We currently (Feb 2021) have the choice which group of people to prioritize for vaccinations agains the Corona Virus. In the present analysis, we use recent demographic data and information about the severity of infections to compare three strategies of vaccination w.r.t. the exected number of severe cases (deaths or hospitalization):

1. Random vaccinatinations,
2. Vaccinating older people first,
3. Vaccinating spreader hubs first, i.e. people with many contacts

We demonstrate that for any reasonable set of paramters that describe the current spreading in Germany, the third strategy performs almost 10x better than the second, which is only slightly better than the first. These results show that the announced strategy by the German government -vaccinating mainly the most at-risk population- is less effective than it could be. Instead of prioritizing the elderly population, a priorization of the strongest spreaders, such as social care, medical employees, teachers and other people with high numbers of expositions and contacts must be priorized to have exponential rather than linear use of the limited vaccination doses available.

Comment (2023): Fortunately, the originally communicated strategy referenced in this document was updated tacitly; a shift in priorities ultimately favored critical roles rather than age alone.

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