According to information reported by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung on November 22, 2022, the compulsory vaccination against Covid-19 for medical personnel should be abandoned from the beginning of 2023 in Germany following its expiry on December 31, 2022.
Reminders on the vaccination obligation for medical personnel in Germany
On December 10, 2021, the German Chamber of Deputies voted for the obligation of vaccination against Covid-19 for the staff of medico-social establishments. The bill was approved by a large majority of the deputies of the Bundestag, with 571 votes in favor and 80 against.
The law provided that the employees concerned in the health sector had until March 15, 2022, the date of the entry into force of the law, to update themselves on their vaccination, at the risk of no longer being able to exercise their profession in the opposite case.
However, the law has never really been applied throughout the territory. Controls on medical personnel were put in place only very slowly and were more or less strict depending on the region. In Saxony, for example, there would be a third of caregivers who are still not vaccinated.
Some Länder, most of the former East Germany, asked that this obligation not be extended beyond the end of 2022.
For a very long time, the Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, very favorable to vaccination, did not want to consider lifting the obligation for medical personnel. However, today he is reconsidering his decision.
Towards the lifting of the vaccination obligation for health personnel
According to information reported by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Karl Lauterbach has for some time been distancing himself from the obligation to vaccinate medical personnel. He would consider that the regulations which oblige all staff in hospitals and healthcare establishments to be vaccinated against Sars-CoV-2″no longer deserves to be prosecuted” et “no longer medically justifiable“.
The daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that this sudden reversal of the Minister of Health is not due to the opposition of certain regions or certain elected members of the Liberal Democratic Party (FDP), but to new health information. Indeed, it is now recognized that vaccination does not significantly protect against the transmission of new variants in circulation. In addition, the number of cases remains lower than the forecasts of the Minister of Health, which discredits the speeches that the Minister has been able to make in the past. Indeed, the one who had constantly warned against the imminence of summer and autumn waves which never took place, finds himself today deprived of arguments to pursue his policy. And, if he alerted on a possible winter wave, of which we still do not know if it will take place, at the Federal Ministry of Health, the concern is now focused on the spread of the new sub-variant BQ.1.1 (sub-lineage of the Omicron variant), while it is recognized that the antivirals used so far to treat Covid-19 would have no effect on this new strain.
Also according to the sources of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the ministry does not expect people to go for mass vaccinations this winter even if new generation vaccines “adapted” to the Omicron variant (BA.1) and its sub-lineages (BA.4 and BA.5) were ordered in very large quantities. For all these reasons, funding for vaccination centers could be reduced, whereas in the future, injections should no longer be administered in these centres, but only in doctors’ surgeries.
The Minister of Health, on the other hand, wishes to maintain certain preventive measures such as the obligation to wear a mask on buses and trains or even the compulsory maintenance of infected people in isolation. However, the decision whether or not to maintain compulsory quarantine is a competence of the Länder and not of the State. In Bavaria, Hesse, Baden-Württemberg or Schleswig-Holstein, this isolation requirement has already been abolished or is about to be. From now on, infected people, if they are encouraged not to go to their place of work, do not have the obligation to stay at home.
This latest decision is a strong signal sent to the State, whose orders are less and less supported by the political authorities of certain Länder who wish to put individual responsibility back at the center of the fight against the disease, as it has always been until that the coronavirus epidemic and the measures adopted to combat it are calling into question fundamental freedoms.