As of October 9, 2021, 4:34 p.m.
After the doubts about the own vaccination quota, criticism of the RKI and its chairman Wieler is loud. The FDP speaks of being too close to the government. The company doctors reject the suspicion of insufficient vaccination reports.
Politicians from the FDP and the Greens have expressed dissatisfaction with the Robert Koch Institute and its chairman Lothar Wieler. The background to this is the admission of the institute on Thursday that the number of vaccinated people in Germany was reported to have been too low for a long time.
At Wieler there is “no trace of error inspection,” said FDP health expert Christine Aschenberg-Dugnus (FDP) of “Bild”. Wieler was “too close to the line of the federal government,” she criticized. The FDP wants the authority no longer to be subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Health. Aschenberg-Dugnus also said that months ago it was suspected that the vaccination rate would be reported too low. However, the federal government has always denied this. “Now it’s October and Mr. Wieler has corrected the quota by five percent. And it is pretended to be a success.”
The Green politician Dieter Janecek also criticized in “Bild” that there are no such problems with recording the vaccination rate in other countries. “Germany is overwhelmed again,” he said. Janecek also sees Wieler’s responsibility for the long school closings in Germany: “The RKI supported a course that paid special attention to children as alleged infection drivers.”
RKI: Vaccination rate probably underestimated
In the report published on Thursday, the RKI itself expressed doubts about its previously officially announced vaccination quota. The institute explained that an “underestimation of up to five percentage points for the proportion of people who had been vaccinated at least once or who had been completely vaccinated should be assumed.” It is to be assumed “in the adult population of up to 84 percent of those who have been vaccinated at least once and of up to 80 percent of those who have been completely vaccinated”. The numbers officially reported to the RKI up to now, however, showed a vaccination rate of 79.1 percent for adults who have been vaccinated at least once and 75.4 percent for those who have been vaccinated completely.
The reason for the bias in the numbers was given by the RKI that some agencies would not report all vaccinations to the institute – it can be assumed, especially for company doctors, that only about half of the vaccinations actually reported were recorded in the statistics. In order to check the total reported numbers, the institute had a telephone survey of more than 1000 citizens carried out. The result indicated a significantly higher vaccination rate.
Company doctors: assumption “extremely unrealistic”
The company doctors, however, vehemently reject the suspicion of insufficient reports to the official vaccination register. “It is extremely unrealistic that only half of the company doctors reported data to the RKI,” said the President of the Association of German Company and Company Doctors, Wolfgang Panter, of the “Augsburger Allgemeine”. “A significant part of the company doctor vaccinations appear in the database as normal doctor vaccinations.”
The RKI itself insisted that those company doctors who also have a health insurance license report their data to the Berlin institute via the existing systems of the statutory health insurance associations and not via the more complicated direct reporting procedure, said Panter. “We are assuming that this applies to around 1,500 company doctors who have vaccinated in companies and have submitted their data to the statutory health insurance associations.” If you “realistically assume that each of these 1,500 doctors has vaccinated 1,000 employees, you would have 1.5 million vaccinations.”