After Covid in Central Europe: Germany, Austria to Become 'Preventative-Activist States'

It's all to 'keep you safe', in 'our common interest', and please remember: 'we're not safe until everyone are safe'

Today, we’ll take a closer look at the trajectory of German-speaking Central Europe ‘after Covid’. This posting comes in two distinct parts: first, we’ll check in with the mental institution formerly known as Federal Government of Austria, which has now launched a new ‘public dashboard’ to monitor all ‘severe acute respiratory illnesses"‘ (SARI). As with the federal Covid injection mandates of yesteryear, Austria continues to function as a proverbial ‘laboratory’ of our post-modernist and post-humanist future.

Thereafter, we shall take a brief look at the many harbingers that told us about this development as early as spring 2020.

The below pieces appear in my translation, with emphases added; the bottom lines, as usual, are mine.

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Austria to Launch Early Warning System to Monitor Severe Acute Respiratory Infections (SARI)

Ministry of Health and Social Press Release, Vienna, Austria, 10 Aug. 2023 [source]

Respiratory infections can spread rapidly during the cold season and lead to an overload of individual hospitals, but also of the entire health care system. The new SARI dashboard of the Ministry of Health and the umbrella organisation of the social insurance institutions now provides a quick access. It shows inpatient admissions with severe acute respiratory infections (SARI), such as influenza, Covid, and RSV. This allows for early detection of waves of illness. ‘Last winter we already saw that not only Covid waves, but respiratory infections in general put a heavy burden on hospitals. The new dashboard is a kind of early warning system for us’, emphasises Health Minister Johannes Rauch. The SARI dashboard is updated weekly and can be viewed publicly as of today at www.sari-dashboard.at.

During the Corona pandemic, the Ministry of Health published epidemiological key figures daily on the Corona Dashboard of the AGES [Federal Public Health and Food Security Agency, i.e., Austria’s FDA equivalent]. In addition to the number of new infections and deaths, an overview of the utilisation of Austrian hospitals with Covid-19 patients was also shown there. Since Covid is no longer a notifiable disease as of 1 July 2023, much of this data was no longer collected. The Corona Dashboard had to be discontinued.

As of today, an even better monitoring of the situation in the hospitals is made available by the SARI Dashboard, which is operated by the Ministry of Health and the umbrella organisation of the social insurance institutions with the technical support of AGES. It provides an overview of inpatient admissions with severe acute respiratory infections in Austrian hospitals, including not only Covid-19 but also other severe respiratory infections, such as influenza and RSV.

‘In order to estimate the burden on hospitals, we need to look at all severe respiratory infections in the future. The SARI dashboard shows us at an early stage impending burdens on hospitals from severe respiratory infections’, Health Minister Johannes Rauch is pleased to say. ‘Together with the broadly expanded Corona wastewater monitoring [Sentinel], we have a good overview of developments and are now well prepared for the coming autumn.’

‘The SARI dashboard, which records all data anonymously, enables us to obtain an up-to-date status of inpatient admissions in Austrian hospitals. This is essential in order to recognise early overloads of hospitals and thus to be able to act quickly and sustainably’, adds the Chairwoman of the Conference of Social Insurance Institutions, Ingrid Reischl.

SARI Dashboard Provides Important Data

The SARI dashboard shows inpatient admissions to Austrian hospitals with diagnoses of severe acute respiratory infections (SARI). Diagnoses with three common viral respiratory infections—influenza (seasonal influenza), Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2), RSV (respiratory syncytial virus)—and all other severe respiratory infections are recorded. For the presentation, the diagnostic codes are used that are reported by the hospitals to the umbrella organisation of the social insurance institutions when patients are admitted as inpatients.

The data can be displayed according to federal states, age groups, diseases as well as normal and intensive care units. In this way, they also provide an overview of which groups of people are currently particularly affected by which disease. All data used are anonymised and do not allow any conclusions to be drawn about individual persons. All reported SARI diagnoses since mid-May of this year are also shown retrospectively. The SARI dashboard is publicly available at www.sari-dashboard.at and is updated weekly on Tuesday.

Vaccination Offers the Best Possible Protection

Effective vaccines are already available against some serious respiratory infections, such as influenza, Covid-19, or pneumococcus. They offer the best possible protection against severe courses of the disease and hospitalisation. This year, vaccines against RSV were also approved for the first time and are expected to be available in Austria in autumn.

In addition to vaccination against Covid-19, the influenza vaccination will also be available at low cost to all people in Austria in all federal states come autumn. You can also protect yourself and your fellow human beings from infection with the familiar hygiene measures such as regular ventilation, hand washing, and wearing masks in vulnerable or heavily frequented areas.

