The Easter blip

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Entering a two-class society?

Health Minister Jens Spahn had an Easter surprise in store for the lucky few who have been vaccinated. The immunized will “regain rights” like going shopping and getting a haircut by providing proof that they’ve had their jab. 

The proposal has been welcomed by politicians like SPD health spokesman Karl Lauterbach who’ve never had moral qualms about the creation of a Zweiklassengesellschaft. At the same time it has been described as a mandatory vaccination programme through the back door by the AfD.

On the face of it Mr Spahn’s announcement seems like a U-turn: he said back in December that he was against offering privileges to the vaccinated. But things are different now: sacred rights like having your hair cut can be offered fairly to the vaccinated, as long as the government sticks to two conditions. 

Firstly, the privileges should go hand-in-hand with similar benefits for people who can show a negative antigen test. Mr Spahn indicated that this was exactly the principle that would be deployed when he said that “in the future people who’ve been vaccinated will be treated like those with a negative test result.”

Secondly, these privileges must be tied to a sunset clause - i.e. they can’t continue indefinitely beyond the point where the national state of emergency is lifted. To our knowledge, Mr Spahn has not specified a time-limit.

Meanwhile the contentious debate over the societal duty to receive a vaccine has been given a face by Die Welt newspaper, which identified one woman who died after receiving the AstraZeneca jab. 

Until this point, the only thing that we knew about the nine women whose deaths have been linked to the troubled vaccine is that they were all under 60. One possible victim is Dana Ottmann, a 32-year-old psychiatrist who died due to severe bleeding in the brain in March. Before receiving the jab, she suffered from acute migraines but was otherwise healthy. While the cause of her death has not been confirmed, a doctor told her mother that the vaccine was the likely culprit.

As more names are put to the numbers, anger among a sizeable section of the public is likely to grow. The comments under the Die Welt article about “the greatest human experiment of all time” are just the tip of the iceberg. Over the Easter weekend, anti-vaxxers and lockdown sceptics gathered in their thousands once again - this time in the streets of Stuttgart.

The German press predictably hissed and wailed about the lack of face masks at the demonstration. But the narrative of good pro-vaxxers against evil anti-vaxxers is too simplistic.

Ms Ottmann’s mother described how she was left speechless as she watched Mr Lauterbach claim on TV that a few vaccine-related deaths were the price Germany has to pay for overcoming the virus.

J.L.

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The gloves are off

The race to become the conservative candidate for this autumn’s federal election is entering the final stretch. New CDU leader Armin Laschet has said that he and CSU leader Markus Söder will decide between Easter and Whitsun which of the two of them will be the centre-right candidate.

Mr Söder has going for him that the public thinks Mr Laschet would make a terrible Chancellor. Mr Laschet has going for him that hardly anyone in the CDU wants to be bossed around for the next four years by a bolshie Bavarian. 

While Mr Söder has never publicly declared his intention to run for Chancellor, the German commentariat are in agreement that he has been plotting his path to the top for close to a year. 

After Angela Merkel expressly criticized the CDU boss last week for not enforcing a state-wide lockdown in North Rhine-Westphalia, Mr Söder let it be known that he is on team Merkel and wants the federal government to crack the whip on foot-dragging states.

The Bavarian then arranged a press conference for his vaccine summit to precisely coincide with Mr Laschet’s CDU manifesto launch. At the press conference, Mr Söder said it was “strange that the CDU leader is getting into arguments with the CDU Chancellor six months before the election.”

There is blatant hypocrisy in Mr Söder’s thinly disguised attacks. Bavaria has a 7-day incidence of 133, way above the ‘emergency brake’ limit of 100, but he still hasn’t enforced a state-wide lockdown. 

But no one in the CDU is likely to nail their colours to Mr Söder’s mast because they see him as a man of great moral integrity. The handful of backbench CDU politicians who have said that they want him to lead them into the next election seem more concerned with keeping their jobs come October. 

It’s far less certain whether Mr Söder enjoys any significant support among the CDU top brass.

That’s why some people in the know have interpreted Mr Söder’s recent pugilism as a sign of weakness: he knows that he needs big name support in the CDU - and with seven weeks at the most to go, time is running out.

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The Easter blip

The number of new recorded coronavirus infections has fallen off sharply in recent days. At least partly to blame is the fact that local health agencies unplug their fax machines during the public holidays. The backlog in cases should be dealt with in the coming week.

It will be interesting to see whether something similar to Christmas happens, when the spread of the virus defied the warnings of epidemiologists and began a two-month decline, or whether the steep upward trend predicted by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) will continue.

Hope is to be found in the last two daily reports published by the RKI, both of which estimated a rate of reproduction below the value of one. If the R-value stays below one for a longer period of time the number of active cases will shrink.

Ever late to the game, Mr Laschet called on Sunday for a “bridging lockdown” until enough people have been vaccinated. When the British variant started to gain the upper hand in late February he outed himself as a lockdown sceptic, saying “treating citizens like little children - that's not something that’s sustainable in the long run.” His latest change of heart can only mean one thing - the worst of the third wave must already be over.

Meanwhile, any representative of the medical profession who departs from the pro-lockdown line is guaranteed to get a good hazing from colleagues.

Gerald Gaß, head of the National Hospital Association, assured Bild Zeitung that the fact that doctors and nurses have all now been vaccinated means that “a complete overstretch of the healthcare system won’t happen in the coming weeks, and there certainly won’t be triage.”

The Association of Intensive Care Doctors decried his comments as “a mockery of all personnel on intensive care wards” while a member of the staff council at Berlin’s Charite hospital accused him of “talking shit” and said “come on colleagues, let’s go home.”

J.L.