Compulsory vaccination talk with Anne Will: “Nobody is shown to be vaccinated”

Compulsory vaccination talk with Anne Will
“Nobody is shown to be vaccinated”

Needed by David

Everything on compulsory vaccination in the ARD panel discussion with Anne Will. But without compulsion. That will no longer save the winter – because politicians do not learn from their own mistakes. Karl Lauterbach cannot promise that there will be no further lockdown for everyone.

On Thursday the federal and state governments decided on a de facto lockdown for unvaccinated people and expressed the goal of giving 30 million first and booster vaccinations by the end of the year. But in order to break the fourth wave, the guests of the ARD talk show Anne Will agree on Sunday evening, only a mandatory vaccination helps in the end. But Markus Söder and Co. are sweeping the failure of politics under the carpet.

“We will not make it without a vaccination”, says Karl Lauterbach with certainty. The SPD health expert and potentially the next federal health minister was clearly against this step in the spring. Yes, he explains talk show host Anne Will: At that time, the Delta variant would not have existed. And now omicron would be added. The data from Israel and Great Britain show that the new variant from South Africa is “catching on faster than we had hoped”. Soon it should also be the predominant variant in this country. “That is cause for concern,” says Lauterbach, “because it also expands in people who have been vaccinated.”

The health expert believes that the likelihood that Omikron will prevail in people with a booster vaccination is very low. But it is very dangerous for people who are only twice vaccinated. “We are now vaccinating against time,” is Lauterbach’s conclusion. And in the long term there is no other way out of the pandemic than compulsory vaccination, “otherwise we will always get into the same cycle,” says Lauterbach, who, when asked, “does not want to speak as health minister” before the SPD has made a decision.

The FDP is now also for compulsory vaccination

Markus Söder supports this plan. “A general compulsory vaccination is the only way to break out of this back and forth,” says the CSU Prime Minister of Bavaria, who notes that he would “welcome” Lauterbach’s appointment as health minister. The FDP, represented in the ARD panel discussion by domestic politician Konstantin Kuhle, is now in favor of compulsory vaccination. One shouldn’t discuss compulsory vaccination as an end in itself, said Kuhle, but it would increase the vaccination rate.

As early as this week, Lauterbach and Kuhle confirm to talk show host Will, that the traffic light coalition will arrest the compulsory vaccination for staff in hospitals, care facilities and outpatient care services. The general compulsory vaccination should then follow in the spring. The SPD health expert reiterates that compulsory vaccination does not mean compulsory vaccination: “Nobody is shown to be vaccinated.” Instead of picking up people from the door to be vaccinated, unvaccinated people would be punished with fines if they were required to be vaccinated.

However, for the medical representative in the panel discussion, none of this is going quickly enough. “We are now in full hospitals and intensive care units, our colleagues can no longer hear it,” criticizes Carola Holzner, who at the beginning of the program describes the current dramatic search by emergency physicians for free intensive care beds for patients of all kinds, the policy. “How much longer do we want to debate? We don’t have any more time!”

Compulsory vaccination helps – but not now

The specialist in anesthesia, intensive care and emergency medicine Holzner is addressing an acute problem that almost disappears in the panel discussion. The compulsory vaccination, which is currently widely discussed, will no longer help in the current fourth corona wave in winter. Even if Lauterbach argues to Will that a mandatory vaccination decided for the spring would take effect earlier, he also knows: “The mandatory vaccination is not the solution for full intensive care units.”

But what then? Are the measures adopted by the federal and state governments sufficient and can contact restrictions or 3G in local public transport be controlled at all? Or is there a need for a temporary lockdown for everyone? “I can’t promise that we don’t need a lockdown, even if I don’t think it’ll come,” Lauterbach replied to a question from talk show host Will. Nobody can comment on this “at this point in time” because those who have recovered and those who have only been vaccinated twice are at risk from Omikron.

Intensive care physician Holzner criticizes the fact that politics ruled out compulsory vaccinations from the start. Because of this, some citizens would not have considered vaccination to be that important. After all, nobody got upset about the measles vaccination of school children or doctors. Holzner also believes that a hard lockdown, although she is against it, is “easier to control” than the contact restrictions that have now been adopted.

Even the Bavarian Prime Minister Söder admits when it comes to controls: “Contact restrictions are the hardest thing, we don’t make house calls.” But the closure of bars, clubs and discos has resulted in a considerable reduction in contact in his state and steps are being taken. The CSU man himself ignores the fact that Bavaria is one of the worst in terms of combating corona, when Anne Wills asked.

No sign of self-criticism

Söder does not admit his own mistakes, although Bavaria is taking the pandemic lightly in the summer and abolishing the mask requirement in schools and shutting down vaccination centers – despite warnings from the Bavarian Ethics Council. Already in June he predicted a difficult situation in winter, similar to many virologists, and yet the Bavarian Prime Minister is still “surprised” by the continued low vaccination rate in his country and the many vaccination breakthroughs in the ARD panel discussion. He even acknowledges Will’s “traditional vaccination skepticism” in some regions in Bavaria.

What applies to Söder in Bavaria also applies to the outgoing federal government. The fact that Anne Will is again debating lockdowns and a harsh winter is not only to blame for those who refused to vaccinate. As in the previous year, the coalition dawdled unprepared through the summer into autumn and winter, ignored all warnings from science, closed vaccination centers, in the meantime abolished free tests and did not systematically prepare the booster vaccinations. For that you have to hold the rulers accountable.

Even when the vaccination quota stagnated in late summer, the then unpopular vaccination requirement could have been openly debated and resolved. Now, however, Anne Will’s panel discussion in December talks about mandatory vaccination measures that will probably only really take effect in spring, looks apprehensively at the overburdened hospitals and full intensive care units – and Markus Söder reports on attempts to “reactivate nursing staff”.

Addressing the real problems in the care sector (higher salaries with an overarching collective agreement for everyone, more professionalization and opportunities for advancement, more attractive training) so that overburdened nurses do not have to quit their jobs or reduce their working hours (Germany lost around 4,000 intensive care beds as a result this year), Söder and the outgoing federal government will not come to that in a pandemic of 21 months. Not even on a strategy that would have kept the incidences low from the beginning with forward-looking measures, because every person in the intensive care unit is one too many and not too full intensive care units are a problem. As intensive care physician Michael Hallek recently said: “Intensive care unit is torture. A patient is left with the struggle for oxygen or death.”

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