Austria is changing the vaccination plan again – politics

Austria is increasing its vaccination speed and has been among the leading member states in the EU rankings for current vaccination services for weeks. Currently, an average of 33,446 vaccinations are carried out per day. The total number of vaccinations carried out has risen to 1.5 million and 1.1 million people have now received at least one first vaccination. That is 14.5 percent of the vaccinable population and 21 percent of the target of 70 percent of the adult population, which the EU has declared.

In the next few weeks, these numbers will increase significantly faster for two reasons, as the Ministry of Health announced:

This week the decision was made to extend the time interval between first and second vaccination for vaccines from BioNTech / Pfizer and Moderna from 3-4 to 6 weeks. This extension leads to faster first immunizations.

In addition, the delivery volume will be tripled in the 2nd quarter compared to the 1st: around 6.9 million vaccine doses are expected in Austria in the months of April, May and June.

These are the goals

Health Minister Rudi Anschober (Greens): “This means that our next vaccination goals are clearly achievable. We want to have vaccinated the population group of people over 65 years of age by the end of April and the group of people over 55 years of age by the end of May. Two should be by the end of June / beginning of July Third of the population – this is the vaccination quota we are aiming for – to be provided with at least the first vaccination. ”

So far, 1.7 million vaccination doses have been delivered to Austria and have already been vaccinated or prepared for vaccination campaigns in the next few days. By far the largest number of deliveries came from BioNTech / Pfizer (1.1 million vaccine doses), another 408,000 vaccine doses came from AstraZeneca and 196,000 from Moderna.