Sunday, December 5th, 2021
Disagreement about compulsory vaccination
Wissing advises against Christmas trips
The designated Federal Minister of Transport, Wissing, warns the population to spend Christmas in small groups instead of traveling across the country. Union faction leader Brinkhaus even calls for further tightening of the measures in hotspots. He doesn’t even want to stop at schools.
In view of the fourth wave of corona, the designated Federal Minister of Transport, Volker Wissing, advises staying at home for Christmas and not traveling. “Winter 2021 will be more dramatic than winter 2020. We shouldn’t take Corona lightly,” he told “Bild am Sonntag”. “Contact restrictions also in the private sector are important in order to fight the pandemic. In the current situation, it seems more sensible to spend Christmas in a small group at home and not to plan major trips through the country.”
Union faction leader Ralph Brinkhaus called for a further tightening of the corona measures. “In areas with high incidences, you have to think about temporary contact restrictions for vaccinated people,” said the CDU politician to the newspapers of the Funke media group. In schools, of course, it must be the aim of the school ministers to keep them open for as long as possible with mask requirements, tests and ventilation. “But there must be no taboos for regions with very high incidences.” He feared that the latest federal and state resolutions will not be enough to break the wave.
The number of infections is at a high level of well over 400 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants per week – a year ago at this time it was 135. Hundreds of Covid sufferers die every day. On Thursday, the federal and state governments decided on contact restrictions for unvaccinated people and stipulated for leisure events and shops that only vaccinated and convalescent people (2G) are allowed access.
Mandatory vaccination? Criticism from the Ethics Council
A general compulsory vaccination is also being sought, although the federal government had long ruled out such vaccination. The prospective new Chancellor Olaf Scholz has announced that the Bundestag will vote on it without being forced into a parliamentary group. According to government spokesman Steffen Seibert, this could be the case at the beginning of next year. It could then take effect in February of March. The German Ethics Council should be questioned beforehand. Its member Frauke Rostalski turned against a general vaccination requirement. Germany has not yet exhausted all other instruments, explained the law professor in the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger”. Such a measure cannot be justified regardless of the individual risk of severe Covid 19 disease. It looks different with the over 60-year-olds, who make up the majority of Covid patients in intensive care units. “Then it becomes obvious that precisely these people have to be protected in order to avoid overloading the health system.”
The CDU chairman Norbert Röttgen sees it differently. “In weighing up the not inconsiderable severity of the interference and weighing up the damage for society, it is clearly justifiable under constitutional law,” he told the editorial network in Germany. Opponents of vaccinations and boycotters of protective measures are, in his opinion, a greater challenge for the cohesion of society than state measures such as compulsory vaccination. “The division by still leaving it to a minority to trigger a huge wave of infections that affects and restricts the entire population is much more serious.”
Almost two thirds of people in Germany also support a general compulsory corona vaccination. In a survey by the Yougov opinion research institute on behalf of the German Press Agency, 63 percent were in favor of obliging all people in Germany to immunize against the dangerous virus. Only 30 percent are against it, 7 percent did not provide any information. The mood has turned since the start of the corona vaccinations in this country almost a year ago.