key: cord-0745731-s8b0gami
authors: Müller, Olaf; Lu, Guangyu; Razum, Oliver; Jahn, Albrecht
title: Reply to “Focusing COVID-19 vaccinations on elderly and high-risk people”
date: 2021-04-30
journal: The Lancet Regional Health - Europe
DOI: 10.1016/j.lanepe.2021.100073
sha: 513866ac7ef51723b2a9c1edec4374774e963a3f
doc_id: 745731
cord_uid: s8b0gami

nan

In his commentary, Hermann Brenner provides timely data on the epidemiology of COVID-19 in Germany [1] . His-main message is that focusing vaccination on elderly and high-risk people in Germany (one third of the population) could avoid the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths. We agree. But Brenner goes one step further: Based on his estimates, he questions the need, justification and ethics of a full population roll-out of COVID-19 vaccinations in Germany and probably globally, instead proposing a herd immunity approach for the remaining two-thirds of the population. Thus, he misses to consider the significant impact of relaxing control measures on health service capacity, severe morbidity, long-term health consequences (long COVID), and the likelihood of emerging vaccine escape mutations until herd immunity is reached [2, 3] .

In Germany, the first SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 epidemic wave in spring 2020 has been well controlled through a rapid employment of intense and comprehensive non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) [4] . In February 2021 -after about three months of light/moderate lockdown measures against the large second epidemic wave -COVID-19 incidence is slowly decreasing. There is now again an intense and controversial discussion on relaxing NPIs, particularly in view of the rapidly emerging more dangerous mutants of SARS-CoV-2 [3] . Thus, in addition to quickly vaccinating as large a proportion of its populations as possible, Germany should consider implementing an adapted No-COVID strategy to heed the lessons learned from the much more successful control approaches in WHO Western Pacific countries such as China, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand [4, 5] .

Olaf M€ uller designed the letter; all authors contributed significantly to the content of the letter and have accepted the final version.

The authors have nothing to disclose.

Focussing COVID-19 vaccination on elderly and high-risk people

6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study

SARS-CoV-2 variants and ending the COVID-19 pandemic

Health Policy: COVID-19 in Germany and China: mitigation versus elimination strategy

The COVID-19 exit strategy À why we need to aim low

E-mail address: olaf.mueller@urz.uni-heidelberg.de (O. M€ uller)

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license

The Lancet Regional Health -Europe journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/lanepe