‘Vaccinations are still the best preventive measure. This is true not only for Covid, but also for many other diseases. I therefore recommend everyone to ask their doctors in good time which vaccinations are recommended for the coming autumn’, concludes [Health Minister Johannes] Rauch.

Enquiries & Contact:

Federal Ministry of Social Affairs, Health, Care and Consumer Protection (BMSGPK), via pressesprecher@sozialministerium.at or sozialministerium.at

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Our—Their—Nascent Vorsorgestaat (Preventative State)

Of course, none of the above is surprising, much of it is simply—misinformation, disinformation, or cheap agit-prop.

Effectiveness used to be but one part of any medical product to be rendered available, with ‘safety’ its Siamese twin. No word about the latter is to be found in the above press release.

Then there is the issue of rapidly declining, if any, effectiveness of the ‘best protective measure’, vaccination. Even Wikipedia used to admit the lowly, if any, effectiveness of the annual flu shots, that is, until recently:

Source. I accessed the above site on 11 Aug. 2023. Emphasis mine.

Source. I do wonder as to why the above graph has been ‘temporarily removed’ from the current version of the same entry. Note that 50% efficacy used to be the minimum threshold for vaccine efficacy required for approval.

None of the above comes as a surprise, well, except to those who elect to remain blissfully unaware, trundling along with seemingly eternal sunshine of their unperturbed minds.

Threee (!) years ago, Joseph Fischer wrote about the content of the above press release. Writing for the (paywalled) Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 31 Mar. 2020, he labelled the shape of things to come the ‘Vorsorgestaat’, which translates into something like the ‘preventation-oriented (activist) state’ that works ceaselessly to keep ‘harm’ from its citizens. With all efforts dedicated to ‘the greater good’, of course, it means ‘all hands on deck’, which translates into ‘follow the Science™’, no questions permitted.

Of course, the idea of a Vorsorgestaat are not Mr. Fischer’s original contribution.

Writing in the Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft (trans. Journal of Political Science) 30 (2020): 631-2, Arno von Schluckmann muses (my translation and emphases):

A welfare state is indispensable for social and thus also cultural and political participation. A modern and democratic society is characterised by the fact that all members can refer to a fundamental canon of values that enables social participation for all citizens of a country. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the welfare state is reflected in Article 20(1) of the Basic Law, which refers to the welfare state principle.

However, the question inevitably arises as to how exactly the welfare state should be structured. The political parties in particular have a wide range of ideas on how the welfare state should be structured. They range from a comprehensive state duty of care, as found especially among the left-wing parties, to the emphasis on rather less state responsibility and instead more individual provision by the citizens themselves, to unconstitutional proposals on the extreme right-wing side of the party spectrum, which call for an exclusive welfare state for certain population groups.

It seems understandable that in prosperous phases, discussions about the scope and benefits of the welfare state tend to swing in favour of liberal and conservative ideas, whereas in times of economic upheaval or social crisis, progressive ideas tend to be advocated.

Note the conflation of crisis with progressivism, as well as the notion that ‘everyone’ is to be included, with, of course, the exception of those deemed ‘unconstitutional’, i.e., a thinly-veiled reference to ‘enemies of “the people”’.

The first two decades of the current century have been particularly marked by major crises—just think of 9/11, the resulting armed conflicts and refugee movements [as if they fell out of an otherwise blue sky…], the global economic crisis, and currently the Corona pandemic or climate change, which has been becoming increasingly evident for years [another of these unfalsifiable statements]. These crises have also been accompanied by an enormous social change induced by digitalisation, which calls into question the job security of broad social strata. This also presents the social sciences, and political science in particular, with the great challenge of participating in the discussion on the design of the welfare state in Germany. For this reason, we are dedicating the Focus section of this issue to the topic of The Welfare State in the 21st Century.

The journal is extra-active in this issue, but I shall spare you the musings of these ‘experts’ for time being. If you are interested in hot-off-the-presses, German-language social science scholarship on the issue, check out issue 4 of the journal here.

Instead, we shall move over to the ‘even’ older stuff, specifically Christian Calliess’ 2013 article (pp. 3-22; source) that appeared in the Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik / Annual Review of Law and Ethics, vol. 21, which focussed on ‘The Rule of Law-Principle’. The author, Christian Calliess, is a full professor of European and Public Law at the Free University of Berlin and one of Germany’s leading legal experts.

I shall delimit myself to excerpting from its English-language summary, with my emphases added.

