Open Letter to STIKO: Updated Covid Vaccines Now

Open letter ·

Open letter to STIKO, the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA) and Federal Health Minister Linnemann: make updated COVID-19 vaccines available now. For vaccine recommendations based on science, and paid for by health insurance.

Dear Sir or Madam, dear Minister Linnemann,

we were horrified to learn of the new STIKO vaccine recommendation, under which the yearly COVID-19 booster will only be a standard recommendation for people aged 75 and over.

Berlin Buyers Club advocates for people with Long Covid and ME/CFS, for reliable care and for effective protection from infection. Many of the people we stand up for have lived for years with serious, sometimes permanent, consequences of a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The new recommendation focuses on protection from severe acute illness, while preventing the long-term consequences of COVID-19, among them Long Covid, ME/CFS, cardiovascular and neurovascular events, organ damage and autoimmune disease, plays almost no part in how the vaccination strategy is judged in public. Given the still high number of people affected, we consider this short-sighted, if not negligent.

At the same time, vaccines updated for the circulating XFG variant are available now. They were approved in the EU on 28 July 2026. On 3 September 2026 the G-BA decided to add Comirnaty XFG, Spikevax XFG and Nuvaxovid XFG to its vaccination guideline. That decision has not yet come into force.

We cannot understand why people who want to protect themselves now with a vaccine matched to the current variant still have to wait for it, or pay for it themselves, while older stocks are used up. For people with Long Covid and ME/CFS and their families in particular, an infection can have serious consequences. The duty to be economical must not become an excuse to withhold medically necessary protection just because older vaccines are still in stock. For flu, the RKI explicitly recommends “the current antigen combination recommended by the WHO”. Why should a different standard apply to COVID-19?

As far as we know, there has never been a federal health minister or health authority that insisted on first using up a vaccine against an outdated flu variant when one matched to the variant circulating now was already available. Why should this be acceptable for COVID-19?

All the more so as variant monitoring in Berlin currently shows XFG circulating widely, and the SARS-CoV-2 viral load in wastewater is rising again.

We therefore demand:

  1. Vaccine recommendations must follow the current science and the real burden of disease, not only COVID-19 hospitalisations and deaths. The COVID-19 recommendation must be extended to younger age groups again and take the long-term consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infections properly into account.
  2. Updated vaccines must be available straight away. Access to current vaccines must not depend on whether older stocks are left, which vaccine is the cheapest to order, or whether people can pay for it themselves.
  3. People with Long Covid and ME/CFS, their families and their carers in particular must get immediate access to the COVID-19 vaccines updated for XFG, paid for by statutory health insurance.

Vaccines are one of the great achievements of modern medicine. They must not become a privilege for those who can afford the most current and scientifically sound version privately.

We call for a vaccination policy guided by science and by protecting the whole population, not by using up what’s left in storage.

Yours faithfully,

Berlin Buyers Club