Covidistan Annals XXIX: Injection Mandate Stayed, but Kept on the Books--tentative 'warnings' by the régime's advisors affirm a comeback later this year

In other news, meet the new Health Minister, Mr. Rauch, who's just like his predecessor (surprise)--no time to celebrate, for come May or June, the régime will think about the injection mandate again

It’s been a few days since I last wrote about Covidistan, so it’s time for yet another update. On 5 March, (most) mandates were revoked, and while it’s only few days since that moment, there doesn’t seem to be a huge increase in ‘cases’ or the like (yet?). Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of Covidistan…(credit Ralph MacTell).

By way of an introduction, we turn yet again to Der Standard, the home for those who self-identify as left-liberal (whatever that means) but are really just Green party hacks who crave for virtue-signalling confirmation bias. On 3 March, Gabriele Scherndl introduced her ‘OMG the world will end’-styled piece with the below stock image:

Caption: the FFP2 (N95) mask mandate will end in most contexts. It would be too soon to get rid of them, though—FFP2 masks are still required in grocery stores, and things might change again, too.

In that piece, Ms. Scherndl opens with the horror of high ‘case’ numbers (almost 40,000!) and decries the political decision to end most mandates. ‘As of Thursday [24 Feb.], 2,599 patients were hospitalised with a Covid-19 infection, of whom 189 required ICU admission’, it is held. High numbers, Ms. Scherndl intimates, but there are neither details nor context provided, so it’s really hard to say what these numbers actually mean. Still, Ms. Scherndl continues, ‘during the Delta wave, these numbers were three times larger, and everyday dozens of people die of or with Covid: 36 in the last 24 hours prior to Thursday.’

You can clearly see the pitch (bias) here: seemingly huge admission numbers, but there’s no distinction between an incidental positive test (ain’t a diagnosis, though) and what actually led the patient to the hospital. But look again at that last sentence, and you shall see that Ms. Scherndl does differentiate, a least a bit, when she writes about the many Covid-associated deaths, which could be either ‘of’ or ‘with’ the disease (syndrome). Dear Ms. Scherndl, you can’t have it both ways: either you tell the reader the breakdown of these hospitalisations numbers, too, or you don’t get to spread this kind of advocacy journalism (propaganda, as Robert Malone rightly called it).

The rest of the piece is really just a run-down of the mandates that changed last Saturday, which means that I shall spare you this listing. If you are contemplating a trip to Covidistan, you can go to this overview provided by the Tourism Board to learn about entry requirements or visit your embassy’s website (I don’t accept any liability for any of the information being factually correct in linked or recommended pieces, by the way).

For the remainder of this piece, we’ll return to the Q&A format once again, shall we?

Q: alrighty, so most mandates are gone now: how’s the mood in Covidistan?

So, basically, the most obviously intrusive mandates are gone, with the exception of the FFP2 mask requirement in stores that provide essential goods (groceries, pharmacies). It’s idiotic, to use a technical term, for it means you could go to a clubbing and be for hours among like-minded people in close quarters without a mask, but if you buy some breakfast on the way home, it’s time to mask up in the supermarket. So far, I haven’t seen much negative commentary in the controlled media outlets, but I suspect that these requirements will end before too long, too, albeit on a temporary base.

Q: you say ‘temporary’, why would that be?

All the authorities emphasise that no-one knows about future ‘variants of concern’ and the like, which is why I cautioned against taking anything that’s said at face-value. Neither has the injection mandate been revoked, nor are the régime’s civil-military advisors saying anything that dispels my concerns. Rather to the contrary, and therefore I maintain my ‘forecast’ that after a lull in spring and early summer of this year (‘party like it’s 2019’, I suppose), we shall see the mandates return with a vengeance once people return from their summer vacation, that is, if anyone will have any money left after the impending price hikes due to the Russia-Ukraine mess. Yet, even if there will be many people travelling to their vacation spots, I suspect that high fuel prices and shortages will make this summer much less ‘fun’ than in the pre-Covid era.

Q: o.k., I see where you are going with this, but isn’t there some light at the end of the tunnel?

With the current crop of political hacks and their advisers, I don’t think so. Take, say, this fluffy piece, which appeared in Die Presse (a once venerable centre-right paper particularly popular among Vienna’s upper middle class that doesn’t like voting their presumed ‘virtues’, i.e., mainly elderly ÖVP supporters) and that cites Covidistan’s Chief Medical Officer, the powerful ministerial appointee Katharina Reich, as follows (my emphases):

An annoying relative of Omicron is still here, which is the sub-variant BA2…without vaccination, every variant is a problem.

Leaving aside the intellectual bankruptcy of that statement (as well as the logical fallacy involved), here’s Ms. Reich’s co-chair of the governmental advisory board GECKO, Maj. Gen. Striedinger, doubled down on this:

‘Those who received three injections will require a booster shot in autumn.’ Those who remained unvaccinated and ‘who were fortunate not to get exposed to the virus yet’, they should start getting vaccinated ‘right away’, because it takes around six months, according to Striedinger, until the full extent of protection afforded by these inoculations is reached. The aim, which is also a ‘difficult task’, he maintained, is an immunisation rate of 90% by autumn.

You see, my friend, the very government, through their subaltern advisors, are giving away the game plan: there has been no change whatsoever in the régime’s aims, for injection remains the objective, with a clear path forward for the already-injected (a fourth shot, evidence to the contrary be damned)—and criminally illegal forced participation in a medical experiment for the rest of the population.

Q: you have a point here, isn’t there anything positive to note in these regards? If I recall correctly, the injection mandate was supposedly evaluated by yet another expert panel—any news on this front?

