Focus on Laws or People? Wolfgang Kubicki's fight against lockdowns

Maybrit Illner speaks in the ZDF talk on the subject of “Pandemic without politics – first carefree, now haphazard?”

Frankfurt – The egg that Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) laid and now the traffic light parties are continuing to hatch: How can the corona virus be fought? On the subject of “Pandemic without politics – first carefree, now haphazard?”, The guests discuss in the ZDF talk at Maybrit Illner, while Germany is waiting for a new government between the exploding number of corona cases.

The communication about the situation is (again) chaotic: While Jens Spahn announced just a few weeks earlier that the epidemic situation would end in November, it is not only the Bavarian Prime Minister who finds this statement completely absurd. Karl Lauterbach (SPD) is shown in a video sequence, how he desperately puts his hands (also: again) in front of his face.

ZDF talk Maybrit Illner: Kubicki rejects criticism

On November 25, the epidemic emergency on a national scale was to end automatically. It is quite strange, taunts Wolfgang Kubicki, Vice President of the German Bundestag (FDP), that appeals are made to the government that is not even in office, even though so many failures have been made by the Union. Under no circumstances does his party want the existing circumstances to continue.

The currently almost 50,000 Germany-wide infections per day only arose due to the influence of the departing government and its poor management. The traffic light would like to radically shorten this catalog of measures and no longer leave it up to the individual federal states how they would assess what is happening: Local authorities should then still be able to close schools if hotspots arise there, but this is no longer desired is, be a blanket lockdown.

Maybrit Illner (ZDF): What do 2G and 3G actually mean?

Ending the emergency when four out of five adults have been vaccinated, this idea also comes from Jens Spahn. The day of freedom hoped for through vaccination is still a long way off, admits Michael Kretschmer, Prime Minister of Saxony (CDU). While the fear of a fourth wave that could overshadow everything that has existed so far, it would be grossly negligent to remove existing measures from the instrument box.

Prof. Dr. Anika Klafki, junior professor at the University of Jena, wrote her doctorate on pandemic in 2016. She considers it difficult to shorten the measures, because many people are still too unclear about the existing measures: What do 2G and 3G actually mean? Where can all of this be used: also in supermarkets, pharmacies and medical practices? And what applies to children aged 12 to 17? In addition, these ordinances have to be updated every four weeks and people do not even have the chance to receive all of this in a timely manner.

Maybrit Illner (ZDF): Kretschmer versus Kubicki

The chief correspondent of Focus-Online, Ulrich Reitz, wonders where Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz are right now. Even an executive government is obliged to do its job. The FDP wanted a clear economic order. The protection of the population was almost secondary: Was it a coincidence that the FDP and the AfD in particular called for Freedom Day? The FDP is not a team for careful caution.

Wolfgang Kubicki counters here that Schleswig-Holstein is a good role model, which Bavaria and Saxony could use as an example: If more vaccinations had been carried out in these two countries, then the fourth wave problem might not have existed at all. It is intellectually pathetic that 2G should now be introduced in Schleswig-Holstein just so that the incidences in Saxony should decrease.

Michael Kretschmer prophesies that arrogance comes before the fall. After all, Schleswig-Holstein is also smaller than Saxony and Bavaria. Seeing the situation come to a head just to indulge in mundane blame is not a solution. Sensible cooperation would be necessary here, instead of just further unsettling the population.

Maybrit Illner (ZDF): Biochemist expresses criticism of politics

The biochemist and pharmaceutical manager Helga Rübsamen-Schaeff cannot understand why the political situation was again underestimated. Science had said from the start that if enough people weren’t vaccinated in summer, there would be problems in autumn and winter. They could learn a lot from the experiences in Israel: The people there started vaccinating early and quickly reached over 80 percent.

But then the delta variant came. And in no time the hospitals would have been full again. Now the machinery was started up again with the booster vaccinations. If someone there has only been vaccinated twice and the second vaccination was more than six months ago, this person is treated like an unvaccinated person who has to be tested freely. And this test has to be paid for yourself. Mask requirement applies very strictly indoors and the penalties for disregarding the regulations are very high. In addition, there are now two promising drugs from the USA against the virus on the market: Why can’t Germany react faster here instead of dealing with changes in the law for weeks?

Maybrit Illner (ZDF): And what about the nurses?

Prof. Dr. Anika Klafki finds it strange that the whole time only the question of guilt is shifted back and forth between the individual parties. That is not relevant: people die again every day and a sensible legal basis must be created. In return, he now has the opportunity to actively improve something, she speaks directly to the grumbling Wolfgang Kubicki.

Some like to talk (even in between), others work within the systems, such as Annemarie Fajardo, the vice-president of the German Nursing Council and qualified geriatric nurse, who again speaks of a systematic overload of the health system. But the nursing emergency has not only been apparent since this year. Should a vaccination obligation for nurses be introduced in addition to the already existing burden? For her professional ethics, she finds it a moral obligation to get vaccinated, but in the end the free citizens decided for it or against it.

Keeping your distance at work and being careful when working with and dealing with a vulnerable group is a matter of course. But she is against a one-dimensional and isolated view of only one specific professional group: If so, then the compulsory vaccination should affect all medical staff. The fact is that people who have been vaccinated can also become infected – solutions must be found quickly before the situation escalates, close to people and people-friendly. Because the virus does not stop until laws have been changed. (Tina Waldeck)