D.he call for change began quite inconspicuously with a sentence in the subjunctive. “One would have to think about how the STIKO will be suspended in the future in order to ensure its neutrality and independence,” said Ute Teichert, chairwoman of the Federal Association of Public Health Service Physicians, in July. In the previous weeks, politicians had clashed several times with scientists from the Standing Vaccination Commission (STIKO). The specialists had to change their corona vaccination recommendation several times. It raised important questions: Who should get the Astra-Zeneca vaccine? And can adolescents from the age of twelve be vaccinated in principle? The political decision-makers were annoyed that the STIKO took so long to make their recommendations. Several politicians, above all Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU), had put pressure on the commission to make faster decisions and more in the interests of politics.
The STIKO is hung up, as Teichert called it, at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Berlin, a higher federal authority in the portfolio of the Federal Ministry of Health. The voluntary members of the STIKO are not bound by instructions and are free in their decisions. They are reappointed every three years by the ministry and the highest state health authorities. What the experts can and cannot achieve during this time also depends on how the office of the commission at the RKI is equipped. With that, said Ute Teichert in the summer, the STIKO got “in the field of politics and political advice”.
A few months later, at a press conference in Berlin at the end of November, it was Jens Spahn (CDU) who made it clear in his last days as Federal Minister of Health that something had to be done: “I just believe that the very important instrument of the Standing Vaccination Commission is not is suitable for times of pandemic. ”The STIKO is undisputedly doing a good job, said Spahn. “The only question is whether, in a pandemic and health crisis, a different mechanism than the conventional one for recommendations on vaccination might be needed.”
For a long time nobody was bothered by the thoroughness of the STIKO
A new organization, a different process? In the world of the Standing Vaccination Commission, which was set up in 1972 at what was then the Federal Health Office, these would be immense changes. Two decades ago the role of the STIKO was clearly regulated in the Infection Protection Act, since then not much has changed in essence. “The commission gives recommendations for the implementation of protective vaccinations,” says the law. And it names clear criteria according to which the current 18 members must orient their recommendations. The “reduction of severe or fatal disease courses” is at the top of the list. A little further below, the law formulates what this means: “Protection of people at a particularly high risk of a serious or fatal course of the disease.”
For years nobody was bothered by the slow but thorough work of the STIKO. Then came Corona. Since then, politicians have repeatedly insisted that the committee should be quicker in its decisions. Current example: In just a few days, the Mainz-based manufacturer Biontech wants to deliver its corona vaccine for children between the ages of five and eleven, which was approved at the end of November. Should parents get their children vaccinated now? A recommendation from the Commission was a long time coming. On Monday, Bavaria’s Minister of Health, Klaus Holetschek (CSU), warned that the recommendation was urgently needed “to give the parents and doctors security in the state”.
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