In the social media, any credible information about the corona vaccination sooner or later ends up in the swamp of vaccination fairy tales, cheap dogmatism replaces the serious exchange, and the denunciation starts anew every week under a different hashtag. The latest candidate is the word of the President of the Association of General Practitioners, Markus Beier: “Our sharpest sword” is what he called the corona vaccines in an interview for the Funke media group.
The doctor regretted “that the vaccination campaign is currently stagnating”. Apparently, the testimonial campaign “I protect myself” launched three weeks ago by the Federal Ministry of Health is not having the desired effect either. On the contrary: since they started, the willingness to vaccinate or re-vaccinate has once again noticeably decreased. According to the Robert Koch Institute, only 54,000 people in Germany had an injection last Saturday, which is slightly less than the seven-day average of the past week. On the most successful vaccination days, there were a good one million vaccinations.
A little more than 62 percent of Germans have been vaccinated three times – formally, i.e. completely. The number of people who have been vaccinated four times, i.e. those who have been vaccinated at least once, is ten million citizens, not even one in eight in the country has gotten the booster.
This can partly be explained by the official case numbers and falling hospitalization rates that have been falling for days. In fact, however, the proportion of those who are recommended to update their Covid 19 immune protection before winter because of their age, previous illnesses and immune deficiencies is much higher than the booster rate. Many apparently think a refresher is superfluous, and quite a few are likely to be unsettled in view of the aggressive counter-campaigns from the ranks of those opposed to vaccination. In fact, hospitalization rates and the number of Covid-19 deaths have fallen recently, but almost a thousand people are still dying every week, so many that at this level over a year, there would be twice as many victims as in a severe flu epidemic.
The general practitioners did not receive nearly as many vaccination requests from patients as would be recommended by the Standing Vaccination Committee. The established practices used every opportunity to provide information about the vaccinations, “but the output is now rather meager. It has to be said very clearly: the run on corona vaccinations has meanwhile slowed down to a gradual rate,” says Beier, President of the Association of General Practitioners.
Is confidence in the usefulness of vaccination gradually fading? Such narratives are currently fueled by claims that these are still “experimental” corona vaccines and that the active ingredients ultimately failed. However, if one considers the numerous findings recently provided by scientists, which provide both real-world data and current laboratory results, there is still hardly any reason for such failure theses. The results of a study by immunologists at the University Hospital in Tübingen led by Juliane Wald and Yacine Maringer are exemplary. In addition to the B cells, which are responsible for the production of virus-specific antibodies, the specialized T cells in the blood are the most important pillar of protection against severe Covid 19 courses. The new, adapted, bivalent Omicron vaccines were not yet used in the study.