FRANKFURT: Germany must revamp its COVID-19 vaccination strategy to tackle the Omicron variant and to ensure it can develop a new vaccine rapidly if it faces a more deadly coronavirus variant in the future, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said.

Lauterbach, who was appointed health minister last month, made his comments in an advanced release of an interview to be published in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday.

“If we get a variant that is as contagious as Omicron, but significantly more deadly, we should be able to develop and produce a new vaccine in a very short time,” Lauterbach said.

The government is planning to put a permanent system in place to purchase and provide shots rapidly at any given time because there could be serious new outbreaks, he said.

“We must not fall into the naive assumption that it (the pandemic) will be over soon. It’s not over,” he said.

Germany closed large vaccination centres in several states last summer when demand for COVID-19 shots briefly declined to a trickle before picking up again.