Does Biontech vaccine have to be rationed or not? Can everyone now have the booster vaccination or not? And what about the epidemic situation? Crisis communication is in a communication crisis.
Monday morning, 10:00 a.m. Health Minister Jens Spahn came to the federal press conference to provide information on the subject of “Vaccinating with Moderna and Biontech”. He has something to correct – again.
On Saturday it became known that the Federal Ministry of Health wanted to cap the amount of the Biontech vaccine, which is particularly well tolerated by young people and people with previous illnesses. The reason for this is, according to a letter from the ministry to the federal states, the imminent expiry date of the Moderna vaccine, which is also stored, in February 2022. The ministry will therefore “define a maximum order quantity for Biontech vaccines”.
The criticism came promptly. Green health politician Janosch Dahmen tweeted: “We need anything but a handbrake when vaccinating,” and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig called for a step forward and not to quota the Biontech vaccine.
On Sunday it sounded very different at Spahn. The demand has increased significantly in the last two weeks, he said on ZDF. “We’re not holding anything back. I can’t deliver a vaccine from Biontech that isn’t there.” That is the real problem. “We should have communicated that better.” He repeated this sentence at the federal press conference on Monday.
That would have settled the issue if the Federal Ministry of Health had not announced at the same time that Germany is donating or has donated 8.8 million doses of Biontech vaccine to poorer countries through the Covax initiative. Spahn had to defend himself for that too. On Monday, he said German deliveries to Covax could be delayed.
“The communication was disastrous”
The fact is: the Minister of Health, who was still one of the most popular politicians in Germany at the end of 2020, is currently criticizing almost everything that goes wrong with Corona. And that’s not a little right now. Even long-term allies seem to drop Spahn like a hot potato. Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder said on Monday that “communication over the weekend was disastrous”.
If only it were the delivery problems with Biontech. On August 23, during the hot phase of the Bundestag election campaign, Spahn declared that Germany would get through the winter well despite the Delta variant, “if many people get vaccinated and we have the 3G principle indoors”. The Robert Koch Institute had already warned of a harsh winter in a study five weeks earlier. “The fourth wave has begun,” says the paper that RKI boss Lothar Wieler presented in a switching conference on July 26th. in the weekly report a month later, on August 19, the institute wrote that the fourth wave was now picking up speed in particular “due to infections among the young adult population”.
Epidemic situation – for or against?
At the end of October, Spahn proposed an end to the “epidemic situation of national importance”. He was not the only one: the former chairman of the health committee, the CDU politician Erwin Rüddel, said at about the same time on Deutschlandfunk that there was agreement in the Union that the epidemic situation should end on November 25th.
When the traffic light parties implement this plan, criticism from the Union rained. Söder called the project absurd and also accused Spahn of having made a mistake with his request.
Söder’s communication is not free of glitches either. He is now just as vehemently advocating compulsory vaccination as he refused a week and a half ago. For months he worked as prime minister with a deputy who refused the corona vaccination. Twice, both in the summer of 2020 and 2021, Söder demanded that holiday returnees test compulsory – always exactly when most of them were already at home. And last year, his cabinet decided that tests should be compulsory for returnees from risk countries, on December 22nd, of all things, in the afternoon. Anyone who entered Bavaria shortly after Christmas had to deal with overloaded test centers and unsuspecting health authorities.
Who is actually allowed to have the booster vaccination?
At least when it comes to such an important question as vaccination updates, communication should be consistent. One could think so. But not true.
At the beginning of September, the conference of federal and state health ministers expanded the group of people eligible for booster to include those over the age of 60. On November 5th, the GMK decided that “within the framework of the available capacities and after medical assessment and decision, booster vaccinations will be offered to all people who wish to have them six months after the completion of the first series of vaccinations”. “Boosters after six months should become the rule, not the exception,” said Spahn after the conference.
The Standing Vaccination Commission saw it completely differently at that time. STIKO boss Thomas Mertens explained the reason as follows: Although they communicated something different, they meant the same thing. Finally, in October, people over the age of 70 had been vaccinated for six months, and a new recommendation will soon be published anyway.
But the difference has still not been fully clarified: Since November 18, the STIKO has been recommending “all people over the age of 18 to receive a COVID-19 booster”. That only seems to be clear, because the STIKO also announced that it was reiterating its recommendation to “give priority to a booster vaccination” to certain groups of people. What do doctors do who want to vaccinate according to the STIKO recommendation? Do you send away patients who are younger than 70 and do not work as caregivers? It happens.
The traffic light parties recently demonstrated in detail that not only government groups are not always up to the communicative challenges of the pandemic. When they announced at the end of October that they would not prolong the epidemic situation, they stated in their key issues paper that the prerequisites for this no longer existed. It had long been foreseeable that the hospitals would get into major difficulties again. “The traffic lights work before they exist,” said Green parliamentary leader Katrin Göring-Eckardt at the time.