Permanent disaster and enormous damage – necessary consequences

Public statement on the coronavirus Policy

(23 August 2021) SARS-COV-2 is a new type of virus that should be taken seriously and can lead to severe illness and death in people with weakened immune systems and previous illnesses depending on working, social and living conditions.

However, the pandemic measures of the German federal government, some of which are scientifically controversial and some of which cannot be justified, cause enormous damage: to the health of the population, especially to children and young people, to the health system itself, to precarious dependent employees and sole self-employed people, to single parents, to isolated old people, to the economy.

This declaration calls for the initiation of a public discussion in which the measures taken so far by the German federal government and their consequences – also with a view to possible further waves or any new pandemics – are objectively reviewed and conclusions drawn for the future. The undersigned want to promote this open and public discussion, notwithstanding some differences on individual points, and provide a possible basis for it. We are open to corrections. It is time to end the panic mode. Together, let us assess the consequences of the coronavirus crisis and explore necessary changes.

I. Public health – systematic failures and lack of preparation

The definition of the World Health Organisation (WHO) “health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being” is a binding human right for all, also for Germany, through the UN Social Covenant of 1966. The organisation of the public and private health care system must be based on it. This also applies to the social insurances, especially the health insurance funds, the jobs in the health system itself as well as those in the public administrations and in private companies.

In Germany the federal and state governments have put the health system – hospitals, nursing homes, services, insurance companies – at the mercy of private investors. The result is the aggressive reduction and underpayment of health workers and the outsourcing of medical services to low-wage companies, even in flagship institutions like Berlin’s Charité hospital.

These changes in the health care system, in addition to misjudgements and wrong decisions during the pandemic, have had serious negative consequences.

Examples of undesirable developments

• Pandemic prevention: government negligently failed to take precautions
  In 2013, the WHO called for national preparations for the next pandemics because of an expected new Sars-Corona virus. The Bundestag decided on concrete precautionary measures with the pandemic risk analysis (Bundestagsdrucksache 17/12051 of 3 January 2013): masks, protective suits, disinfectants, treatment capacities. Since the federal government failed to implement precautionary measures, even the simplest and cheapest means of protection have been lacking since the beginning of the pandemic, even for medical staff.

• Flat-rate payment per case promotes intensive care
  In no other country were so many infected persons treated with intensive care medicine as in Germany. The flat rate per case provides hospitals with higher revenues through mechanical ventilation. Hospitals that developed alternative treatments to mechanical ventilation in intensive care, e.g. those in Moers or Havelhöhe, were able to significantly reduce the mortality rate and shorten the length of stay. Health Minister Jens Spahn and North Rhine-Westphalia's Minister President Armin Laschet were there, praised the results, but did nothing to promote these alternative treatments. The federal government has refused funding for further trials.

• Shortage of intensive care beds – for real?
  Germany has a high number of intensive care beds compared to other European countries. Nevertheless, the government justifies a stricter lockdown with avoiding triage in intensive care units. However, the shortage of beds was caused on the one hand, at least initially, by the rapid admission of Covid-19 patients to artificial respiration; on the other hand, by a lack of staff who were completely overworked and therefore increasingly quitting. Also, additionally equipped intensive care beds could not be used in some cases due to a lack of staff.

• Hospitals closed before and even during pandemic
  Since 1998, a quarter of all hospital beds have been cut. Instead of expanding treatment facilities, more than 20 hospitals have been closed since the beginning of the pandemic. When Health Minister Spahn had his State Secretary claim in the Bundestag in January 2021: “The Federal Government has no knowledge of hospital closures in the pandemic year 2020”, this was either deliberately untruthful or the Ministry has no idea what is happening in its own department.

• Health damage due to omitted treatments in the coronavirus crisis
  According to the Institute for the Hospital Remuneration System, 2.4 million fewer treatments and operations were billed in the first pandemic year than in the year before. Among others, cancer and heart patients, kidney wash, tumour and amputation patients were affected. At the same time, doctors had to make the necessary capacities available for the pandemic fight. The same applies to postponed and omitted preventive check-ups. Quite a few sick people avoided visiting doctors' surgeries out of panic about the risk of infection. A record of the deaths and long-term consequences caused by this has not yet been established, but is urgently needed.

