as of last Friday (a number that could be revised upwards after the European Medicines Agency said six doses rather than five could be extracted from each vaccine bottle), Germany had only administered 613,000 jabs as of Monday — less than one-third of the available doses.

Doctors say half the doses must be held back for a second jab after three weeks to boost the vaccination to a 95 percent efficiency rate and avoid the risk that the virus could mutate and adapt to the vaccine. But that hasn’t stopped other countries like Belgium from emptying their freezers to hand out as many first vaccinations as possible, after receiving guarantees from BioNTech/Pfizer that there will be enough supplies in the coming weeks to administer second shots in time.

Germany, which normally is no stranger to “just in time” production, is so far taking a cautious approach and keeping large quantities of vaccines on ice, despite having received guarantees from BioNTech/Pfizer that it will receive nearly 670,000 new vaccines every week in January, thereby increasing the total number of BioNTech/Pfizer jabs to 3.98 million by February 1.

“We administer the vaccine that is there, instead of later having to say to people: Sorry, the expected supply for the second vaccination has not arrived,” said Kramkowski.

The doctor argued the current bottleneck was only temporary — also considering that more vaccines are expected to be authorized soon — and that later in the year the country may reach a point at which supply of the vaccine is greater than demand. At that point, he said, it would be important to keep people motivated to keep coming in to get vaccinated so that as much of the population as possible has immunity. “That’s the only way to get out of this pandemic,” he said.

Among the about 70 lucky people who managed to get an appointment at the ferry terminal on Tuesday was Ursula Grohmann, aged 83. After receiving a short briefing and stamp in her vaccination passport from Kramkowski, medical assistant Holzwarth — dressed in white polythene scrubs — administered the shot. All in under 10 minutes.

Grohmann was accompanied by her daughter Frauke, who secured the appointment the previous Tuesday morning when sitting in front of the computer in her nightdress.

“We’d been online since 7 a.m. and kept clicking, and then all of a sudden it worked,” she said.

This article is part of POLITICO’s premium policy service: Pro Health Care. From drug pricing, EMA, vaccines, pharma and more, our specialized journalists keep you on top of the topics driving the health care policy agenda. Email [email protected] for a complimentary trial.