Status: 10/15/2021 6:49 a.m.
How high is the current vaccination rate in Germany? To this day, the RKI has not been able to answer this question exactly, admitted the head of the institute, Wieler. However, the fault is not the RKI itself, but the reporting system.
The President of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Lothar Wieler, has admitted that exact information on the current vaccination rate is still not possible. “We cannot say how high the actual quota is now, in mid-October,” Wieler told the newspapers of the Funke media group. The last RKI estimate is now two weeks old. “All we can say is that by the end of September, up to 84 percent of adults had been vaccinated at least once and up to 80 percent had been vaccinated completely.”
An RKI report, according to which presumably more people among adults are vaccinated than official data suggest, caused a stir last week. Wieler defended the RKI against criticism. He shared the anger about the reporting problems, but was not responsible for it. When determining the vaccination rate, one has to rely on the so-called digital vaccination rate monitoring (DIM). The application and reliability of this reporting system are “solely in the hands of the vaccinating bodies (vaccination centers, vaccination teams, hospitals, medical practices, company doctors)”.
Not all medical practices report their corona vaccinations to the RKI
Katharina von Tschurtschentahler, NDR, morning magazine, October 14, 2021
In this context, Wieler criticizes the slow pace of digitization in the healthcare system. “It depends on resources, on the many different billing systems, the different interests of doctors, health insurers and clinics, but also on data protection.”
The officially reported data are the minimum vaccination rate, said the RKI boss. With the entry of resident doctors into vaccination, the vaccination quota can no longer be recorded as precisely as in the vaccination centers.
Wieler receives death threats
Wieler also told the newspapers of the Funke media group that he was exposed to massive threats. “I wish the situation were more pleasant, but I still get threats,” said the RKI chief. If, for example, it is publicly claimed that he is responsible for schools being closed, or if the claim is made somewhere that he wants lockdown instead of freedom, “then the threats, including death threats, increase massively”.
But that doesn’t prevent him from doing his job. “But the risk does not prevent me from my duty. As long as I am an official of this state, I will serve it responsibly,” said Wieler.