• Lack of hygiene in German Hospitals
  According to the statistics of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), 400,000 - 600,000 patients are infected with multi-resistant germs in hospitals every year [nosocomial infections, add. edit.], and up to 20,000 people die as a result. The virologists and doctors called in by the government, such as Professor Drosten/Charité, Professor Wieler/president RKI and Professor Cichutek/president Paul Ehrlich Institute (Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedicines), did not initiate measures to reduce these high avoidable death rates either before or during the pandemic.

II. Government measures violate medical rules and promote uncertainty and fear through lack of transparency

It is a fact that more than 90 percent of those who test positive for the virus overcome the infection without any medical help. Only a minority of those infected show typical coronavirus disease symptoms, some of them truly threatening. Instead of making this transparent and working towards a scientifically balanced presentation of the Covid disease, the government and the leading media pursue the strategy of enforcing the adopted Covid measures with the help of scaremongering and alarmism.

In doing so, the federal government and federal authorities are violating proven medical rules and standards. Their anti-Covid measures are based on criteria that in many cases have no sufficient scientific basis in epidemiological, virological and medical facts and findings. Thereby, it adopted the view of a few epidemiologists, which dominated over that of many other medical specialists, lawyers and psychologists.

Important data were negligently or deliberately not collected – especially regularly repeated mass tests on fixed representatively selected population samples.

Examples of rule violations and panic generation

• PCR test: unsuitable and dramatising
  The RKI declares every positive PCR test to be a Covid-19 case, i.e. evidence of a disease. In November 2020, a group of 22 internationally renowned experts presented an expert opinion on the PCR test in the journal Eurosurveillance. According to this, the PCR test is completely unsuitable as a diagnostic tool because it is not able to measure the respective viral load, nor can it determine whether the mRNA snippet found is capable of replication or not. Only if it is capable of replication, however, is there a risk of infection and serious illness. Since it also responds to earlier infections and low concentrations of viral genetic material, a disproportionate number of false-positive results are also displayed.
  Nevertheless, the PCR test is still used. In this way, incidence data are manipulated.

• Instead of determining the exact cause of death: scaremongering
  According to current medical guidelines, when “determining the cause of death”, a “four-link causal chain” must be given in order to determine the hierarchy of causes of death. From this, vital conclusions are drawn for the treatment of sick patients. But right at the beginning of the pandemic, the RKI warned against carrying out forensic medical examinations on dead people who had tested Covid-positive. It practices the equation of those who died “of or with the coronavirus”. Although epidemiologically unjustifiable, RKI President Wieler stipulated: “In our country, someone is considered a Covid death if they have been found to be infected with Covid.”
  How is it that a state apparatus does not even want to distinguish between those who died from the virus or with it? It would be easy to do an autopsy on a representative group of – let's say – a thousand “Covid dead” to check which of them really died from the coronavirus and not from a previous illness? Why do such representative examinations not take place?

• The highest risk group neglected: old people's and nursing homes
  As in all western countries, the highest mortality rate was in the predominantly privatised old people's and nursing homes. “The median age of those who died with or from Sars-Cov-2 is 84 years, which is more than the average life expectancy,” said Professor Detlev Krüger, Director of the Institute of Virology at the Charité hospital until 2016. Yet this highest risk group was neglected for a long time, tested far too late and instead isolated in their rooms and wards, contact with next of kin banned for weeks. Despite widespread nursing shortages, no additional treatment capacities were created. Many deaths here could have been avoided by earlier safety measures.

• Sudden realisation in cases of death after vaccination: pre-existing conditions are to blame
  There has been no transparent and complete documentation of all vaccinations so far, in order to record side and subsequent effects. When it became known that some old people died after vaccination, the Paul Ehrlich Institute abruptly and without empirical justification declared: many had died of their “multiple pre-existing diseases”. The people had therefore died after the vaccination, but not because of it. Here, all of a sudden, underlying health conditions were put forward, while in the case of deaths “from and with Covid” underlying health conditions are neither taken into consideration nor identified. Why are double standards applied here?

