The unredacted minutes of the Robert Koch Institute’s crisis team on the corona pandemic from 2020 to 2023 were published online by a group led by a journalist who is one of the critics of the federal government’s corona policy. The RKI had previously published the minutes for the period from January 2020 to April 2021 with redacted personal data and third-party trade and business secrets. This has sparked a new debate in Germany about who was allowed to say what during the pandemic.
“In retrospect, there is a lot of criticism to be made,” says Rudolf Anschober, the former Green Health Minister, about the situation in Austria. There was no time to prepare for the pandemic. That is why mistakes were made. One of them was certainly the statement that it was the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” in September 2021. “This also created a false sense of security for vaccinated people,” says Anschober on ZiB 2 on Tuesday. It is also easy to say in retrospect that the lockdown for unvaccinated people was not legal.
“Act across Europe”
Anschober was no longer Minister of Health at the time; he resigned in May 2021 for health reasons. He could only judge what had happened during his time. Something that he would definitely do differently in retrospect: “There is one measure in particular. We should have acted together across Europe. It was an international pandemic that did not stop at national borders.” However, the EU still has no mandate to act in the case of serious, cross-border diseases. “That is why my appeal is: we need a Europe-wide review.” The EU should be given more powers.
“I would like to see a general explanation so that we are better prepared next time. The next pandemic is not at all unlikely. We should learn from it what we did right,” says Anschober.