The German Association of General Practitioners is skeptical about the hope of a vaccination boom from the new vaccine from the US manufacturer Novavax.

"In the practices, there have so far only been isolated inquiries from patients about the Novavax vaccine," said Chairman Ulrich Weigeldt of the editorial network Germany.

"As things currently stand, it is at least questionable whether the new vaccine will lead to a significant increase in vaccination rates."

General practitioners’ practices currently only receive very few appointment requests for a vaccination.

"Of course, anyone who has not been vaccinated so far is difficult to convince," said the head of the association.

"It is obvious that these people need a different way of addressing them." The current communication campaign with the well-known slogans does not reach them.

The federal government hopes that the drug Nuvaxovid will give new impetus to the vaccination campaign in Germany.

It was approved as the fifth corona vaccine in the EU - for people aged 18 and over.

Two doses are injected about three weeks apart.

The first federal states began administering the preparation at the weekend.

It's a protein vaccine, so it's based on a different technology than the most commonly used mRNA preparations from Pfizer and Moderna, which some people have concerns about.

Fewer new infections than a week ago

The nationwide seven-day incidence of new corona infections has fallen again.

According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the value was 1171.9 on Wednesday morning.

On Tuesday it was 1213.0, on Wednesday a week ago it was 1278.9.

The value quantifies the number of new infections per 100,000 inhabitants over a period of seven days.

As the RKI announced, citing data from the health authorities, the number of new infections recorded within 24 hours on Wednesday morning was 186,406 after 122,111 the day before and 209,052 a week ago.

The total number of registered cases of infection in Germany since the beginning of the corona pandemic thus exceeded the 15 million mark and grew to 15,053,624.

In addition, according to the RKI, 301 new deaths related to the corona virus were recorded within 24 hours.

The total number of corona deaths recorded in Germany rose to 123,238.

The RKI dashboard with further detailed information was not yet available in the morning.

Traveling will be easier from Thursday

As of Thursday, no country will be considered a high-risk corona area from a German perspective.

"With the widespread occurrence of the omicron variant, it shows that the ability of this variant to cause a threatening disease is less severe than the previously dominant variants," said the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) on Tuesday evening.

For this reason, only those regions in which more dangerous variants are widespread would be designated as high-risk areas.