On Thursday, the two draft laws on a general obligation to vaccinate will be read for the first time, as well as Kubicki’s applications against an obligation to vaccinate and the Union’s motion for a vaccination reserve law. What comes out at the end is completely open. The doctor and Greens MP Paula Piechotta supports – unlike Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach – a vaccination requirement only from the age of 50 and a requirement for advice for younger unvaccinated people. In an interview with ntv.de, Piechotta explains why compulsory vaccination is still needed and why the Union urgently needs to change its position on the traffic light’s compulsory vaccination proposals.
ntv.de: Most of the corona protection measures will fall at the beginning of next week. At the same time, the number of infections is increasing rapidly again. Hundreds of people continue to die every day as a result of this disease. In your opinion, where does Germany stand in the struggle with the pandemic?
Paula Piechotta: We know that the corona numbers will very likely drop in the summer and that the much-needed relaxation of the health care system will take place. At the same time, however, we are experiencing a large number of refugees from Ukraine, where the vaccination rate is extremely low. Our healthcare system has continuously lost employees over the past two years, but may soon have to take care of up to two million additional people. Many of these people also have a need for health therapy independently of Corona. In this situation – a war in Europe and an imminent economic crisis – we must ensure that we do not also risk avoidable crises if the health system is overloaded again by Corona in the autumn.
They are therefore promoting compulsory vaccination, for which two legislative proposals will be discussed in the Bundestag on Thursday. One of the drafts, which you worked out with the FDP MP Professor Ullmann, among others, provides for compulsory advice for all unvaccinated people and compulsory vaccination for all citizens over the age of 50. How fast can you get the effect to prevent overload?
We know from surveys that the motives why people do not get vaccinated are still very different. There are die-hard deniers, but there are also younger women of childbearing age who are very afraid of vaccination because of incorrect information. We can largely dispel these fears in private discussions in a confidential context. Since the obligation to provide advice takes effect immediately after our draft has been approved, we would have several months over the summer to reach precisely these people and increase the general vaccination rate.
How exactly does the consultation come about? Anyone who is currently trying to get an appointment with their family doctor knows that they are actually working beyond their capacity.
Our application was developed by many doctors and it was one of our main concerns that the family doctor’s practices are not overloaded. But we still have the vaccination centers, which are really not busy right now – unfortunately. The employees there have the greatest expertise in advising on vaccines. You can’t tell anyone where to get advice, and of course there will be people who go to their family doctor because they have a relationship of trust with their family doctor. But we also have many people in Germany who don’t even have a family doctor. Vaccination centers are a low-threshold, easily accessible contact point for them.
According to your model, how do the unvaccinated come to counseling?
The health insurance company asks its insured persons to provide proof of vaccination or recovery. You can then click on it in the Corona app or have it sent to the health insurance company by the pharmacy. If you cannot do this, you must make an appointment for a consultation and prove that you have attended it.
What feedback have you received from the regions – especially from your state of Saxony – where the skepticism is particularly great and where such a consultation appointment can possibly also become unreasonable for the advisors if vaccination skeptics bring their frustration with them?
In Saxony, massive security personnel are already deployed for these structures because this frustration has already been unloaded there in the past few months. This is another reason why the vaccination centers with their protective structures are suitable. However, I do not assume that the 5 percent of convinced vaccination refusers will attend these consultation appointments on the first day. If you don’t respond to your health insurance company’s request, you’ll get a reminder at some point.
According to your suggestion, what would be the worst possible consequences for a persistent refuser?
A large majority in the Bundestag is against vaccination refusers being arrested or something similar. If there will be penalties, then fines. This week we are going into the parliamentary procedure in search of a compromise that the majority of the Bundestag can support. Detailed regulations such as the amount of fines will be part of this compromise.
Doesn’t this mean a substantial additional burden for the health authorities and, ultimately, for the district courts, which have to enforce compulsory vaccination?
That’s why I said during the debate on compulsory vaccination in the Bundestag that we have to pay very close attention to it and that it makes a massive difference in terms of feasibility whether I still have 50 percent unvaccinated in a district or only 5 percent. In counties that will be particularly badly affected, we have to support the local health department and the local district court with administrative assistance structures.
The basic assumption of both vaccination proposals is that sooner or later a new corona variant could prevail. A variant that is more aggressive than the two Omicron variants that are currently infesting the population in a more or less controlled manner. But this scenario is not mandatory, right?
That’s why our draft law provides that at the end of the summer, based on an assessment by the Robert Koch Institute, we should look: Which variants are likely to be relevant? How effective are the existing drugs against the relevant variants, especially Paxlovid? How high is the vaccination rate and how effective are the vaccinations against the relevant variants? In this synopsis, an assessment should be made as to whether an overload of the healthcare system is becoming a topic again and whether vaccinations should be compulsory from the age of 50. We went into the Corona autumn twice poorly prepared. That should be the least that the German parliaments have learned after two years of Corona: that you cannot only start taking precautions when the crisis is already here.
Does the compromise you mentioned aim at a third way, behind which the advocates of compulsory vaccination from the age of 18 and the supporters of your proposal can gather?
You can strive for that, but even that might not have a majority. Like it or not, we should talk to the Union and the Union should be part of the decision-making process. It’s not just a question of majorities. Compulsory vaccination also requires the highest possible level of acceptance among the population. Almost everyone in the Bundestag and the entire Bundesrat supported the institution-related compulsory vaccination. But when it came to implementation, we still had our hands full trying to maintain social acceptance. It will be similar with the general obligation to vaccinate: If it should actually take effect in autumn, no matter what age group, we urgently need the broadest possible majority in the Bundestag and Bundesrat.
What signals are you getting from the ranks of the Union? With her idea of a vaccination reserve law, she presented her own concept.
Like the Kubicki paper, the union proposal is just an application. For me, this is an indication that the Union did not want to present a complete counter-proposal. We know that many Union MPs are inclined towards an age-related vaccination requirement, and the Union Prime Ministers have also made positive comments about the vaccination requirement. But the Union had noticed that Chancellor Olaf Scholz had associated vaccination requirements from the age of 18 with his person, although there was no majority in the traffic light coalition for it. She saw the opportunity to discredit and weaken the federal government a bit by not supporting the drafts from the government factions. But the situation has changed due to the war in Ukraine. The Union should now take responsibility so that we don’t have to expect even more from society in the autumn on top of the current crisis.
As you say yourself, people fleeing Ukraine are often unvaccinated. Wouldn’t that be an argument for a general obligation to vaccinate from the age of 18?
There will be a lot of people who have already built up immune protection, but on the way to infection. Many people from Ukraine will voluntarily be vaccinated upon arrival, this is now being organized. The issue is more that our healthcare system was under extreme pressure even before the war, also because of the many other sick children this winter. Now children, women and older people come to us from Ukraine. If we want to provide them with additional care in the fall, including the Ukrainians with war trauma, and if we want to continue to treat heart attack and stroke patients reliably, then we should do everything we can to prevent avoidable causes of an overload in the healthcare system, such as a high number of corona diseases .
Sebastian Huld interviewed Paula Piechotta