• As the WHO points out, the risk of infection is particularly high for people who are disadvantaged in terms of social, housing and work conditions. Nevertheless, the measures initially did not take this into account at all and still do not take it into account to any significant extent. German politicians and virologists were surprised when people in precarious employment in the low-wage sector or Hartz IV recipients living in close quarters tested positive particularly frequently and thousands of employees suddenly became infected in the abattoirs of Tönnies, Vion, Danisch Crown and others. The coronavirus crisis thus makes clear the negative consequences of dismantling state supervision of occupational diseases and occupational health protection under labour ministers Scholz and von der Leyen.

• Children's welfare is violated on a massive scale
  Although numerous studies prove that the infection rate and infectivity of children and adolescents is extremely low, nationwide school closures have been ordered. Home schooling has been shown to increase socially induced learning inequalities. In combination with home offices, it often means a pathogenic overload of all family members involved. Many families lack important preconditions: equipment, quiet place, supervision. The number of school dropouts has already doubled in the pandemic. The consequences are particularly glaring in the multiplication of depression and anxiety disorders among children and adolescents that has been verified for the lockdown period.

III. Orientation of measures towards large private companies and their profit

The politically imposed measures primarily serve to support large, also environmentally harmful corporations. These are exempted from pandemic measures, protected from the consequences of crises and given massive financial support. In contrast, small businesses, service providers (retail, hotels and restaurants), the entire cultural and educational sector in particular are subjected to massive restrictions. There is an extremely unequal distribution of the psychological, social and financial consequential costs of overcoming the crisis: wage earners, sole self-employed and their families are suffering extreme economic losses in some cases. At the same time, the economy has been restructured in favour of a few big profiteers.

Examples:

• State support from the Economic Stabilisation Fund (WSF), which is endowed with 600 billion euros, is given on a large scale to corporations, even those with tax evasion models, as well as environmentally harmful companies, such as Lufthansa or manufacturers of cars with petrol engines. The biggest beneficiaries of the lockdowns were US digital corporations, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Zoom, which profited directly from the closure of large parts of the retail sector. Big stock corporations that were able to minimise their losses through state-funded short-time work paid out high dividends to their shareholders during the crisis in some cases (for example Daimler). The coronavirus measures led to intensified concentration processes in the German economy, especially in favour of digital monopolists.

• In contrast, hundreds of thousands of pending insolvencies, especially among the sole self-employed in the cultural sector, retail and gastronomy, are only being postponed.
  For employees, short-time allowance, as important as it is, means a reduced income. Precarious and temporary workers do not even get short-time allowance.

• Investors are allowed to further increase rents and prices for flats. Rental payments that were deferred during the crisis to promote the image are now being collected again.

• Companies are exempt from the Infection Protection Act: the SARS CoV-2 occupational health and safety rule, which was also watered down by the business lobby, has only belatedly been applied to them as from 20 August 2020. Contrary to the alleged complete lockdown, the vast majority of the approximately 45 million dependent employees were and are still regularly employed in companies: in the “strict” second lockdown since January 2021, they amounted to at least 34 million.

• The now imposed obligation of companies to provide tests is not sustainably controlled by the state. In factories, FFP2 masks are often worn without the mandatory breaks. Companies such as Amazon deduct the breaks required for FFP2 masks from the employees' working hours.

• Vaccine manufacturers, who were heavily subsidised with public funds, are exempted from liability for side and consequential effects by the German government and the European Commission.
  At the same time, research on Covid-19 drugs is criminally neglected. German companies working on the development of drugs for the treatment of Covid-19, i.e. directly life-saving, have hardly received any support, in contrast to vaccine developers.

