Germany will offer the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to all adults Coronavirus pandemic News

The move reverses the previous decision to limit AstraZeneca COVID shooting to people over 60 years of age.

Germany will allow AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine to be given to adults of all ages and aims to vaccinate young people aged 12-18 by the end of August, Health Minister Jens Spahn said.

The country’s 16 regional health ministers have agreed with Spahn to overturn the previous decision to limit the AstraZeneca shot to people over 60 years of age. He also said the 12-week gap between the first and second doses of AstraZeneca vaccines could be shortened.

“Both of these measures serve to accelerate our overall vaccination campaign,” Spahn said Thursday.

Initial supply shortages and bureaucratic hurdles meant that Germany, the largest economy in Europe, began to slow down with its inoculation strategy.

The move, already approved in several German states, would be done voluntarily and family doctors would decide how best to give the vaccine, Spahnen said.

Millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been safely administered in Europe, but there are concerns about a rare type of blood clot seen in a very small number of recipients, which is due to the age or health of some people in some priority groups. they preferred to wait.

Dozens of countries stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine in March or restricted it to adults. However, many of them have been re-used completely or with restrictions, after health regulators said the benefits of the shot outweighed the risks.

Extension for groups aged 12-18

Spahn said Germany plans to offer the vaccine to 12-18-year-olds in late August if European regulators allow a BioNTech-Pfizer shot for that age range.

To date, 30.6% of the German population of about 83 million have received the first dose and 8.6% are fully vaccinated, according to data from the Robert Koch Institute.

Germany will ease restrictions this weekend on people who are fully vaccinated or cured of COVID-19. They will be exempt from the night spot text and will not have to give a negative test when shopping.

A third wave of the pandemic has hit Germany, but the number of new cases is easing. The seven-day incidence dropped from 100,000 to 129 on Thursday, data from the Robert Koch Institute showed.

The spread of vaccines in the country has been widely criticized for its slow start, but the pace has increased tremendously, with 15 million shots fired in April, as many as in the previous three months, Spahn said.