Well, actually, that panel met yesterday, and they were supposed to publish their considerations on 8 March. What we got instead, however, were deferrals until Wednesday morning (9 March), as reported by both state and de facto state media. In-between Mr. Mückstein resigned and his successor, former Vorarlberg state secretary Johannes Rauch was sworn in, hence that little delay, which may also have been influenced by events in Ukraine.

Be that as it may, Mr. Rauch went on national TV last night and told the public the following (see if you can spot the condescension; emphases mine; JR = Johannes Rauch, AW = Armin Wolf, the interviewer):

JR: It is agreed that the parliamentary parties will receive the [advisory panel’s] report, which will be discussed by cabinet tomorrow morning [i.e., 9 March]. You can rest assured of two guiderails that will inform any decision: scientific expertise and constitutionality, legality, and proportionality…

The report will be transmitted to parliament tomorrow, it will be discussed, and I’ve also agreed to include the parliamentary parties into any decision…

AW: Mr. Secretary, you call for an 8:30 a.m. press briefing, together with [ÖVP Legal Affairs Minister] Ms. Edtstadler. I suspect you’ve already determined what you are going to do.

JR: You will not receive any further information from me tonight. I shall seek to talk to both other parties, which I stated earlier. This will happen, and then it [the decision] will be publicised.

Here’s two brief comments on this exchange: first, note, semantically, how Mr. Rauch always uses the third person singular when pressed (‘it will be discussed’, or ‘it will be publicised’) while telling the interviewer and the public in the first person about his decisions.

Second, for many months since at least the Covid Coup in November 2021, the Committee of Public Safety (i.e., the government) has acted with nothing but contempt for parliament: this entire shitshow is a massive power grab by the executive, which comes to the fore in statements such as this one by the new Health Minister whose arrogance and contempt for the sovereign people seemingly knows no bounds. Government—tyranny—by press briefing, held during the rush hour on a workday hardly, if at-all, qualifies as transparent policy deliberation.

Kudos to Mr. Wolf, though, who followed up on this in the following way:

AW: Now, three weeks ago you wrote on Twitter: ‘This is a particularly absurd proposal: keep the injection mandate, but don’t enforce the fines. This is akin to speed limits on motorways without radar controls and fines.’ Apparently, this is exactly the advisory panel’s recommendation. What are you going to do: follow the recommendation or your own considerations?

JW: Mr. Wolf, you will not get any answer from me tonight.

So much change, and all at-once. Rather, meet the new boss (same as the old).

Q: this is patently absurd. How do you explain this? Is this just plain incompetence or are there ‘other’ shenanigans at work?

Well, I’d settle for both. Like elsewhere in ‘the West’, Austrian politics pre-selects for obedience and conformity (think: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), at least in domestic terms. One wouldn’t get anywhere near the levers of power or any function with a modicum of publicity potential, if one isn’t vetted before. While this is obviously true for party hacks such as Mr. Rauch, keep in mind that this also applies to state broadcaster ORF (which has a long history of political shenanigans), i.e., what I just said is also true for Mr. Wolf. There’s virtually no difference between corporate media in, say, the US and state broadcaster ORF.

That said, the cognitive capabilities (or lack thereof) of Covidistan’s politicos are quite obvious, and one cannot rule out that they, much like the régime’s advisors, all sincerely believe these patently absurd things about the Covid injections, etc. Part of me thinks that they are mostly (useful) idiots who may or may not believe a word they are feeding the public, but then we’d need to talk about the puppet masters, wouldn’t we?

Q: so, what happened with that injection mandate?

As it happens, I just saw that the régime took about a handful of minutes to ‘decide’. As reported under the header ‘breaking news’, the injection mandate is stayed for the moment. Here’s Mr. Rauch a few moments ago (my emphases):

‘The injection mandate is stayed’, for one [note again the third person] ‘has no justification for enforcing the injection mandate at this moment.’

He was seconded by Ms. Edtstadler:

‘The history of the injection mandate is a very ambivalent one’, and one ‘has to be flexible and able to adjust to changing circumstances’.

Plain English: right now, we can’t enforce it, for a variety of reasons—the public is done with this topic for now, there are continuous technical difficulties in making the automated fines work prior to April at the earliest, and I do find it quite coincidental that, two weeks ago, Ms. Reich told everyone that ‘perhaps we’ll see a new surge in May, but there could also be a new variant in April, around Easter’.

In addition, the stay—curiously determined by the executive branch alone without taking recourse to, say, parliament and/or the courts, is suggestive of this massive shift of power away from both the courts and parliament towards the government and its (unelected) federal agencies.

But make no mistake—this isn’t a win, not at-all, for Der Standard offers additional details, as per another piece by Ms. Scherndl, whose header tells the story as it is (my emphases):

The injection mandate will be stayed, and there will be no enforcement of fines at the moment. Edtstadler says that this kind of infraction of civil rights is not justified right now.

Further down in the piece, Ms. Edtstadler is (indirectly) quoted as saying this infraction of civil rights would be ‘not necessary right now’.

Mr. Rauch followed up and mentioned that this might change, as early as next May or June upon the next evaluation of the advisory panel.

Q: this is…quite something. So, where will this lead to in, say, half a year?

Personally, I do think that my thinking from early February has aged quite well:

Even if the mandates are temporarily suspended now, we the people must keep an eye on their return ‘through the backdoor’ of combined Covid-plus-Influenza mRNA shots in late summer/early autumn.

Get ready for the storm, for the clouds are gathering on a darkening sky.