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Family doctors in Germany should routinely start vaccinations against the coronavirus immediately after Easter.
Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and the prime ministers of the federal states decided on Friday at a conference call.
There is, however, a possibility for countries to declare by March 22nd that they will not participate.
Merkel called for more speed when vaccinating.
“We can become faster and more flexible,” she says.
“We want the tried and tested German thoroughness to be supplemented by more flexibility,” she says.
"The motto is: vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate".
Because of the initially small quantities of vaccine available, vaccination in general practitioners' practices will only start slowly.
The decision paper mentions about one vaccination appointment per week.
Converted to around 50,000 general practitioners in Germany, this means around 20 vaccination doses per practice - a total of around one million vaccination doses.
In the last week of April, however, almost 3.2 million vaccine doses should be sent to general practitioners.
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It was also agreed that five federal states should receive additional vaccination doses to protect against the entry of mutated coronaviruses by commuters from neighboring states.
This affects the Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate with their border with France as well as Bavaria, Saxony and Thuringia due to the high number of infections in the Czech Republic.
According to the decision, Bavaria is to receive 100,000 additional doses of vaccine, Saxony 100,000, Saarland 80,000, Thuringia 30,000 and Rhineland-Palatinate 20,000 doses.
That makes a total of 330,000 cans.
This vaccine is said to come from the additional delivery of 580,000 doses from the manufacturer Biontech / Pfizer, which this manufacturer has promised.
The remaining 250,000 additional doses are planned for the general practitioners' practices in the week after Easter.
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