Back in 1792, Wilhelm v. Humboldt wrote wise words when he noted: ‘There is no security without freedom’. If there is anywhere that freedom and security belong together, then in the constitutional state. A state under the rule of law is defined by procedural specifications, such as separation of powers, reservation of statutory powers and effective legal protection on the one hand and by the recognition of basic rights on the other. To this extent, the rule-of-law premises are the state monopoly on the legitimate use of force as well as the corresponding duty of state authorities to protect individual rights on the one hand and the ‘freedom-preserving’ individual rights protection against state authorities on the other hand, both aspects based on human rights.

Note that today’s protagonists of ‘transformation’ of our world—the UN/WEF ‘sustainability’ cabal has inverted this notion. It is no ‘freedom’ without prior ‘security’ for all, whereby ‘freedom’ refers to prerogatives, i.e., things that are granted and not pre-existing via, say, natural law, and that can be revoked at-will via, e.g., a social-credit system.

Responsible state authorities face often a considerable lack of knowledge on behalf of the question, if a substance, a product or a process causes a concrete danger (hazard) for individual or public goods, it becomes nevertheless difficult for them to correspond their constitutional duty to protect. In this situation risk management is geared towards the control of risk situations defined by unpredictability and uncertainty. Via the precautionary principle which corresponds with this term, the sphere of influence of the state institutions is expanded in such a way that protective measures can be taken in the event of an abstract concern and not only in the event of concrete danger (hazard) for which there is concrete evidence. The precautionary principle has embarked on a remarkable legal career, which began with and focuses on environmental, health, and consumer protection law. To establish a reason for precaution, it is sufficient to have an abstract potential for concern and therefore reasonable suspicion in theory only—as opposed to purely speculative suspicion supported by scientific plausibility grounds—which does not have to be well substantiated empirically or even scientifically proven in the sense of a majority opinion.

Reads fine, in principle, however, once the experiences of the so-called Covid ‘pandemic’ are taken into account, one must question both the competence of ‘the experts’ and the good intentions of key players, such as Big Pharma, the captured regulatory agencies, and legacy media.

The precautionary principle (together with the rebuttable presumption of danger that is inherent to it) legitimises early regulatory action by the state. It can provide for the enactment of precautionary regulations and permit the authorities to intervene on a broader, risk orientated basis. As a consequence a constitutional conflict may arise with regard to the rule of law, especially the freedom guaranteed by human rights. [line break added]

If an appropriate level of protection cannot be derived directly from scientific findings due to lingering uncertainty, under the rule of law there is a growing necessity to back up precautionary decisions with procedural rules.

Reference is made to the above-related claims by the Austrian Health Minister Rauch that ‘vaccination is the best possible prevention’, which is belied by mountains of evidence with respect to the flu shot, unprecedented levels of adverse events following Covid ‘vaccination’, and the yet-unknown risk profile of the to-be-rendered-available RSV injections, to say nothing about evidence-based assessments about the latter’s efficacy (as the evidence with respect to the former two products is in).

In light of the rather political character of risk assessment, the decision-making process not only has to be made transparent, it must also enable a pluralistic discussion of vaIues, which should be held under the institutionalised involvement of representatives of social groups which participate in public life. This is why there have been calls outside the sphere of jurisprudential debate (in the fields of philosophy and sociology, which deals with issues such as environmental ethics and the social dimensions of technological risks) for a general shift of the burden of proof from state authorities to the responsible actors in society to address the risks of new technologies (‘in dubio contra projectum’).

You read this correctly: a decade ago, ‘the science’ argued, ‘if in doubt, against the decision’, echoing the age-old adage of in dubio pro reo. What the Central European governments are pushing, aided by their willing ‘experts’ and abetted by legacy media, is one of the kind identified explicitly to be at-odds with free societies and constitutional government:

A risk decision of this kind pushes the rule-of-law limits of our liberal constitution. As a result, the precautionary principle can only be employed in conformity with the rule-of-law concept if it is based on the model of a rebuttable presumption of danger. If we adopt the idea of apportioning the burden of proof based on the theory of spheres, an idea that also corresponds to the ‘polluter pays’ principle in the field of environmental law, this appears justified if for no other reason than it is the substance or product producer who confronts the public at large with a potential risk.

And here, in a nutshell, is the problem with the above-related policies:

The SARI dashboard is not ‘in conformity with the rule-of-law concept if it is based on the model of a rebuttable presumption of danger’.

If one furthermore adopts the ‘polluter pays’ principle in the field of public health, it would indicate that Big Pharma should pay for these things, as opposed to us, the regular taxpayers.

I for one won’t hold my breath, though, for that to happen anytime soon, if at-all.