After the delivery of thirty thousand vaccine doses was cancelled, three German states have been forced to suspend the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine.
Three German states, Berlin, Brandenburg and Bavaria, have been forced to suspend their vaccination programmes due to a shortage in doses. The news, which was reported on Wednesday, comes just four days after the first vaccine was administered in Germany. The states will have to delay their vaccination programmes for at least a week.
The delivery of 30.000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, due to arrive on January 4, was cancelled. The reason for the cancellation remains unclear. “We have received word from the federal health ministry that the delivery of vaccines will not take place in the first week of 2021,” said Berlin’s Health Minister, Dilek Kalayci. Vaccinations are now expected to restart on January 11 at the earliest.
The state of Brandenburg wrote on Twitter to confirm that it was also affected by the delay and Melanie Huml, Bavaria’s Health Minister, announced that Germany’s largest state would also have to wait for the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines. "It is incomprehensible how, when the infection rates are so high, a complete delivery can simply be cancelled," Huml said.
It was expected that around 20.000 coronavirus vaccines would be administered in the first week of January, however, due to the delay, there will be none. Healthcare authorities have said that vaccines are now more necessary than ever, as the coronavirus in Germany continues to set new records in terms of both infections and deaths.