In view of increasing incidences, the last weeks of summer threaten to turn into a corona autumn again.

Experts consider a vaccination quota of at least 85 percent of people over the age of twelve to be necessary to stop the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant.

Regardless, vaccination fatigue is growing in Germany.

At the height of the vaccination campaign, more than a million doses were vaccinated a day in Germany.

Currently there are not even 500,000 - and the trend is falling.

Why is that?

Martin Franke

Editor on duty at FAZ.NET.

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Patrick Schlereth

Editor on duty at FAZ.NET.

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Anyone who asks the Federal Ministry of Health learns that an offer has now been made to all those willing to be vaccinated.

A spokesman for the FAZ announced that the campaign had already been “over-fulfilled” at the beginning of the summer.

In fact, half of Germans are now fully vaccinated, and almost two out of three Germans will soon have received at least one dose of vaccine.

But that is far from the required 85 percent.

According to the European Covid Survey, a study by the University of Hamburg, the population's willingness to vaccinate increased again from April to early July. At the same time, however, regional differences also became clear. Most people in the north wanted to be vaccinated, but very few in the east. Bremen, for example, ranks first with 70.6 percent one-time and 60.7 percent completely vaccinated. Saxony brings up the rear. The Free State only has 47.2 percent completely and 52.1 percent vaccinated once. It looks a little better in Thuringia. And there are hardly any additional first vaccinations in both countries - the vaccination rate in Thuringia and in Saxony only increases by around 0.2 percentage points every day.

The vaccination campaign is largely the responsibility of the federal states.

The federal government pays, procures the vaccines and distributes them.

So far, the countries have primarily been considered based on the proportion of their inhabitants in relation to the total population.

Exceptions to the rule were made to protect areas that were particularly endangered.

In March, the Prime Minister's Conference decided to make additional deliveries for Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate to protect them from virus variants from France.

The same applied to Thuringia, Saxony and Bavaria because of the formerly high infection rates in the Czech Republic.

Demand will determine supply in the future

The federal distribution key will be replaced by new rules in mid-August. Then the countries should only get what they order. Demand then determines supply. This is to prevent hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses from being stored unused in refrigerators, as was the case in the past. That could be an advantage for Bayern. So far, the Free State has felt disadvantaged in terms of distribution. With this, Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) also declared that his country was below the national average for vaccinations. “We need more vaccine,” he said at the end of June. Bavaria is now in fourth place in terms of vaccination doses delivered, but still in one of the lower places in terms of vaccination doses administered.