Vaccination willingness against COVID-19 is generally perceived as low. Moreover, there islarge heterogeneity across and within countries. As a whole, Germany has average vaccinationrates compared to other industrialized countries. However, vaccination rates in the 16different German federal states differ by more than 20 percentage points. We describe variationin vaccination rates on the level of the 400 German counties using data on all vaccinationscarried out until December 2022. Around 52-72% of that variation can be explained byregional differences in demographic characteristics, housing, education and political partypreferences. We find indications that the remaining part may be due to differences in softfactors such as risk aversion, trust in the German government, trust in science, and beliefsin conspiracy theories regarding the origins of the Corona virus. We conclude that improvingthe trust in science and the fight against conspiracy theories may possibly be effective toolsto improve vaccination rates and effectively fight pandemics.