Covidistan Annals XI: 'Expert' Meetings, Contradictory Messaging, and Régime Recalcitrance

Also: Chancellor Nehammer tested positive for Covid despite (because) of three jabs and from today onwards, plainclothes roam Vienna to randomly stop and frisk passersby

Since my last report on Covidistan, a lot has happened: there were a flurry of press appearances over the past couple of days, most notably after the régime’s task force meeting on Friday, followed by a number of media appearances of various putschists over the weekend, and of course there were more protests.

If the régime’s hope—read: vainglorious aim—in late 2021 may have been ‘let’s hope this blows over after the Christmas holidays’ (see here, here, and here), what transpired over the past couple of days is yet another policy failure.

The main trend, summarised below, that unites all these events and developments, is that the Committee of Public Safety has almost reached the end of the line (they went off the rails long ago), which indicates to me that the search for ass-covering and lame excuses that may or may not fly with the electorate is in full swing.

GECKO Calling, Nehammer has Covid-19

The régime’s ‘new’ joint civil-military task force-and-advisory body GECKO (that’s the German acronym, and I’ll spare you the original wording; and, yes, it sounds like a friendly amphibian, but it’s anything but) convened last Thursday and recommended a number of new measures: FFP2 (KN95) masks to be worn outdoors, less quarantine upon infection (someone told them their draconian rules would endanger ‘essential services’), and the like.

The main news item, though, and one that quickly over-shadowed these announcements, was Chancellor Nehammer’s positive Covid test. Announced to the public only hours after the task force had ended its deliberations, state and pseudo-state media was full of fawning coverage about the awesome-ness of the Covid-19 ‘vaccines’: Nehammer got tested last Thursday and informed the public that he is ‘quite well’, working from home, and ‘of course, [he’s] jabbed and boosted’:

There is no need to worry, I am fine. I’m asking you to go and get vaccinated, get boostered, for it will most likely protect you from severe disease.

The absence of any scientific evidence didn’t bother the putschist, and neither did it occur to any typist-pretending to ‘do journalism’ occur to actually enquire about the irrelevant topic of vaccine efficacy.

Speaking about VE, there were a few murmurs about where the heck Nehammer would have gotten Covid-19. Now, we do know that he did neither go on a Covid Cruise, nor did he spend his time in a fully-vaxxed-and-boosted Antarctic research station (where, incidentally, a much larger share of scientists than the small number of cruise passengers got infected with Covid-19).

Behold, courtesy of investigative journalist Thomas Walach, we learned that Nehammer doesn’t like classical music (he claimed to abstain from the traditional New Year’s Concert due to Covid-19); instead, he appears to prefer drinking booze with dudes while on a skiing vacation:

In a situation as grave as this pandemic, which is demanding a lot of all of use, I think my attendance [at the New Year’s Concert] would be the wrong signal, Nehammer wrote on Facebook.

Nehammer’s spokesman, one Daniel Kosak, then took to Twitter the other day to state the following (my emphasis):

Before any inappropriate rumours emerge: the [above] picture was taken on 29 Dec. (while adhering to the 2G rule [only jabbed or recovered people are on the picture]). A week later, the Chancellor tested negative for Covid. The infection occurred after his return from vacation.

You see, the condescending and, frankly, inappropriate wording about ‘rumours’ aside, instead of treating Nehammer’s positive test result as an opportunity to publicly discuss the planned vaccine mandate, all we got was denial, derision, and the continuation of the pretension that jabs work against Covid-19.

Speaking of the vaccine mandate, how is that one going?

200K Comments on the Parliamentary Website

As I reported last week, there were already almost 70,000 comments, yesterday (10 Jan. 2022), state media ORF came out with a piece about it. Entitled ‘Strong Criticism during the Comment Period’, the article leads in the following way:

The controversial nature of the vaccine mandate is clearly visible by the record number of comments received: a total of about 200,000. Despite all concerns, in part also by the judiciary because of a lack of personnel, the government insists on introducing compulsory vaccination at the beginning of February. The [Social Democrats] are divided on the issue.

This being the gist of the matter, let’s briefly address them one by one:

Clearly, the jab mandate is controversial; legislatively, there are actually two drafts, one by Mückstein (see here) and the other one a joint resolution introduced by the two coalition parties. There is significant overlap, and in their essence, these two versions are identical.

There are almost 200,000 comments, which corresponds to about 3% of the electorate (of c. 6.4m people) voicing their opinion. This is unprecedented, and even allowing for a number of pre-designed objections, this level of public dissent hasn’t been seen. (See here for a particularly important one by retired haematologist Prof. Dieter Schönitzer, courtesy of Steve Kirsch.)

