Monday 15th November 2021
Appeal to the undecided
Steinmeier: “Get vaccinated!”
Federal President Steinmeier encourages German citizens to get vaccinated against the corona virus. It is above all unvaccinated people who “fight for their lives” in intensive care units. He also calls for the right conclusions to be drawn from the pandemic in order to be prepared for future crises.
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has urgently called on all undecided citizens to have a corona vaccination. “If you are still hesitant to get vaccinated, I want to ask you directly today: What still has to happen in order to convince you?” Steinmeier said according to the speech at a discussion at Bellevue Palace. In cooperation with the Bertelsmann Stiftung, he invited to the “Forum Bellevue on the future of democracy” for the twelfth time this Monday. “I ask you again: get vaccinated!”
“Those who do not get vaccinated are putting their own health at risk and they are putting us all at risk,” added the Federal President. Above all, it was unvaccinated people who were infected with the coronavirus this fall and who were “fighting for their lives” in the intensive care units.
The state must learn from the pandemic
Steinmeier also looked to future crises. Almost two years after the start of the pandemic, it is time to draw the first conclusions and make the state crisis-proof and future-proof. “Our crisis memory is a short-term memory; we suppress and forget bad experiences quickly,” said the Federal President.
The state institutions must be able to react “quickly and well” in the event of a crisis. “In the age of global warming, our state has to be prepared for further environmental disasters, it has to be prepared for further pandemics and, paradoxically, it also has to be prepared for crises, the nature and extent of which we do not yet know,” said Steinmeier.
The pandemic put the democratic constitutional and welfare state to a “tough and novel endurance test” and ruthlessly revealed weaknesses “that existed before Corona,” said Steinmeier. In particular, he criticized deficits in digitization. “The digital backlog in authorities, schools and the health system – this backlog is shameful, and efforts to remedy these shortcomings are progressing far too slowly,” said Steinmeier.