- At the start of the pandemic, Germany was doing much better than the US in all respects – from access to personal protective equipment to the infection rate to the death rate.
- Today, Germany is far behind not only the US but also other global leaders such as Israel and the UK on vaccination
- – It is important that we take as many steps as possible to strengthen public confidence in vaccination and put data protection first, Chancellor Angela Merkel said in February
- You can read the original article on the POLITICO.eu website
As the coronavirus pandemic raged in the US last summer, my Arizona classmate wrote me a letter in admiration for how Germany is handling the crisis.
Previously, like other American colleagues and my family, he had taken a lot of malicious satisfaction in imagining the torments that met me as an American amidst supposedly numb “swabs.”
This time, with the US struggling to cope with the pandemic, they looked to the other side of the Atlantic with envy and even humility. Unlike America, where politicians mocked the pandemic right from the start, Germany seemed to be doing everything right in the eyes of the Americans. In everything – from access to personal protective equipment to the infection rate to the number of deaths – Germany fared much better than the US.
After a few months, time is running out
“It’s amazing to be an American journalist in Germany watching from a distance how the US really falls apart,” wrote my colleague.
German friends nodded. I was lucky, they told me I live in a country that works, run by a person with an academic title, not some “inept madman”.
But six months later (most of my time in the walls of my apartment) I don’t feel so lucky.
This week, Germany will enter the fifth month of the lockdown in a row, and the end is not in sight. While infection rates have dropped in recent weeks, it remains unclear when schools and shops will open, not to mention restaurants and bars. Small businesses face ruin in conditions of uncertainty. Such fears, along with frustration at the endless restrictions, worsened the mood in the country a lot.
Meanwhile, the US is just getting straight. Schools are slowly opening up, unemployment is falling, and the economy is slowly coming to life. Here and there you can see the instinctive optimism of the Americans, which has always amazed Europeans.
The rest of the text below the video
The keyword for the reversal of fate: vaccines
Until last Friday, about 68 million doses were administered in the United States, or about 14 percent. the population received at least one injection. Germany gave about 5.7 million doses, which means vaccinating about 4.5 percent. population. That is less than a third of what is in the US. The problem is not that the Germans do not have enough vaccines, but that they have started administering them very slowly. So far, they have received 8.5 million doses, and only used 68 percent. of them – the corresponding rate in America is 75 percent.
Germany lags far behind not only the US but also other global leaders such as Israel and the UK. Other EU countries, including neighboring Denmark, turned out to be more effective than the alleged homeland of efficiency.
Yes, Germany has given the world many of the largest and most profitable companies – from the software giant SAP to the chemical group BASF to Mercedes. But they can’t figure out how to speed up the administration of the vital vaccine.
What happened to the proverbial German organizational and logistics talent? It must have disappeared somewhere on the fax link between Berlin and Brussels.
Problems of German society
The reasons for the current problems are both structural and political. The rulers tried to point only to the former – for example, the decentralization of the federal state or the participation of the EU in the process of ordering vaccines. But the greatest shortcomings lie in their own political defeats.
Let’s take these faxes, for example. It is already a technological fossil around the west, but it is still a fixture in many doctor’s offices and health departments. This, in turn, made the coordination of the activities of almost 400 German offices particularly difficult. Health Minister Jens Spahn has spent millions of euros digitizing healthcare, with mixed results so far.
The fax, however, is merely a symptom of a deeper problem. Angela Merkel has been talking for years about the need to “digitize” German society – which has long been a fact in many economically advanced countries The first thing that often hits people visiting Germany is poor connectivity – there is no wifi in cafes, the Internet is slow. The fact that almost a thousand fax machines are still in operation in German federal offices and ministries tells all about how Merkel’s digital revolution was successful.
But this technology straight from the 1970s is still a sign of modernity in relation to paper documents commonly used by the German health service. You can’t rely on outdated communication methods to quickly vaccinate 83 million people – that should be obvious to everyone.
But it is not, especially for those Germans (and there are most of them) who care about the most sacred German law – Datenschutz, or data protection.
Israel, which has already immunized over half of its 9 million population, has agreed to provide the manufacturer with a significant amount of anonymised data (including gender and age) on vaccinated people as part of its deal with Pfizer. It was one of the first reasons why Israel was vaccinated.
In the privacy-obsessed Germans, the idea of collecting data on this scale is met with resistance.
“It is important that we take as many steps as possible to strengthen public confidence in vaccination and that we put data protection first,” Chancellor Merkel said in February.
In other words, any German who dies from COVID-19 because he did not get the vaccine on time can take comfort in the fact that his data will be secure forever.
Describing problems instead of solving them
What particularly strikes outside observers like me in Germany is the enormity of energy put into identifying and dissecting problems, rather than solving them.
For many months, millions of Germans watched politicians every night as they chanted prime-time things that were often self-contradictory about the pandemic.
This “coronapornography” attracts viewers with a false promise of fresh knowledge and decisions (the title of the recent program: “Lockdown instead of new actions – is there no alternative to the German strategy to fight the pandemic?”), But leaves them unsatisfied with questions unanswered.
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People flock outside Cottbus Town Hall to take part in a demonstration against the coronavirus restrictions.
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Most of the discussion revolves around who should be responsible for a disastrous situation.
Most fingers now point to Minister Spahn. While he’s undoubtedly guilty of making too much promises and responsible for the shortcomings – from slow vaccination rates to a poor supply of self-service coronavirus testing – it’s shocking to me how little criticism goes against his boss.
Just as the Germans couldn’t understand how millions of Americans could continue to support Donald Trump in the face of his obvious incompetence, I am in turn amazed at the Germans willingness to forgive Merkel for her management of the pandemic. Despite significant issues in responding to COVID-19 and the bleak outlook for the future, Merkel remains the most popular politician with a 70% confidence rating.
But the story is unlikely to be that understanding.
Where is the fault?
The biggest mistake during the pandemic – and throughout her tenure as well – was made in June when Merkel agreed to take responsibility from her government for the procurement of vaccines and hand it over to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
As a minister in Merkel’s government, Von der Leyen had the opportunity to demonstrate various qualities, but competence was not theirs. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the procurement process has turned out to be a failure, marked by dragged out negotiations and delays. As a result, Germany and other EU countries are forced to maintain the restrictions much longer than would otherwise be necessary. Even if Germany had better dealt with the logistics of administering the vaccine to its citizens, they would soon run out of supplies.
It would be wiser for Germany – which created a negotiating group with France, Italy and the Netherlands – to continue talks with companies, and even to finance the costs of vaccinating the entire Union in a beautiful gesture of European solidarity.
This would, of course, work if the scientific-minded Merkel was concerned about how and where enough vaccine could be produced. It would be enough for her to listen to Bill Gates, who has been alarming for months that adequate production capacity must be ensured.
But instead, Germany and Europe did almost nothing, allowing the short summer pandemic to end. Then, at the beginning of the year, they realized that pharmaceutical companies had significant production shortages.
“We need massive state subsidies to increase vaccine production,” said Clemens Fuest, head of Munich’s Ifo Institut economic think tank, this week.
The delay in vaccinations, he warned, is stifling the German economy. The political class seems to take it in cold blood, complaining about the whole situation on TV. Restrictions on basic civil rights — running a business, educating, or even hanging out with friends in the park — are only, they continually say, temporary.
My school friend was hoping to visit us in Berlin this summer.
But as things are now, we’d better visit him in Arizona.
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