Germany

Germany’s vaccine committee has advised the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine only be given to under-65s. The announcement marks a major twist in a week of muddled vaccine reports. On Tuesday, the German newspaper Handelsblatt suggested that German officials believed the Oxford vaccine was only 8 per cent effective for the over-65 groups (no evidence has been produced to support the 8 per cent claim). It has been heavily and extensively rebuffed by both AstraZeneca and the German government. Yet the German reporter who broke the story doubled down on the claims, raising the stakes as to whether he was making precarious reporting worse, or whether the European Medicines Agency may indeed conclude that the vaccine’s efficacy is too low. As

Yesterday’s extraordinary row over the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has just become even stranger. The German government spent much of Tuesday rubbishing reports they had found the jab to be only 8 per cent effective among the over 65s. A claim that was published by the Düsseldorf-based financial paper Handelsblatt following a tip-off from anonymous sources within the German government. Instead, according to the country’s health ministry, there had been a very embarrassing misunderstanding:  At first glance it seems that the reports have mixed up two things: about 8 per cent of those tested in the AstraZeneca efficacy study were between 56 and 69… But one cannot deduce an efficacy of only 8 per cent with older

Angela Merkel is known for her competency, yet even Mutti’s defenders would struggle to use that word to describe Germany’s rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine. German firm BioNTech won the race to develop a vaccine, but this has not prevented crippling supply shortages, which has forced states including North Rhine-Westphalia, in the west of the country, to suspend jabs.  German health minister Jens Spahn has come under fire and his insistence that ‘the vaccine is a scarce product worldwide’ rings hollow when Germans look at the speed of the vaccine rollout in Britain. Now, to make matters worse, German’s health ministry has found itself caught in a fresh row: over the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. German newspaper Handelsblatt reported

Germany’s new lockdown has hit its people like a lightning bolt. On Tuesday, Angela Merkel and the 16 federal state leaders decided that those in coronavirus hotspots should not be allowed to travel beyond a nine-mile radius (15 kilometres) if they don’t have a valid reason.     Valid reasons include a visit to a doctor’s office, shopping for necessities and commuting to work. Yet many Germans feel that the new regulations are arbitrary and affect rural areas much more than cities. The nine-mile radius as a metric is added to the edge of the town, meaning that those living in a large city still have a lot of space where

European health ministries have not been happy places of late. Earlier this week, the German daily Bild reported a spat between national governments and the EU, frustrated at the bloc’s failure to procure vaccine doses in any serious numbers. That failure has now ricocheted back from Brussels, destabilising Germany’s increasingly fragile coalition government. So infuriated are Angela Merkel’s junior partners that they are now calling for a parliamentary inquiry into Germany’s vaccine failures, centring on one of her possible successors. Problems began when health ministers in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands (the four countries with the most advanced pharmaceutical industries in the EU) joined forces to try to get

A debate is playing out in the German-speaking media about whether inflation or deflation was behind the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Conservative economists have been arguing that public overspending and the 1923 hyperinflation destroyed the middle class and thus paved the way for the National Socialists. Most recently, Hans Werner Sinn, a well-renowned economist and former chairman of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, reiterated that argument in an interview with Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), saying: ‘People lost their savings and life insurances which became worthless. Ten years later, Adolf Hitler became chancellor. I don’t say that something like that will happen again, but we

The government is yet again under fire for its handling of Covid-19, as cases rise across parts of the country. But what about the global context? Is it still possible to argue that Britain has done especially badly in handling the pandemic? Possibly, but it is becoming increasingly hard to do so, as many countries which appeared to handle the virus best the first time around are now suffering second waves much larger than what they experienced in the spring. Germany, which this week announced a hard lockdown over Christmas, is a prime example. In the spring it was held up as an example of how the rest of Europe

The Bundestag can’t be an easy place to be a politician right now. At the start of the pandemic, Germany seemed to be steering a steadier course than other countries, who looked on in awe at the speed with which it launched its testing regime. But as Britain, Canada and the USA begin vaccinations, Germany has been left tapping its feet. It is still waiting for the European Medicines Agency to approve the Pfizer vaccine, which it is set to do on 21 December – a state of affairs that is rapidly turning into a national and international embarrassment. The German public have grown increasingly irritated at the delays. ‘It’s just beyond belief,’ the Bild

Germans, just like Britons, will have to cope with restrictions during this year’s Christmas holidays. Yesterday, Angela Merkel and the heads of Germany’s federal states agreed on an updated catalogue of regulations that will allow ten adults to meet for a Christmas party. After three weeks of what is widely called a ‘lockdown light’, the infection rates in German cities and regions continue to remain above the threshold that has been set by medical experts. The vast majority of Landkreise (regional districts) have recorded an incidence proportion of higher than 50 cases per 1,000 inhabitants within the last week.  Chancellor Merkel said yesterday that the ‘lockdown light’ has prevented the

Germany has been in uproar over the events that unfolded this Saturday, when 38,000 protesters gathered in Berlin and clashed with the police. The organisers of the gathering, entitled Umdenken (Rethinking), claimed they wanted to show their frustration at government measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Among the 38,000 were at least 3,000 far-right sympathisers and extremists, according to Berlin’s interior minister. The run-up to Saturday’s protests was already marked by controversy, as Berlin’s local government had initially banned the gathering due to concerns that the event could contribute to the spread of the coronavirus. As is often the case in Germany when governments ban political protests, a