Clinic overload report
Lauterbach attacks the “Bild” newspaper head-on
02/18/2022, 8:39 p.m
In January, “Bild” boss Boie apologized for the Corona reporting in his paper. But there is apparently no improvement: in an interview, Minister of Health Lauterbach dissects manipulative tactics when it comes to the utilization of intensive care units. This time Springer rejects all allegations.
Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach sharply attacked “Bild” for the latest reporting in the Corona crisis. “Bild-Zeitung and Springer-Verlag are campaigning against me and spreading untruths,” the SPD politician told the “taz”. “The aim is to downplay the pandemic and discredit the protective measures.” Lauterbach referred to the print edition of the newspaper on Thursday. The front page said: “Health Minister Lauterbach – intensive care units were NEVER overloaded”.
The related article on page 2 of the newspaper says: “In a letter (available to BILD) to Bundestag Vice President Wolfgang Kubicki (69, FDP), he admits: The intensive care units have never been overloaded. Specifically, it says there from Lauterbach’s State Secretary Edgar Franke: ‘A Germany-wide, regional simultaneous overload of all available ITS capacities, which would have meant a systemic undersupply of COVID-19 cases requiring intensive care (…), did not occur.'”
The SPD politician told the “taz”: “The fact that the health system was never overloaded is, for example, a manipulative misrepresentation. It is correct: more than 70 percent of the intensive care units were partially or completely overloaded at the peak of the pandemic. There was only No Germany-wide overload of the health system, so not in all places at the same time. But patients had to be transferred from one federal state to another. We had to fly patients to Italy. Operations had to be postponed.” The situation was dramatic. “The Bild newspaper knows that and makes it out of it: There was never a threat. That’s a manipulative false report.”
“Image” spokesman defends representation
A “Bild” spokesman said on request: “We would like the statement by Federal Minister Karl Lauterbach in the ‘taz’ that the claim ‘that there was never an overload of the health system’ was ‘a manipulative misrepresentation’ not rate it because BILD did not claim this in the text in question and the associated headline.” The spokesman referred to the passage from the ministry letter cited in the article. In the headline on the front page, this statement is abbreviated, as is usual in the media. “In the article itself, readers will find out in detail that there has been an overload regionally and in individual clinics.”
The spokesman continued: “However, this aspect is much less relevant here than the core statement, because Mr. Lauterbach himself has been threatening for many weeks that there is a risk of a systemic collapse of the intensive care units, in the justification of the measures restricting freedom, it was usually not possible about individual clinics or regional problems.”
It was only at the end of January that Bild editor-in-chief Johannes Boie publicly apologized for his newspaper’s reporting on the corona virus. It was about an attack on scientists with the headline “The lockdown makers” from early December.