Sharp criticism of the Freedom Party Corona course comes from Minister Elisabeth Köstinger (ÖVP): She has already thought a few times that FPÖ boss “Herbert Kickl actually has blood on his hands now,” she said on Saturday in the Ö1 – Series “Guest in the Journal”. The FPÖ is calling for demonstrations, resistance, “almost violence”, although science has the solution in hand with vaccination, accused the opposition party minister.
Recently it became public that children’s heart or cancer operations also have to be postponed because intensive care beds in hospitals are occupied by corona patients. The vast majority of these patients are not vaccinated. Köstinger does not see the responsibility for the situation primarily with the federal government, which is trying very hard to get people to vaccinate. But there is “a very large party in Austria that is extremely attached to conspiracy theories, which does not miss any opportunity to convince people not to take the vaccination,” she criticized the FPÖ. The blues would even have recommended a de-wormer instead of the vaccination.
For the blue general secretary Michael Schnedlitz, Köstinger’s statements “can no longer be surpassed in terms of stupidity and human contempt”. The ÖVP government team have their backs to the wall and are now trying to “free themselves from their self-inflicted and unfortunate situation with verbal blows,” countered Schnedlitz by broadcast. “If Köstinger should look for politicians with blood on their hands, then they should turn confidently to the ÖVP Federal Chancellor and former Interior Minister Karl Nehammer,” because he was responsible for the terrorist attack of November 2020 with four dead, said Schnedlitz.
Köstinger defended the fact that the ÖVP had said in the summer that the pandemic had been overcome by stating that a pandemic was “very unpredictable”. Before the summer there were definitely signals that vaccination was the big game changer. Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein (Greens) meanwhile said, according to a pre-notification in the “profil”, that it was a mistake to “orientate oneself to exceeding a certain number of occupied beds” in autumn instead of listening to the forecast of experts. “We couldn’t prevail,” the counterpart was said to have been Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) at the time. It also did not do the vaccination campaign good that “the pandemic had ended and had been declared an individual problem”. With the new Chancellor Karl Nehammer (ÖVP) “a new wind”, believes Mückstein.
The tourism minister defended the opening of the inns and hotels from tomorrow, Sunday, in Vorarlberg, Tyrol and Burgenland, even though Vorarlberg has the highest seven-day incidence of all federal states. “The decisive factor is the situation in the health care system, the pure incidence does not say everything,” she said, saying that everything is under control in the West. In western Austria in particular, the economy is also in a different environment, since the hotels are open in the neighboring countries of Germany, Switzerland and Italy. She will continue to work to ensure that German holidaymakers’ children do not have to be quarantined in Germany when they return from Austria, but this German provision has so far been in place.
As Minister of Tourism, she would have wished that all restaurants and hotels could be opened at the same time, but this was not possible due to the different assessments of the provincial governors. Control is also important: the economic aid is linked to compliance with the Covid regulations, and a company that does not control the 2G proof risks losing the aid. When asked about another possible lockdown at the beginning of next year, the minister said, “We don’t control the virus, but the virus controls us”.
It is not yet clear which curfew regulations apply over New Year’s Eve. The measures will be evaluated again before Christmas and see what is practicable for the Christmas holidays and New Year’s Eve. But Köstinger thinks it makes more sense to celebrate in controlled areas such as pubs than to meet uncontrolled in private rooms.
SPÖ health spokesman Philipp Kucher summed up in a broadcast that the ÖVP had apparently not learned anything from the past few weeks.
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