There should be classrooms in Germany in which teaching staff can get vaccinated students up and clap for them. Two authors recently described this in the World. And even if her anecdote hadn’t happened that way, the headline of the text would still be valid: “The division in society has arrived in schools”.
Vaccinated and unvaccinated – for some there seems to be no sharper social demarcation line. If you want to know the extent of bullying currently affecting unvaccinated schoolgirls, you just have to listen to the schools. And this in the case of the age group who suffered the most from the measures to contain the pandemic and who must be allowed to question the usefulness of a vaccination: in view of the fact that the fear of a serious illness in children is largely irrational – by the way According to the so far only very fragmentary findings on the omicron mutation also in South Africa – the possibility of vaccinating health or socially vulnerable adolescents is beyond question and the Standing Vaccination Commission (STIKO) has very good reasons to write: “The STIKO expressly speaks against it from the fact that vaccination is made a prerequisite for social participation in children and adolescents. “
Vaccination in adults has long been a prerequisite for social participation. And there is no longer much need to tell about the resulting social division – everyone encounters it in everyday life. My favorite example of the associated grotesque is that of a theater collective, which I personally experienced: its caretaker was not allowed to watch a long-awaited festival because it is not vaccinated and a negative corona test was not enough for some vaccinated people. An unvaccinated duo of actors, on the other hand, who made their vaccination status the subject of their own performance, did.
Exclusion, ostracism, fines, the temporary cost of corona tests: after two years of pandemic, can we only think in terms of punishment and prohibition?
No moralism, please
No, there are alternatives. For example, reward instead of punishment. But clapping, as we know from the nursing staff in German hospitals (and it may not be any different in the classrooms), is not enough. What the left-wing parliamentary group has long requested in the Bundestag is needed: money. A vaccination bonus.
The Left Bundestag member Christian Görke calls for 300 euros for each initial vaccination and a further 200 euros for boosting in an adequate time interval. Whereby the new Federal Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach (SPD), would first have to implement this adequate time interval realpolitically. At the moment, after waiting for hours, people over 60 are actually being sent home “unboosted” because their second vaccination was a few days less than six months ago. But the whole thing cannot fail with the vaccine – according to Lauterbach, there are enough of them. That leaves the logistics. But a major general in the Bundeswehr is now taking care of them.
A pleasant detail of the Görke proposal: The vaccination premium should also be paid retrospectively! Anyone who had already been vaccinated would get it. Good this way. We don’t need a moral argument about who got vaccinated and when. Mainly vaccinated in order to avoid severe courses and to relieve the further underpaid and thinned out nursing staff in the hospitals.
Inflation? Rather not
Görke, previously Finance Minister in Brandenburg, puts the cost of his proposal at 37.5 billion euros. Shouldn’t this attempt be worth it to us at a time when the German state is sometimes being paid to take out loans? Perhaps the most important thing to consider is the effects of such a payout on inflation. The head of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Marcel Fratzscher, contradicts such fears and calls for an even higher premium than Görke: “We know from lotteries in the US and elsewhere that financial incentives work to get people to vaccinate“says the economist.
He should probably sell that to some of Görke’s comrades: because in the ranks of the Left Party, the bonus idea is highly controversial. Instead of rates of 300 and 200 euros, only 100 and 50 euros made it into the parliamentary motion of the parliamentary group. Prominent party representatives – including chairwoman Susanne Hennig-Wellsow – prefer to use six cleverly written pages when pleading for a general vaccination requirement. The marginalized in this republic are unlikely to have access to read them.
The criticism of the premium proposal from outside the left is expected, mostly morally grounded and overall quite weak: “I am extremely reluctant to pay someone to get vaccinated,” quoted t-online.de the SPD health expert Sabine Dittmar.
Leave Hartz IV out of the game
The widespread assumption that the majority of those who are not vaccinated today refuse for ideological reasons may be responsible for skepticism. But as powerful and violent as the images of torch-lit marches in front of a minister’s house are: according to the available findings, the extent of persistent vaccination opposition is not decisive, is of central, but still publicly under-highlighted importance the social dimension of the corona crisis. There are often reasons for the status “unvaccinated”, which consist of poverty, inequality and a distance from institutions that is unimaginable for some vaccinated bourgeoisie.
Would the customer be able to overcome this distance with a 500 euro bonus? Quite conceivable, 500 euros is a lot of money for many people, especially in times of economic and social shocks caused by lockdowns. The whole thing should not fail due to logistical difficulties with the payment. And woe to you, someone comes up with the idea of counting the amount against Hartz IV and other social benefits!
Quite independently of the social dimension, however: Wouldn’t it be just about the time and would be difficult to combine this annoying, argumentative, divisive topic of vaccination with something positive? 500 euros reward, who would not like to take it and be happy about it?
In Slovakia they are already there, at least partially: instead of a mandatory vaccination, parliament has decided on a vaccination premium of 300 euros for people over the age of 60 – there was even unity between the government and the opposition.
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