BERLIN, October 4./TASS/. Diether Dehm, member of the Bundestag from the Left Party, intends to file a lawsuit with the Federal Administrative Court of Germany, seeking the recognition of his vaccination with the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine as grounds for obtaining a national COVID-19 vaccine certificate.
The politician explained that the reason for his move was the refusal of the Kassel (federal state of Hesse) administrative court, because the people vaccinated with Sputnik V were not eligible for the German vaccination certificate. "This decision grossly violates the principle of equality," Dehm told the DPA news agency.
In May, the politician got a Sputnik V jab in Moscow, and in July he was vaccinated with the second dose of the vaccine in San Marino. Then, upon his return to Germany, he applied for a German vaccination certificate to the local health authorities in the city of Fulda (federal land of Hesse).
However, the agency rejected his request on the grounds that Russia’s Sputnik V was not on the list of coronavirus medicines approved by the Paul Ehrlich Institute. In turn, Dehm noted that residents of EU countries vaccinated with the Russian vaccine where it is allowed, can freely go to German restaurants. "It is absurd, that for example a citizen of Hungary, fully vaccinated with Sputnik V, can have lunch at a German restaurant that works under the 2G rule (admittance for only those vaccinated against or recovered from coronavirus - TASS), while Germans, me in this case - cannot," he noted.
He also regretted that Sputnik V was not authorized in Germany. "Many people have died, for whom the vaccine would have been of use," Dehm said. However, though Germany was sometimes short of the vaccines, Sputnik V was not approved for use, he stressed.
Germany has repeatedly expressed readiness in principle to use vaccines developed outside the European Union, in particular Sputnik V. Both Chancellor Angela Merkel and Health Minister Jens Spahn named the key condition - the vaccine must be certified by the EMA.
Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine has been approved in many countries with a total population of over three billion people. The vaccine’s effectiveness is 97.6% according to data on infections among Russians who received both doses of the vaccine between December 5, 2020, and March 31, 2021. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced the start of a rolling review of Sputnik V on March 4. Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko, for his part, reported that all obstacles preventing the certification of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine against coronavirus by the World Health Organization (WHO) had been removed.