So now Olaf Scholz, the top pragmatist, comes and takes care of it: compulsory vaccination. First the Bundestag is supposed to pass it for the medical staff, then in February for everyone. No red lines. Do what needs to be done. I’m sure that many find it good – including and especially all the hesitant, lazy, defiant: Grummel, well, then I’ll just do it. Finally someone takes the scepter in hand. It is now governed. The compulsory vaccination means the failure of any government.
Don’t get me wrong: I see it. It is possible that compulsory vaccination can no longer be avoided in this situation. Another lockdown cannot be done to the children of violent parents, café owners, restaurant employees and short-time workers. Feel free to scold me as ultra-liberal, but I still think that the state shouldn’t force anyone to press a serum into their bodies. After all, we are not subjects. But citizens. So what am I proposing?
I propose that the state learn to act really sovereign. His job is not to make the decision for his two children, who are bickering about whether one has to put a syringe in or the other has to stay at home. The Federal Chancellor is not Papa Scholz. The Federal Chancellor is the head of government. He coordinates and is responsible for the task of organizing the needs of the population in such a way that the siblings don’t even start the fight. The magic word is called services of general interest.
There-to-be-provision: the state task of providing all goods and services that are necessary for a human existence. A precautionary state should have done a lot. He should have sent vaccination teams to the nursing homes as early as July and invited all citizens to the third vaccination. He should have released the patents for the vaccines so that the population in the Global South can be vaccinated – out of post-colonial responsibility for the world community and to reduce the risk of dangerous mutations. He should have subsidized hospitals in order to free them from the cost pressures of “competition” in the health system. In this way he might have won the trust that up to 30 percent of the population now lacks him.
Our governments have not done any of that. They refused to provide for our existence. Why? Because it would have cost money to really take precautionary measures. Investments should have been made for this. The governments of the past twenty years have not invested but saved. And the traffic light? She plans – tentatively – investments. Nursing is to be supported, a personnel key introduced, hospital planning and health services reformed. It all sounds very vague, and it is. The question of how sovereign a Chancellor Scholz is will be measured by what his government is doing here. Quite pragmatic.
Admittedly, all this criticism of past failures is of little use for the current pandemic situation. But there are still alternatives to compulsory vaccination. An obligation to give vaccination advice, for example, with the possibility of vaccination afterwards. In this way, the state authority leaves its hands off that part of its territory in which it has no business: the bodies of its citizens. But if he forces them instead of directing them, the question arises: How much do people radicalize if they are forced into their bodies with a serum that they consider toxic?
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