Nordrhein-Westfalen
Landtag, Plenarprotokoll 17/138, pp. 20-22.
Frau President.
Ladies and gentlemen. Colleagues.
“Let the pandemic run. Treat it like
a flu.”
This sentence,
ladies and gentlemen, is not some demonstration motto of German Querdenker; no,
it is Bild’s approving headline on Denmark’s
Corona policy.
After England’s
Freedom Day and Sweden’s anti-lockdown, we now learn that almost all of Denmark’s
Corona preventive measures have been abolished. Even masks in the streets are
scarcely to be seen.
The Welt writes:
The Danes very early submitted an opening plan. Since June, people need wear no masks; from September, the clubs shall be open and the schools again operate normally.
It is Sören
Riis Paludan, professor of virology at the University of Aarhus, who spoke precisely
this sentence in the left-liberal newspaper The
Politician: “Let the pandemic run, treat it like a flu.”
For the
German discourse, that clearly sounds provocative. Yet what he means is not to
equate the flu with Corona, but to manage it with the art and ways of viral
illnesses.
Further: More
than 90% of the endangered population, said to be groups at risk, have been
vaccinated. It is therefore no catastrophe if school children are infected. We
should no longer, Herr Kutschaty, send home entire classes because one, single
student tested positive. That is not proportionate.
For once, the
German numbers: The German Society for Pediatric Infectious Diseases since
March 2020 includes in a register children and youths who have been treated for
reasons of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Up to March 2, 2021, that was approximately
1,400 children and youth. 71 young patients need be treated in intensive-care
stations. Eight have died, of whom three on account of other illnesses were
already found to be in a palliative situation. For a total of four children was
Covid-19 identified as a cause of death. Four children are much too many – here
we all clearly agree – ; nevertheless, four children out of 14 million children
in Germany, that is 0.00002%. For whom cannot correctly conceive of 0.00002%,
0.00002% of 100,000 euros is two cents, ladies and gentlemen.
Those facts
on the state of the Danish discussion of Corona, which we here in this country
to some extent at times read of prominently in Bild and Welt, yet which
otherwise fall under the table as “accidental”, are the scientific basis for
the decision of – now get a good grip, dear colleagues – the social democratic government
of Denmark.
Dear
colleagues of the SPD, what then now actually are your Danish party friends for
you? Are they Nazis, are they Covidiots, or are they all aluminum hats? Social
democratic Denmark now follows social democratic Sweden. And the only party in
Germany which thinks along this line is not those of you in the SPD; it is certainly
not Herren Laschet and Söder; it is also not the FDP which has diligently voted
for every lockdown; it is the AfD.
The world is plainly
still a bit more complex than your “black-white panic mode.”
Yet then we
are not quite so alone. “This Corona policy is wrong” headlines Germany’s
largest newspaper.
And further:
“The Federal government’s Corona policy has nothing more to do with reality! For a year and a half, the government tells us its preventive measures are working and openings are dangerous. Both are false. The government asserts that Sweden’s Corona course has failed.
The fact is: For a year, the Swedish mortality curve runs parallel to the German, with the distinct difference that Germany was in lockdown for six months, yet Sweden not a single day.
Yet nearly everything with which the government frightens us was in reality completely disproved; that they simply continue to do so harms Germany.”
Ladies and
gentlemen, it does not get more clear.
With the
exception of particular persons like Wolfgang Kubicki who however does not have
the FDP behind him, or Sahra Wagenknecht who the Linke forthwith wish to
exclude, Hubert Aiwanger who the Frei Wähler want to remove, or Boris Palmer
who has an expulsion proceeding of the Greens running against him, these are
insights which unfortunately will plainly be admitted by only one party, by us
of the AfD.
Herr Laschet,
the morning’s press will be submitted to you. I really ask myself: Don’t you
actually read it? Does it not impress you? Or have you simply not the guts to
commit yourself to measure, mean and reason? You now come here with a
five-point plan which wants to prolong the epidemic situation.
“The prolongation of the epidemic situation is however no question of free, political judgment, but is tied to the criteria of the Infection Protection Act.”
Public law professor
Josef Lindner says this, and he is therewith naturally right.
And Professor
Kingreen quite clearly says:
The prolongation on a chance suspicion with regards the Bundestag election and the following time is an inappropriate consideration which may play no role. That would be highly actionable. Restrictions of basic rights cannot be made dependent upon the policy’s ability to act.
Ladies and
gentlemen, for over 16 months it is thus. In the beginning, we had given you an
advance of trust. It was understandable that it was not immediately known how
to deal with Corona. But then you first put forward an unconstitutional Corona
law, with whoa and gee [hü und hott]
assented to masks with which those of the CDU have made a mint, and then you
slither like an electric eel through the country, first on account of an
inter-party election fight – due to the intra-CDU elections – and then in your
impotence vis-à-vis Söder, Merkel and Spahn.
You toss the
dice – this you must concede – with utterly unscientific incidence numbers, and
establish in the morning verbose, nonsensical national lockdowns which you then
in the afternoon again take back. That was really a memorable day here in the parliament,
ladies and gentlemen.
It is however
actually inexcusable: Instead of protecting the at-risk groups, as we had again
and again demanded, which in 16 months made up 80,000 of the 90,000 deaths, you
send all into one lockdown after the next. Yet now instead of finally getting
out of this total madness, you remain, Herr Laschet, only in nuances better
than Söder and Spahn on the playing field of demonstrably false premises and
guidelines which want to exclude from the buying of bread those non-vaccinated
people who yet have tested negative.
…
Ladies and
gentlemen, since the Federal government replied in writing to inquiries that they
do not know which preventive measures had helped or not, I want in concluding
to again peek at Denmark. Lately, – so writes the Welt – the vaccination campaign is not the decisive difference
between the two countries. Denmark is here not decisively far ahead of the
Federal Republic. It is the fundamental political decision of how at an agreed
point to prioritize the vaccination campaign. When is the point reached at
which the opening is foremost, and no longer the restriction?
CDU, SPD,
Greens and FDP do not muster this political will. They have stubbornly attached
themselves to a completely characteristic lockdown logic. With them, logic is
in long-term lockdown.
Instead of
ever further inciting the people one against the other, children against the
old, non-vaccinated against vaccinated, Corona winners against Corona losers,
it would be better to finally put more money into the research of medicines
with which to have serious developments treated.
There
nevertheless also always belongs to life a known measure of risk. We need again
to learn not to look at risk exclusively in a panic. And we need finally to
undertake an overall view: How harmful are the side-effects of the Corona
preventive measures in regards other illnesses – for education, for the
economy? The hitherto one-sidedness of viewpoint is a regression for our way of
living.
But our way
of living is no longer negotiable. Our basic rights are no longer negotiable.
And, Herr Laschet, our freedom is no longer negotiable.
I thank you.
[trans: tem]
