Minister: Germany on booster offensive to stop omicron

(16 Dec 2021) Germany is scrambling to procure more vaccine to fuel what the new health minister on Thursday called a "very offensive and fast booster strategy" that would leave the country well-prepared for the onslaught of the new omicron variant.
Germany on Wednesday administered nearly 1.5 million shots, its highest one-day total so far.
As its vaccination campaign has revved back up, an average of some 988,000 people per day have been vaccinated over the past week.
The proportion of Germany's population of 83 million that has been fully vaccinated now stands at 70% — a number that officials, who had set a minimum target of 75%, aren't satisfied with.
And 27.6% also have received a booster shot, a figure that is rising quickly.
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said that with its aggressive strategy, Germany will try "to keep the omicron variant as small as possible to avoid overloading the health system and possibly society as a whole."
But Lauterbach told reporters he wasn't satisfied with an inventory of vaccine delivery plans for the rest of December and next year's first quarter after he took office last week in the new government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, arguing he needed more.
Under those delivery numbers, he said the booster campaign would take until the end of March to complete.
"We can't work with that," Lauterbach said.
He said his ministry launched efforts to remedy that on Saturday and has secured the European Union's approval to get the delivery of 35 million doses from Moderna moved forward.
Lauterbach said he is negotiating with other countries, including Romania, Poland, Portugal and Bulgaria to secure more vaccine.
Germany also hopes to get doses of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine that have been adapted to the omicron variant in the first quarter.
Omicron hasn't yet become a major factor in Germany but the country is only now seeing a wave of infections caused by the still-dominant delta variant, its biggest so far, recede slowly.
Lothar Wieler, the head of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany's disease control centre, said that "a few hundred cases" of omicron have been registered so far, and it has been found in all 16 German states.
In the morning about 40 people protested in front of the North Rhine-Westphalia parliament in Duesseldorf against vaccines for children and mandatory vaccinations.

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