Covid in Austria: the Régime Spent Close to 500m € on Injections, which, according to the Health Minister, 'Cannot Prevent Infection Waves'

Jabs don't do anything to 'stop the spread', therefore they will be 'offered' time and again: 65+ now, the rest in Aug./Sept.; 'despite rising cases', there are no more hospitalisations

And now this happened: over the weekend, the Covidinistas offered first insights into their ‘real’ planning for the autumn. Here are David Krutzler, Jan Michael Marchart, Gudrun Springer, writing for Der Standard on 9 June, who introduce their most recent dedicated piece as follows:

Mass boosting will not be able to prevent a wave, according to model calculations. Health Minister Rauch wants decreased ‘agitation and stress levels’ than before.

If it weren’t so tragic, these two lines would almost be comical:

‘We will have waves, not only this year, but also in the future’, says Health Minister Johannes Rauch (Greens)

Covid infection numbers are gradually rising again, this time even before the summer. This, however, was expected, the minister explained on Thursday. Rauch sees a larger Covid wave coming again in autumn. By then at the latest, masks will have to be worn again as usual, he said.

But even so, the pandemic will not be over, he added. ‘We will have waves, not only this year, but also in the future’, Rauch held. Their effects may only be lessened with booster vaccinations and other [non-pharmaceutical] measures to relieve the hospitals. It is therefore time to learn to live with the virus.

For these reasons, the Health Minister does not think much of further lockdowns and school closures in the autumn, although he still cannot completely rule out the latter. Empty classrooms, however, should be avoided ‘as long as possible’. In any case, it is no longer possible to maintain the ‘level of agitation and stress’ of the past two pandemic years. This would only drive an ever-widening rift through society.

I’ll offer some unsolicited advice, Mr. Rauch: just resign and crawl back under the rock whence you came from. Do it now, for whatever you do next, it will define your ‘legacy’.

As regards school closures and mask mandates for children, all I can say is that there’s nothing like this here in Norway: no school closures (for both primary and secondary school cohorts), no mass testing (we did that here in the province where I live after the Christmas break: 140,000 rapid tests, 19 positive ‘cases’, to the tune of some US$ 750,000, which prompted papers to ask, ‘couldn’t we have spent this money better on something else?’), no more quarantines (from which children under 12 were always exempted anyways). There were surprisingly few teachers who actually got sick; it was the same in my daughter’s kindergarten.

Leaving aside the absurdity of masks as doing anything against respiratory viruses, such as Sars-Cov-2—other than perhaps luring the wearer into a false sense of individual security—it’s quite rich for someone like you to decry the high ‘level of agitation and stress’. After all, it was your faction (the Greens) and your predecessors (Mr. Anschober and Dr. Mückstein) who did their utmost to raise the alarm bells to unsustainable levels.

I’ve written about all of this in a synthesised way two weeks ago; if you desire background on the nefarious actions that resulted in the Enabling Act that bears Mr. Mückstein’s name—the injection mandate—I’ll invite you on a drip down this particular rabbit hole:

Covid in Austria: LAST WARNING as Health Minister Rauch Decrees 3-Jab Minimum Req, No More Recovery-as-Exemption from 23 Aug. 2022 Onwards = TYRANNY LOOMS

Back to the piece, then: there is, again, mention of the brilliant minds around ‘simulation researcher’ Nikolas Popper (Technical U Vienna) whose team has ‘conducted 20 long-term simulations’. They ‘model’ that ‘approx. 4.5m people in Austria will lose their immune protection against Omicron BA.2’. Consequently, they found that there will be ‘a next wave in late summer, as late as October, or in November’. Dr. Popper’s team also held that

if there will be a summer wave, it will be followed by later waves, albeit with lower case numbers.

According to their model simulations, if half of those who have received a booster shot get vaccinated again in July and August, this can reduce the number of cases in autumn by 15-20%, but the wave itself will not be avoided. The effect of timely booster injections on hospital occupancy is stronger: with a reduction of about a quarter of the maximum occupancy of ICU and regular beds.

Please re-read the above: nothing we can do will, according to the modellers who are, of course, seldom correct (for a brilliant example of selling out, see this news item from TU Vienna on Dr. Popper’s brilliant powers of foresight and soothsaying from 20 March 2020: ‘Covid-19: The Mandates Are Working!’ It’s in German-only, but you may run it through a machine translator to get the point), and, if reality doesn’t conform to their simulation, quick to point to the fact that there were also other models that showed this or that.

Case in point: please take a look at ‘the bigger picture’, courtesy of OWID:

This, to my mind, begs only one question: WTF are these people talking about?

As a follow-up I suppose it’s fair to characterise the Mr. Popper and his ilk as CYI, or ‘credentialised yet idiotic’. Please feel free to spread the acronym and use it accordingly.

As any brief glimpse at Covid deaths shows (and leaving aside the equally salient, if no less problematic question of how to, and what does, define a Covid death), the correlation between infections, injections, and deaths is not as clear-cut as may be presumed:

So, looking at these data (visualisations) helps us to clarify the picture, eh? Perhaps someone should tell the Covidinistas about OWID? Personally, I find it increasingly absurd to read statement, such as the ones cited above, and trying to reconcile them with observable reality.

Autumn, therefore, is to be mastered with booster vaccinations. People aged 65 and over should get their fourth injection as soon as possible and probably a fifth later this year. For the rest, booster could be relevant at the end of August or beginning of September, so that immunity lasts for a long time. A recommendation by the National Immunisation Consortium for autumn will be available before the end of June.

Rauch no longer wants to be the only one talking about the importance of boosters. ‘A ministerial announcement will not persuade anyone to get vaccinated’, he said. Rather, one has to go ‘where the people are’. In the future, municipalities, volunteer fire brigades, and also general practitioners should be involved in a campaign to increase the vaccination rate. It is not yet clear how exactly this will work.

Cabinet-level appointees receive in excess of 18,000 € per month (14 times in Austria), by the way. This is what you get for spending such extraordinarily high salaries: innumerate (the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy) individuals with little, if any, relationship to observable reality, beholden to special interests—to the tune of 475m € spent so far on buying these products: approx. 38m doses of about 16 € each—who double or triple down on failed policies because they like their cushy positions.

How to tell? Easy—there were ‘but 39 Covid patients in the country’s ICUs’ as of last Thursday (9 June), which Der Standard characterises as follows:

With the slight increase in the number of cases in recent weeks, the utilisation of ICUs remains stable at a low level.

A problematic increase in hospitalisations is ‘by no means expected’, even at the peak of the anticipated BA.4/5 summer wave, according to the office of Vienna State Health Secretary Peter Hacker (SPÖ). Modelling from 19 May assumes that, at the peak of the summer wave, only about 25 Covid patients in Vienna’s ICUs, despite all the relaxations. Most recently, there was an average of 13 beds occupied [by Covid patients] in Vienna.

If in doubt, re-read the above quote: the ‘horrifying’ uptick in cases, blamed on the temporary ‘relaxation’ of mandates, is merely a blip (‘slight increase’), there’s no drastic, no less dramatic, rise of hospitalisations, and no-one expects this to be the case in summer.

Case in point, there were on average 13 Covid patients in Vienna’s hospitals in the past couple of weeks. Covidistan’s capital has close to 2m inhabitants, and even if the above-quoted piece doesn’t tell whether or not we’re talking ICU beds of ‘regular’ ones, this is all far from the drama anticipated by those in power.

Disingenuity? Incompetence? You be the judge.