Covidistan Annals VIII: the régime seeks enforcers to ensure compliance all the while liability concerns (slowly) emerge

A slow week in Covidistan, but there's more agitation just around the corner

A now for a brief update on occurrences in Covidistan, which, due to seasonal circumstances, is a bit more of a mixture of items that caught my eye over the past week.

Today, I’ll have the following items for you:

1. Job Opportunities in Covidistan

2. Vaccine Injury Liability Legislation

‘Costapo’—the Régime is looking for Enforcers

First reported by tabloid (i.e., ‘free’, on which see the sidenote below) daily Heute on 21 Dec. 2021, the Committee of Public Safety knows that police are overworked and under-staffed, hence:

Caption reads: ‘Those who control vaxx mandate will be offered 2,774 € per month. The situation is apparently very dire in Upper Austria whose state capital is now looking for additional manpower to enforce and fine those residents who aren’t ‘vaccinated’ against Covid-19. When I told me spouse about it, I offered the name CoStaPo, as in ‘Covid State Police’, a thinly-veiled wordplay on GeStaPo.

Swiss tabloid Blick quickly reported on this development (on 21 Dec. as well), but given the fact that Swiss public discourse is less reluctant than its Austrian and German counterparts to use certain terms and allusions (judging from my own experience of years of residence there, this is most likely due to not being officially part of Hitler’s Germany), the language employed is very telling:

Anyone over the age of 14 must be vaccinated against Covid, which was announced by the Austrian government last week.

This could create new jobs, as the example of Linz shows. The city has a about 200,000 inhabitants and is the capital of Upper Austria, has the lowest vaccination rate in the entire country. According to Covid Passport data, only 63% of its residents are ‘fully vaccinated’.

You see, ending medical freedom is, according to certain legacy media people, something of a job-creation opportunity. Nevermind the inconsistency of the argument (which, last time I checked, went something like ‘private businesses create jobs, not the gov’t’), its sheer lunacy and ill intents are on full display in the bottom part of the piece. Entitled ‘going after unvaccinated cheats’ (the piece uses the term Zechpreller, which is the functional equivalent in US legalese would be ‘dine and dash’, but it’s heavily connotated and further conveys ‘moral outrage’), we learn that

vaccination inspectors [their word] receive a salary of at least 2,774 €, the equivalent of about [US$] 2,880 [for full-time employment].

Think about this job opportunity in the following way (the above and below wages are all before taxes), courtesy of jobted.at:

The average salary in Covidistan is 2,104 € per month (x14) or 29,458 € per year. This is way more than, say, kindergarten teachers (2,210 €) and accountants (2,591 €), or about the same average wage an interior designer makes (2,740 €), to say nothing about nurses (average wage of 2,290 €), retirement home care-givers (2,070 €), or pharmacy-assistants (2,450 €).

Hence, if you’re up for a change and don’t mind harassing your fellow-citizens, do apply.

Liability Concerns

Next up, and comparable to US legislation, liability issues. Self-self-identifying as left-liberal Der Standard (that’s not a typo or the like, it refers to the paper and its readers) recently ran a piece asking ‘Whose liability in off-label application [of therapeutics]?’

Good question, isn’t is, and also pertinent in light of Covidistan’s intended vaxx mandate. Hence, the opener is o.k., reading:

The only prerequisite for liability under the Vaccine Injuries Act is the existence of a marketing authorisation under the law on medicinal products. Off-label applications are therefore also covered.

It starts strong, but it also suffers from both legal issues as well as a general lack of interest (by the time I first accessed the piece some twelve hours before posting, there were 22 comments; by the time I wrote this, the number of comments stood at 389). Why, you may ask? Well, here’s why (my emphases; there’s a sidenote below):

Due to strict approval criteria for vaccines, they can generally be said to be very safe. Nevertheless, in some cases [sic] people may experience health problems associated with vaccinations.

