This decision overturns an earlier decision to restrict the firing of AstraZeneca COVID to people over the age of 60.
Germany will allow AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine to be administered to adults of all ages and aims to offer a vaccine to 12-18 year olds by the end of August to speed up its deployment, a said Health Minister Jens Spahn.
The country’s 16 regional health ministers have agreed with Spahn to reverse an earlier decision to restrict shooting of AstraZeneca to people over the age of 60. He also said that the current 12-week gap between the first and second dose of AstraZeneca vaccines could be shortened.
“These two measures serve to further accelerate our vaccination campaign as a whole,” Spahn said Thursday.
Initial supply shortages and bureaucratic hurdles forced Germany, which has Europe’s largest economy, to slowly start its vaccination strategy.
The decision, already adopted in several German states, would be voluntary and family doctors would decide how best to administer the vaccine, Spahn said.
Millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been administered safely in Europe, but concerns persist about a rare type of blood clot seen in a very small number of recipients, which means that some people in early priority groups due to due to their age or pre-existing health condition delayed its obtaining, preferring to wait for another vaccine.
Dozens of countries suspended use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in March or restricted it to the elderly. However, several of them have now resumed their use either fully or with restrictions after health regulators said the benefits of the shot outweighed the risks.
Deployment for the 12-18 age group
Spahn also said that Germany aims to offer a vaccine to 12-18 year olds by the end of August, on condition that European regulators approve the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine for this age group.
So far, 30.6% of the German population of around 83 million has received a first dose and 8.6% are fully vaccinated, according to data from the Robert Koch Institute.
Germany is expected to ease restrictions this weekend on people who are fully vaccinated or who have recovered from COVID-19. They will be exempt from a nighttime curfew and will no longer need to provide a negative test to shop.
Germany has been hit by a third wave of the pandemic, but the number of new cases is declining. The seven-day incidence fell to 129 per 100,000 on Thursday, according to data from the Robert Koch Institute.
The rollout of the vaccine in the country has been widely criticized for getting off to a slow start, but it has picked up the pace significantly, with 15 million vaccines administered in April, as many as in the previous three months combined, Spahn said.
