A Tuesday morning in early November.
The vaccination bus has come to Mainz, in a new residential area in the southeast of the city.
For eight hours, a team of four vaccinators, three documentaries, two doctors and a pharmacist will vaccinate people against the coronavirus.
Around 20 people are queuing in the drizzle, including many gray-haired people who are already getting the third shot.
Kim Bjorn Becker
Editor in politics.
Follow I follow
Leonie Feuerbach
Editor in politics.
Follow I follow
In addition: A Pakistani couple who want to visit relatives at home - that is not possible without a vaccination. A man in his early 30s who has practically only worked from home for the past year and a half and therefore saw no reason to get vaccinated. An 18-year-old student from Belarus who has only been in Germany for a few weeks and says that vaccinations are not an issue in her home country. Two young women who until recently were pregnant. And a woman with her twelve and fourteen year old daughters who hesitated whether the children should be vaccinated.
While the Germans are woken up every morning with new records for the seven-day incidence - on Monday it was 201.1 - the vaccination rate is now only increasing very slowly, almost stagnating. According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), 55.7 million Germans were last fully vaccinated against Corona, that is 67 percent. Because not all vaccinations administered are included in the statistics, at best it could be almost 60 million people, i.e. 72 percent.
If you subtract from the total population children under the age of twelve and people who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, as well as two million people who have been vaccinated for the first time, this leaves up to 14 million people who have so far decided against the vaccination even though they could be vaccinated . Whether or not they can still be changed will largely determine the course of the fourth corona wave.
Max, a freelance musician in his early 40s with red curly hair and a three-day beard, has let himself be changed. “I hesitated for a long time whether I would get involved in this experiment,” he says - and he means the vaccination with BioNTech, which in his opinion was “pushed through” in a fast-track process. “It wasn't entirely voluntary.” But because the 2- or 3-G rule applies in more and more places, i.e. only vaccinated, convalescent and possibly also tested people are allowed in and the tests are no longer free, it became too complicated for him too expensive. He now speaks louder and faster: "To put pressure on people to vaccinate just because the hospitals are now full after years of reducing intensive care bed capacities: that's awesome."
Most of the unvaccinated people see it the way he does: In a Forsa survey commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Health, 89 percent of those questioned recently said that if the intensive care units reached their capacity limits again, it had no effect on their willingness to be vaccinated.
What else do we know about those unwilling to vaccinate?