The Austrian Vaccine Injuries Act (Impfschadengesetz) provides for strict liability of the federal government for vaccine injuries caused by certain vaccinations. These include vaccinations that are decreed by the Minister of Health. The reason for the federal government's liability is, among other things, that these vaccinations not only provide protection for each individual, but they are also in the interest of public health [the original term used here is Volksgesundheit, like in Nazi Germany; also: don’t be angry at me, I’m the messenger here] because of their contribution to averting a danger to public health of the population, and due to this public interest, federal liability applies.

Sounds ‘good’, doesn’t it? Hence, federal liabilities may cover welfare and/or pension benefits, if payment for treatment and rehab won’t cut it. Yet, there’s a rub (there always is), for—like in the US—plaintiffs must prove they were injured by a specific product.

These thorny issues are further complicated by so-called ‘off-label’ application of a product, i.e., doctors prescribing/applying certain treatments without official guidance. In the present case, this (legal) problem arises from the use of different ‘vaccines’ (e.g., AstraZeneca for the primary course of two jabs plus any of the two mRNA ‘booster’ jabs) or the use of one or the other jab for explicitly excluded groups, such as pregnant women or a group of children and/or adolescents.

To avoid ‘confusion’, and (emphases mine, as above)

‘in order to remove some of the uncertainty from such off-label use, the Ministry of Health has now clarified in a press release that the minimum requirement for liability under the Vaccine Damage Act is a (basic) marketing authorisation. In other words, which means that legal access to the Austrian or European market is a prerequisite for liability, but not use in accordance with the specific marketing authorisation. Vaccine damage that occurs or has occurred during off-label use is therefore also covered by the Vaccine Injuries Act.

This is all o.k., in theory at least. Given the fact that Covidistan doctors used an on-site diluted version of Pfizer/BionNTech’s witches’ brew to administer to kids aged 5-11 until two weeks ago (in all 85,000 kids are concerned), we’ll soon find out about the differences between that particular ‘theory’ and ‘[mal-] practice’, won’t we?

The author of that op-ed/piece, Eva Erlacher, is a certified attorney hence if she notes, albeit in passing and only at the end of the article, that the Nuremberg Code (informed consent) is the law of the land, I’m unsure whether or not she’s disingenuous or not: no Covidistan resident (which, for all intents and purposes, includes family, incl.—to my great sorrow—my nephews aged 5 and 8, both ‘fully jabbed’), this particular facet of medical freedom has been found wanting.

Sidenote: my main issues here would be that the gov’t’s payment offered for ‘hunting down’ those who won’t comply is in excess of healthcare workers, esp. nurses and retirement care professionals. Then there’s the issue of the Committee of Public Safety’s ‘mission’ to flex its non-existing muscle in terms of coercion, which would be another issue to be discussed by any court (who still gives a pile of horse manure about the rule of law; no offence to horses, though). Finally, there’s also the lunacies mentioned by that attorney who claims, without evidence with respect to Covid-19 ‘vaccines’, that stringent measures are in place to ensure safety and efficacy of these biological products. As regards their so-called ‘off-label’ use, I guess we’d all have to hope that courts and discovery are still working in the US—and their findings having an impact on European affairs as well (see below)—to ensure at least the possibility of a free existence for my generation and esp. that of my kids.

Side-Sidenote: weirdly enough, the—to my European eyes—strange preoccupation, if not outright obsession, of our American friends with their seemingly unchanged-able Constitution may actually be what ‘saves’ them: while the jury is (literally) out on whether or not the Supreme Court will decide this or that way (on the ‘vaxx mandates’, which I think are illegitimate), almost all European countries are promulgating new laws to make sure these (similarly illegitimate and scientifically unsound) mandates may be enforced. Whatever one may think about the US system and its (many) flaws, in this regards, an un-reformable Constitution and the power this situation vests in the courts is certainly not disadvantageous compared to Europe.