Germany’s Scholz Urges Faster Vaccinations to Beat Covid

(Bloomberg) -- Chancellor Olaf Scholz called on his fellow Germans to get vaccinated against Covid-19 to beat the pandemic and open up opportunities for sweeping economic reforms.

The 2020s will be a decade of transformation as Europe's largest economy pushes to become climate-neutral in about 25 years, the 63-year-old who succeeded Angela Merkel earlier this month said. 

“We are embarking on a new era -- an era that will be good if we actively shape it,” Scholz said in his first New Year speech. “It makes a difference if we resolutely take our fate into our own hands.”

The pandemic has overshadowed the start of Scholz's tenure. His Social Democrats narrowly beat Merkel's conservative bloc on the promise of accelerating Germany's economic overhaul as climate change and the rise of digital technologies pose risks to its industrial base.

Those ambitious plans have been sidelined as Germany grapples with vaccine shortages, spotty data on infections and increasingly aggressive anti-vaccine protests.

Scholz spent the bulk of his speech urging Germans to stick to pandemic restrictions, including refraining again from big New Year's parties and firework displays. He pushed back against vaccine skeptics, saying nearly 4 billion people worldwide have received a shot and inoculated mothers have given birth to healthy babies. 

Vaccines are “the path out of the pandemic,” Scholz said. “Now it's about speed. We need to be faster than the virus.”

Germany's seven-day infection rate rose on Friday for the second day in a row and stands at 214.9 cases per 100,000 people. While that's less than half the record in late November, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has warned the current outbreak might be two to three times worse than official numbers show because of spotty data provided by its decentralized health-care system during the Christmas holidays. 

Scholz's new government, which consists of a three-way alliance between the SPD, the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats, will meet with regional leaders on Jan. 7 to discuss further steps to fight the pandemic. Lauterbach has vowed to have accurate data by then. 

German authorities are bracing for a spike from the omicron variant, which led to surging infections in neighboring countries like France, Denmark and the Netherlands. The highly-contagious strain has stoked concern over the ability to safeguard critical infrastructure if health-care staff and police get infected or forced into quarantine. 

To head off these risks, his administration imposed tighter rules on private gatherings and aims to vaccinate 80% of the population by the end of January, a goal that looks like a stretch amid tenacious opposition to shots among a minority of the population. Currently, about 71% of Germans are fully vaccinated. 

Protests in recent days, especially in the former communist East, have turned violent at times over curbs targeting unvaccinated people and as parliament considers legislation that would make Covid shots compulsory. 

“Let's pull together to do everything -- and I really mean everything -- to defeat corona in the new year,” Scholz said.

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