Germany looks to buy up spare Covid vaccines amid row over shortfall

New health minister says reserves are running low but denies blaming previous government

• Coronavirus - latest updates

Germany's new health minister, Karl Lauterbach, has warned that the country has insufficient vaccine doses to keep the population's Covid defences up over the winter, especially with the predicted rise of the Omicron variant.

Lauterbach said Germany was very low on stocks and was rationing its distribution of the German-developed BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine to vaccine centres and doctors' practices across the country, to 1.2m doses next week, 800,000 the following week between Christmas and the new year, and another 1.2m the week after.