Person of the week: Lauterbach: Mr. Lauterbach, declare the Corona crisis over!

Person of the week: Lauterbach
Mr. Lauterbach, declare the Corona crisis over!

By Wolfram Weimer
09/20/2022, 8:47 am

US President Biden was on the Corona team for two and a half years. But now he freely declares the pandemic to be over. He is expressing what many countries have already done and what millions of people in Germany are secretly thinking. The German health minister should follow Biden’s example.

“The pandemic is over!” With these four words, Joe Biden is currently making world headlines. In the CBS television show “60 Minutes”, the American President summed up the corona catastrophe as history: “No one wears a mask anymore” and “everyone seems to be in pretty good shape”.

At the same time as Biden’s declaration, the last major lockdown in China – in the economic center of Chengdu – was lifted. In addition, the particularly strict New Zealand has now lifted all corona measures. In most countries around the world from France to India, from Brazil to Great Britain, this has already happened. The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Ghebreyesus, is also optimistic. The current number of weekly corona deaths reported worldwide is the lowest since the pandemic broke out in March 2020. His conclusion: “We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic. We are not there yet, but the end is in sight .”

Biden’s proclamation caused the share prices of the corona vaccine manufacturers to collapse on the world stock exchanges. The titles of Moderna and the Mainz-based vaccine manufacturer Biontech each fell by almost ten percent. Biontech stock has lost nearly half its value since the start of the year as analysts now expect global demand for vaccines to fall rapidly.

Contrary to statements by Biden and the WHO, the Bundestag and Bundesrat in Germany have decided to tighten the Infection Protection Act. The new version will come into effect on October 1st. Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach admits in the RTL night journal: “In fact, Germany has the strictest rules at the moment.” “But these are exactly the rules that we need to get this under control in good time”.

With maskless crowds in the beer tent

In truth, however, popular resistance to the strict German rules is growing. From mandatory masks on trains and planes to quarantine rules to facility-related vaccination requirements, acceptance is dwindling. Annoyance is caused above all when German politicians demand rules of conduct from the population but do not comply with them themselves, for example on government flights without masks or when top politicians from the Greens, who have just called for masks to be worn in public, at the Munich Oktoberfest with maskless crowds in the celebrate beer tent.

Lauterbach assesses the corona situation completely differently than Joe Biden. Through a ministry spokesman, he explained: “Like the expert council, the federal government is still expecting a moderate wave in the fall. It can still be dangerous, especially for unvaccinated and vulnerable groups.” That is why the ministry is calling on the population to “check their vaccination status” and, with the Infection Protection Act, has “created an instrument” to comply with “nationwide precautionary measures” and to enable countries to take further measures.

Lauterbach remains true to his role as Germany’s restlessly admonishing senior physician. But the criticism of his “alarmist crisis communication” has become massive in recent weeks. The CDU is now asking the Minister of Health to finally get out of the tunnel of fear.

New Zealand has dropped the measures

The Vice President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Kubicki, also sharply attacks Lauterbach: “We are on a ghost trip across Europe. New Zealand has discarded the pandemic measures. Throughout Europe there is no longer a mask requirement and no longer a quarantine requirement, it is going into an endemic situation. Anyone who feels sick should stay at home. Only we in Germany are going our own way,” complains the FDP man.

Of course, Lauterbach is right in an accounting sense that the pandemic is not over as long as people are getting infected and dying. His constant over-caution and admonition is defended by his followers as a legitimate part of his role as “Doctor Caution”.

But it is time that Lauterbach accepted its responsibility on a larger scale. Because just as there is a political duty to issue a warning, there is also an all-clear when millions of vaccinations have been carried out and the hospital admissions and lethality of the disease are no longer exceptional.

Far-sighted health policy must once again focus more closely on other problem areas. You have to weigh risks and not dramatize them. She needs to find a new normal. In his interview, Joe Biden pointed out that responsible politics must weigh the collateral damage of a corona protection policy more carefully.

“It was a difficult time”

Biden said he believes the pandemic has had a “profound” impact on Americans’ psyches. “It changed everything… people’s attitudes towards themselves, towards their families, towards the state of the nation, towards the state of their communities,” he said. “It was a very difficult time. Very difficult.”

Peter Doshi, senior editor at the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, warns that one should not spread the “aura of emergency” unnecessarily long. He writes: “The ubiquity of dashboards has helped convey the sense that the pandemic is over when all of the dashboard’s indicators reach either zero (infections, cases, deaths) or 100 (percentage of vaccinated).

However, the respiratory pandemics of the past century show that the end is not definite and that the end of a pandemic is better understood with the resumption of social life than with the achievement of specific epidemiological goals.” In that respect, Joe Biden doesn’t have the total, arguably but rightly declared the social end of the pandemic Karl Lauterbach should follow him.