Minister fights for compulsory vaccination
Lauterbach quotes Hegel
01/26/2022, 8:55 p.m
Health Minister Lauterbach fights vehemently in the debate about compulsory vaccination and even becomes philosophical in the end. For his plea in the Bundestag he uses a quote from Hegel.
Karl Lauterbach on fire – as one of the last speakers in the Bundestag debate, the Federal Minister of Health passionately advocates compulsory vaccination. Pushing the problem away cannot be expected of “the children, the nurses, the doctors, the people who are at risk, who we cannot vaccinate”. It will then come back in full force, says the SPD politician. “We have to take action!”
Nevertheless, in the orientation debate in parliament about a possible corona vaccination obligation, the minister emphasizes that his house will work on all applications and support them, “including applications that I personally do not like”. Several groups, in which MPs from different parties have come together, are currently working on the development of proposals for compulsory vaccination – from a clear rejection of such a law to the compromise of only making vaccination compulsory for people over 50 to general vaccination for all of legal age.
The previous debate was a special one. Freed from the discipline of voting with the group’s position, parliamentarians sometimes explain very personally which motion they want to support and for what reason. Lauterbach notes that he “benefited a lot” from this exchange of views. His thanks seem sincere. Most of the speakers focused on balancing freedom rights: the right of vaccine skeptics to physical integrity is weighed against the right of everyone to a future without restrictions on freedom to protect against infection.
Lauterbach finally resorts to Hegel to underpin his own point of view: “Freedom is the insight into necessity” is a quote attributed to the philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, with which he once again puts his demand “We must act” in other words. “We will not come back to the life we loved and cherished without turning the spade now,” said the minister.
With compulsory vaccination “we are well prepared in the fall”
Lauterbach outlines the course calculated in models from the Robert Koch Institute over the next few weeks, during which omicron would also pose a threat to the unvaccinated. One has to reckon with an occupancy of 5,000 seriously ill people in German intensive care units.
As one of the few of the 40 speakers in the debate, the doctor goes directly into individual prefaces. The Union MP Günter Krings, for example, has called for an “advance decision” to be taken, but to wait and see how the pandemic develops before implementing it. “It’s not medically feasible,” says Lauterbach. It takes “at least five to six months” to implement compulsory vaccination. If it were decided now and then implemented, “then we’ll be ready for the fall”.
Internationally, he doesn’t know of any scientist who says “the omicron variant would be the last variant we have to reckon with.” One must expect variants, says the minister, that contain both the escape mutation of the omicron variant and the fitness mutation of the delta variant. “These so-called recombined variants, we’re afraid of these variants. And if we want to avoid them for sure in the fall, then the only way is to have vaccinations that we all use to protect each other.” Germany must start now.