Germany worries more about vaccination skeptics than about the corona pandemic. Seducers and liars have it easy – the body bags are carried by others.
You have to consider the first four years of a pandemic as a basic course in order to get through with intact nerves: We are repeating the basics again. Stunned faces again at the dynamism with which the fourth wave catches up with us. Quacking again like from brats in the back seat after several hours of driving, when is it finally over. Again defiance and anger – and above all: again seducers without any scruples.
Hardly anyone has embodied this lust for seduction as much as Sahra Wagenknecht in the show “Anne Will”. Vaccination is not a question of solidarity, claims the left-wing politician, “even those who are vaccinated can infect others”. A mad manipulation. If Wagenknecht were just too stupid, the sentence could be sighed away. If I were patient like the SPD health specialist Karl Lauterbach sitting next to her, I could stay calm. Both is not the case.
Of course, Wagenknecht knows that the likelihood of infection cannot be described like the question of whether the light is on in the kitchen. We have had this kind of thing before: Yes, the mask does not provide complete protection either. Yes, vaccinated people can also get sick. Yes, a corona infection can be harmless. And yes, vaccinated people can infect others too – it’s just much less likely. Nobody said otherwise, but nothing can be countered as nicely as a made-up assertion.
Seduction of the risk-incompetent
The triumphant howl of vaccination skeptics at each breakthrough ignores the fact that more people are vaccinated and therefore the number of breakthroughs is inevitably increasing. This is the simplest math. The law of large numbers prevails. The smallest changes in probability have a huge impact on the high-revving racing engine of a pandemic.
How poorly people are cognitively prepared for such comparatively simple interrelationships in our modern world has been worked out by many authors over the past few decades. Cognitive psychologists like Steven Pinker (“Rationality”) or in the German-speaking area Gerd Gigerenzer (“Risk”) have highlighted the frightening risk incompetence of untrained citizens in their books. Twenty years ago, economists like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky challenged human rationality in common economic models. Even jurisprudence is now questioning the objectivity of judicial decisions.
But it is also correct: recognizing cognitive distortions does not stop their effects. The idea that large parts of the population could someday deal with exponential developments is a phantasm. It would help if the risk-incompetent weren’t also seduced.
Fooling is fun!
Which brings us back to Wagenknecht. You and your kind know these connections, you are not risk-incompetent – which only allows one conclusion: you really like to deceive other people. Wagenknecht is no different from the inhuman characters who unleash lies on the Internet every day to spread chaos and death. Why do you actually do that?
Seducing other people en masse is a special form of biography gilding. It makes sense to be king one day. Tell me where it’s going, find approval, whether as a politician or a swarming economist on Twitter with many loyal followers. It is simply fun to lead – even if it is by the nose.
This pleasure is not only enjoyed by politicians on the far left and on the far right and liars on the Internet. Some media also discover flirting with pandemic skepticism for themselves, skilfully omitting certain things, adding a provocation here and there. “Get rid of the mask, for the sake of the environment!” sounds the “Bild” newspaper, of course with a, haha, “wink”. You bathe in the applause of the skeptics and count the new subscribers.
Nobody is ensnared like the vaccine skeptics
A reversal – unthinkable. At the head of a movement, one thing is most important: staying there. Reality doesn’t stand a chance. Conspiracy idiots could safely announce in telegram groups that at the end of September all those vaccinated would really drop dead. They dumped some other crap in early October – the vaccine skeptics are an amazingly unskeptical herd.
Everything else would have to mean admitting one’s own wrong path as such. “I was too stupid to deal with mathematical correlations and empirical ambivalences of a pandemic and that’s why I got on the neck of some charlatans, I beg your pardon and would like to ask Biontec left an appointment for the second and third vaccination!” No, that doesn’t fit with your own biography gilding, namely the story that you saw through the lies and deceit of “those up there” from the start.
Nobody disturbs the seducers in their performance. No section of the population is currently so powdered and ensnared as the vaccine skeptics: pedagogy instead of spades, just don’t irritate! Although many of them have said goodbye to community and rationality with a raised middle finger, out of defiance or intellectual inability, they hold the dull remaining population hostage.
At home in the angry republic
We talk about vaccination skeptics as we do about an irritable kidnapper who sits at the kitchen table in an undershirt, fiddles with a revolver and threatens to freak out at the slightest contradiction. We live in an angry republic in which a minority of defiant heads does not care about the deaths and loss of freedom of others. Because the state – even in the face of a federal election – could not even bring about a compulsory vaccination for nurses, others are now carrying the body bags out of the homes.
Not all vaccine skeptics are angry citizens or esotericists. Many are simply scared, sluggish, or uninformed. Some just don’t understand that their decision is not an individual one – and thanks to prominent seducers like Wagenknecht they feel confirmed. No campaign will change that.
Coercion or pressure, on the other hand, are not to be expected: The executive federal government is again stunned by Karona or whatever it is called; it sends bizarre, albeit legally correct signals such as the “end of the epidemic situation”. She yells to the children in the back seat, “We’ll be there in a minute!”, Although the navigation system can’t even calculate the travel time.
Fighting for freedom through the duty spades
What about the new government? The FDP also owes its approaching participation in government to a consistent commitment to freedom in the pandemic. There is nothing wrong with that, but parts of this promise will collapse if you come up with measures such as mandatory vaccination. Rolling out 2G and imposing room arrest for the unvaccinated is fortunately a matter of the state – who dares? Who hesitates? It’s like always: chaotic.
Freedom has to be fought for, sometimes with two or three mandatory pricks in the upper arm. That requires pragmatism and determination. It is therefore no wonder that the State of Israel is doing so well in dealing with the pandemic. Shortly after becoming a state, this country had to defend itself against its neighbors again and again, which shapes. Radical and controversial measures, whether it is data processing in a pandemic, kilometers of concrete walls against snipers or more than two years of military service have ensured survival in Israel. Now the country is withdrawing the “green passport” from its citizens if their last vaccination was more than six months ago. Motto: Who hesitates, loses.
We will learn more about pragmatism and realism. We will turn away from vaccination skeptics pedagogy and turn to legal measures. Maybe not in the Covid-19 undergraduate course, probably not even in the fifth or sixth wave. But for the next pandemic, we’ll be ready. Most certainly.