IV. Dismantling democratic structures and violating fundamental rights and international law

New definition of pandemics under US pressure:
In 2009, under the influence of its most important donors – the USA and the private Gates Foundation – the WHO finally changed the definition of pandemics considerably. The occasion was the “swine flu”, which, although very mild, was nevertheless classified as a pandemic. The previous criterion for a pandemic, namely an “enormous number of deaths and illness”, was deleted without replacement. On this questionable basis, freedoms have been radically restricted nationwide as never before in the Federal Republic’s history.

• In particular, the passage on the “epidemic situation of national importance” allows radical encroachments on fundamental rights: the lockdown on freedom massively interferes with the freedom of movement, the freedom of assembly and protest, the inviolability of the home. It allows contact bans right into the private sphere of families and nursing homes, a kind of house arrest for the population, up to and including night-time curfews, it allows the suspension of freedom of trade and the prohibition of professional activity.

• The considerable restrictions were justified by the fundamental right to physical integrity – undoubtedly a serious right, but one that nevertheless does not automatically take absolute precedence over all others. This is precisely where a public debate on proportionality, appropriateness and reasonableness should have been allowed. Instead, public life was reduced to the criterion of the risk of transmission, the individual person demagogically portrayed as a danger to his fellow human beings.

• Protests against this are largely impossible; parliament and the opposition have allowed themselves to be disempowered by the federal government, and the leading media keep close to the executive as usual. Lurking aggressiveness determines the public mood. Reasoned doubt, even artistic expressions such as satire, are massively attacked and often labelled as right-wing or even anti-Semitic. Critical voices are sweepingly and arbitrarily defamed as “coronavirus deniers”, “lateral thinkers” (Querdenker) and “conspiracy theorists” without addressing their arguments.

• The Office for the Protection of the Constitution blames “alternative platforms” for “fomenting political alienation in Germany”, monitors them and thus prevents objective public debate. Blogs are blocked for allegedly “violating journalistic due diligence”, without the same proper standard being applied to all major public and private media. By establishing such authoritarian surveillance practices, the democratic substance of our country is being eroded.

• At the same time, the German government, in conjunction with the EU, is elaborately fomenting enemy images, especially against Russia and China, against the will of the vast majority of the population. In order to conceal geopolitical power interests, human rights are being used as a pretext according to the tried and tested practices of the Cold War, and economic sanctions are being declared as democratic disciplinary measures.

• In the shadow of the rampant media portrayal of the pandemic measures, the federal government and parts of the opposition are implementing the rearmament requirements of the US-dominated NATO. No nuclear-weapon state or NATO member, including Germany, has agreed to the UN's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, approved by 122 states, which stands for the will of humanity to live without this weapon of mass destruction. Instead, during the second lockdown at the “Resilient Guard” manoeuvre in Büchel, the use of nuclear weapons against Russia was rehearsed under utmost secrecy.

• Species are already dying, the climate is beginning to collapse and democracy is also at risk. The pandemic must raise awareness that it is not enough to return to the previous conditions. What is needed is a new legal and security practice that puts the common good before private profit-making to bridge the gap to countries kept poor (including within the EU) and thus do more justice to the right to life.

V. Necessary consequences and activities (selection)

1. The coronavirus crisis has shown that a private, predominantly profit-oriented health system is not equipped for the demands of a pandemic situation. This means: hospital closures must be stopped immediately; we need more and better paid nursing staff, and we need more municipal and state hospitals again, in general a greater weight of the public sector in the health sector. In addition, a minimum level of national production capacities for certain medical products should be guaranteed.

2. In the spirit of the Basic Law, all restrictions on fundamental rights must be lifted as quickly as possible. This is the special responsibility of the Bundestag and the parties represented in it, but also of the constitutional bodies.

3. The domination of public discourse by a small group of pro-government virologists and epidemiologists must be ended. Our society urgently needs to return to an open discourse in which critical voices and all factual arguments from experts, scientists and citizens are also allowed and can be discussed. The ostracism of critics through sweeping enemy images such as “coronavirus deniers”, “conspiracy theorists” and “lateral thinkers” destroys any discourse, without which no democracy can exist. In this context, the media have a special responsibility.

