BERLIN – Slow off the blocks in the race to immunize its citizens against COVID-19, Germany faces an unfamiliar problem: a glut of vaccines and not enough arms to inject them into.
Like other countries in the European Union, its national vaccine campaign lags far behind that of Israel, Britain and the United States.
Now there are growing calls in this country of 83 million to ditch the rulebook, or at least rewrite it a bit. Germans watched with morbid fascination in January as Britain trained an army of volunteers to deliver coronavirus shots, then marveled at the fact that the U.K. — hit far worse by the pandemic than Germany — managed to vaccinate more than half a million people on some days.