Vaccination protects. Not only the vaccinated person, but also all people with whom the vaccinated person has contact. In order to keep the virus under control, the vaccination rate in Germany must be between 85 and 90 percent, depending on the age group, That’s how the Robert Koch Institute calculated it last summer. One thing is clear: the higher, the better.
When the virus started its global epidemic two years ago, experts still assumed that between 60 and 70 percent of the population would become infected or be protected by vaccination to stop the spread. Once enough people were immune to the pathogen, it would no longer be able to find enough unprotected people and would eventually disappear. At the time, that was the most optimistic outlook for a future without Sars-CoV-2. Since then, however, it has been shown that one can become infected with the virus several times and that the previous vaccinations also do not offer complete protection against infection, i.e. those who have been vaccinated can also transmit the virus – albeit to a reduced extent. In addition, the virus has changed, it has become even more infectious and has therefore raised the threshold for community immunity ever further.
So far, almost 70 percent of the population in Germany has been vaccinated twice and is therefore already quite well protected against severe Covid courses, and a good half has the better triple protection so far. There is still an enormous vaccination gap. Many children are still unvaccinated, but there are still no approved vaccines for the youngest. But a few million people over the age of 60 are either not vaccinated or have only just been vaccinated. According to current data, the omicron variant does not lead to severe illnesses that have to be treated in hospital as often as the delta variant, but the number of new admissions is already increasing again.
It is undisputed among experts that this gap in the common immune system should be closed better by vaccination than by infection with the virus. If you let the virus do this work, the damage is enormous. In South Africa, which is in the middle of the global vaccination statistics with a vaccination rate of just over 50 percent and with many previously infected people came through the omicron wave quickly and relatively easily, many people died from the virus in earlier waves of infection.
However, whether vaccination is required to close the immunity gap in Germany is not a scientific question that could be answered with data from the various research areas on the pandemic. Experts from virology, medicine, sociology, psychology and ethics have already emphasized a hundred times how a sufficient vaccination rate is achieved is a political decision.
There are many ways to get there. This is shown by looking at other countries that have rates in the 90 percent range without state-mandated vaccinations, such as Spain. To all appearances, the idea of solidarity is more firmly anchored in society there than in Germany, and in any case little persuasion had to be done. The small federal state of Bremen shows that this is exactly how you can reach a lot of people. Not only did they start early on to promote vaccination, but they also had an eye on population groups that health education often hardly reaches.