4. The Covid crisis has enormously widened the social division of our society. Large sections of the population have no political voice, no form of organisation, no media representation and no lobbyists for a political representation of their interests. A sense of social powerlessness is growing and can give room to dangerous developments. Urgent countermeasures must be taken here.

5. As is well known, the Covid measures have caused immense costs with a correspondingly high national debt. The hitherto extremely unequal distribution of the social and financial follow-up costs of the crisis management must be stopped. The burdens that will fall on all of us must be distributed fairly. For example, profiteers of the crisis and the very wealthy must be called upon particularly, in the manner of the equalisation of burdens act after the Second World War.

Source: https://harald-walach.de/2021/06/11/oeffentliche-erklaerung-zur-corona-politik-dauer-desaster-und-enorme-schaeden-notwendige-konsequenzen/

(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)

Signatures

Dr. Annette Bänsch-Richter-Hansen/Physician for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Maria Bermig/Psychotherapist

Armin Bernhard/Prof. Educational Science

Renate Börger/Journalist/attac Munich

Eva Borst/Prof. Educational Science

Almuth Bruder-Bezzel/Psychotherapist

Prof. Klaus-Jürgen Bruder/FU Berlin

Prof. Dr. Aris Christidis/Informatics

Dieter Dehm/MdB The Left Party

Friedrich Deutsch/Heilpraktiker

Dagmar Doerper/Council attac-D

Radimé Farhumand/doctor

Susanne Fischbach/educator

Reinhard Frankl/Klartext e.V.

Dr. Elke Fritsch/Internist

Prof. Dr. med. Karl Hecht/Clinical and Experimental Pathophysiology

Dr. Kai Herthneck/Psychoanalyst

Dipl.Ing. Ronald Hönig/City Planner

Sabine Hönig/Nurse

Margit Hoffmann/Psychotherapist

Klaus Jünschke/Author

Regina Junge/Ceramist

Antje Kirchner/Council attac-D

Prof. Dr. Michael Klundt/Childhood Science/Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal

Dr. Heike Knops/philosopher/ordained theologian

Michael Koeditz/Diploma teacher/GEW

Dr. med. Thomas Külken/Specialist in general medicine

Dr. Cornelie Kunze/Africanist/Economist

Dr. Stefan Kurella/Medical sociologist

Günter Kuesters/Council of attac-D

Dr. med. Rebekka Leist/Gynaecologist

Klaus Lübberstedt/Diploma economist/The Left Party

Rantje Meierkord/Specialist in general medicine

Dr Martin Metzger/Anaesthetist

Jusuf Naoum/Writer and physiotherapist

Elke Nordbrock/The Left Party

Prof. Norman Paech/Political Science and Public Law

Klaus Pfaffelmoser/Mathematician

Mathias Poland, MD

Arnulf Rating/Cabaret artist

Dr. med. Magdalena Resch/Physician for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Freimut Richter-Hansen/Lawyer

Dr. Matthias Riessland/Feldenkrais pedagogue

Prof. Rainer Roth/Klartext e.V.

Werner Rügemer/Publicist/Transparency International

Dr. med. Bernadette Schmidt/Naturopathic doctor

Prof. Michael Schneider/Writer/PEN Germany

Ralph Schöpke/attac

Dr. Ilse Schütze/Specialist in general medicine

Eberhard Schultz/Lawyer/Foundation for Social Human Rights and Participation

Annemarie Utikal/engaged contemporary

Dr. med. Hans-Peter Utikal/Diploma chemist and doctor

Stefan Vey

Christoph Wackernagel/actor

Prof. Harald Walach/University of Witten-Herdecke

Hellmut Weber/Corporate consultant

Dr. Ronald Weikl/Gynaecologist and general practitioner/MWGDF

Ingrid Weinand/Educational scientist/attac

Dr. med. Nadia Weinbach/Psychotherapist

Tobias Weissert/Rhine-Main Alliance

Dr. Hartmut Wihstutz/physician

Further signatures and suggestions are welcome

Contact addresses:

Dr. Heike Knops heike.knops@online.de

Werner Rügemer interventphil@posteo.de