“The vaccines are our ticket out of this pandemic,” Ammon said on Friday during a visit to Latvia.
In view of the highly transmissible delta variant that dominates the entire EU, it is important to vaccinate a large part of the population. There are four vaccines in the EU that are “approved, available and effective”, said the German doctor after a meeting with the Latvian Health Minister Daniels Pavluts in Riga.
How high the vaccination quota has to be in order to achieve so-called herd immunity cannot be said. “I know that’s the number everyone wants to know. It is not yet possible to give a final threshold, ”said Ammon. In the case of risk groups, it must definitely be as high and as close as possible to 100 percent. The head of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) hoped that people’s reservations about corona vaccinations can be dispelled. To do this, each country needs a tailor-made approach, she said.
Ammon’s talks in Latvia focused on how ECDC can help the country. The EU authority currently has the highest infection rate in Europe for Latvia. In view of the steep rise in the number of infections, the government in Riga has sent the country into a lockdown until November 15 – with many restrictions and a night curfew. One reason for the high number of cases is the low complete vaccination rate of 53 percent of the 1.9 million inhabitants.