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Hanover (dpa / lni) - With a vaccination weekend on Saturday and Sunday, the Ministry of Health in Lower Saxony wants to accelerate the vaccination campaign against the corona virus.
On both days, around 70,000 vaccinations are planned in the 50 vaccination centers in the country, about twice as many as on the previous weekends.
More vaccination doses than the country already receives are not available for the campaign. And: You cannot be vaccinated at short notice and spontaneously, the appointments have all been taken, the ministry said. Around 380,000 people who were already eligible for vaccination were still on the waiting list in Lower Saxony on Friday.
The purpose of the campaign is also to compensate for a dent in the number of vaccinations over the Easter weekend, when in a number of centers fewer vaccinations than usual were received despite a warning from the ministry.
In addition, it is a question of using accumulated stocks after the discussion about the Astrazeneca vaccine.
Many people who are entitled to vaccinate recently refused to receive an already scheduled vaccination with the Astrazeneca product - sometimes only on arrival at the vaccination center, so that not all vaccination doses could be used as planned.
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The campaign on Saturday and Sunday is aimed primarily at people over 70 in prioritization group 2 who had not previously been given an appointment.
The order of priority was not softened for the vaccination weekend - only people who are currently eligible to vaccinate received an appointment.
This rule was also adhered to for the Astrazeneca vaccine.
The CDU parliamentary group leader Dirk Toepffer criticized this on Friday.
If there are larger stocks of Astrazeneca doses left after the vaccination weekend, Lower Saxony, like four other federal states, should lift the prioritization for this vaccine.
The vaccination weekend accelerates the vaccination campaign and leads to faster immunization of the population, emphasized the head of the state government's corona crisis team and state secretary, Heiger Scholz.
He defended the action against criticism of the opposition.
The Green MP Meta Janssen-Kucz, however, spoke of “hot air” and a “PR gag”.
The bottom line is that there will be no more vaccinations than without the action.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210424-99-333735 / 2