Given the expected—expectable—avalanche of complaints and the like, the Dept. of Justice notified the public in advance that they are under-staffed by at least 100%. Yes, you read that correctly: the introduction of the vaccine mandate is set to completely overwhelm the country’s judiciary and administrative apparatus, as shown in similar comments by the Judges’ Association and the Union of Public Servants (who usually don’t agree on many things).

Speaking of the judiciary, the Administrative Judges further noted that it would be ‘unrealistic’ to expect swift processing schedules given the highly contentious nature of the issue (do tell, it’s about bodily autonomy, the sovereign individual, and medical freedom, I wonder why these educated people haven’t thought about that earlier…).

Yet, the most significant comment was published by ELGA Inc., the government-owned entity responsible for the logistical side of the vaccine mandate. According to their statement, however,

the technical implementation of correlating all data…is impossible before April.

Why would that be? Well, according §5 and §6 of the draft legislation, the Health Minister is empowered to quarterly correlate data from the national residential register with the epidemiological database run by ELGA to send out ‘reminders’ to those who elected to forego the Covid jabs. Due to privacy and data protection regulations, all these data must subsequently be deleted.

Yet, according to this one detailed statement by the data privacy advocacy group ARGE DATEN, this is highly problematic: despite these clauses, the end results appears to be the introduction of an automated vaccine-scoring-and-penalty system (akin, perhaps, to China’s infamous social credit system).

On 10 Jan., infectious disease specialist Herwig Kollaritsch, MD went on the nightly news and opined that a postponement of the vaccine mandate is still on the books. At the latest, he cautioned, the law must be operational by late May ‘to have any impact on future autumn waves’. Kollaritsch further noted that the vaccine mandate wouldn’t do much, if anything, against Omicron.

Despite these concerns, the Committee of Public Safety elects to ignore all of this. Health Minister and Wannabe-Tinpot-Medical Dictator Mückstein insisted that the vaccine mandate would enter into law by 1. Feb. Nehammer’s aide-de-camp August Wöginger (in US parlance, the functional equivalent of the Majority Whip) added that ‘while it is, of course, necessary to look at the public comments and, where necessary, include them’, but there’s no debate about the mandate’s starting date.

Without citing any evidence, Wöginger added that ‘the first jab is 90% effective to protect against hospitalisations against Omicron, the second jab is still 70% effective’.

On top of it, the country’s main (systemic) opposition party, the Social Democrats, were divided on this issue: the party leadership continues to be in favour of the mandate, with a number of state governors citing ‘legislative shenanigans’ and differential incentives: the latter, according to Burgenland Governor Doskozil, means that ‘unvaccinated’ should pay for the PCR testing themselves.

Back to School and Work: Pandemic-Management meets Groundhog Day

Yesterday (10 Jan.), the school year re-commenced: the expectation was that due to the sharp uptick of testing, more and more ‘cases’ would be discovered, according to Vienna State Health Secretary Peter Hacker.

Surprise, surprise, this came to pass.

Interior Minister Gerhard Karner, meanwhile, took to the podium and announced intensified Covid checks, starting today (11 Jan.; my emphases):

We will further increase the pressure…this will be a veritable Aktion Scharf [this is very German, and the US comparison would be ‘stop and frisk’] against the few unreconstructed [the original is Unbelehrbare, i.e., ‘un-teachable’, by which is meant, ever so lovingly, ‘the unvaccinated’]

Since the introduction of house arrest for ‘the unvaccinated’ in mid-November, police performed more than 1.6m paper checks, issued more than 12,000 citations. (A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation ‘reveals’ that it would actually take some 2m paper checks to actually find 1% transgressions: why isn’t any of the typists-masquerading-as-journalists asking about the cost/benefit projections of this clearly unsustainable police efforts to weed out ‘the few unreconstructed’ people?)

Note, further, that police must also ensure that businesses, which are now obliged to check papers on behalf of the régime, actually do so. Furthermore, police will provide businesses, restaurants, and hospitality providers with written instructions how to perform these checks.

Brief Notes

This won’t end well, in particular in terms of state capacity to implement most, if any, of these measures. By late December, the state of Upper Austria asked retired police officers to help out (that didn’t work out).

Now there are news items that ‘even’ private security providers cannot find temporary employees to actually conduct all these vaccine status checks.

To cite but one more example, plainclothes are now strolling through Vienna and randomly checking papers, according to this piece by state media ORF.

Why these things won’t change before too long is expressed in the sentiment expressed by the Viennese Head of the Chamber of Commerce, Margarete Gumprecht: ‘anything is better than another lockdown’. Gumprecht further called on business-owners or managers to download the ‘Green Check’ app, because

Plainclothes will not just check customers, but also managers and owners.

Fines of up to 3,600 € per transgression are on the books, but the closure of businesses that won’t comply is also an option.

Thus, this is the current state-of-mind, courtesty of the above-linked ORF piece: