Covidistan Annals XXXII: Mandates are Back, the Vaccinators are Getting Itchy, and Politicians Seek to Blame the Experts (who in turn blame the former)

We've apparently entered the soap-opera part of all matters Covid-19, if it weren't so tragic: expect more force to be applied to those who continue to forego the injections

Ha, that was fast—but it’s not that you, my dear readers, haven’t been ‘warned’.

Mandates Are Back (They Never Went Away Completely)

As I documented in yesterday’s dedicated post on Covidistan (Austria), some mandates are creeping back. As reported by state and de facto state media outlets, the Committee of Public Safety’s comprehensive advisory group (GECKO) met in the afternoon to consider recent developments. In the early afternoon, state broadcaster ORF mused that ‘a return of FFP2 mask mandates may be in the works’.

By late afternoon-early evening, the GECKO meeting was over and Health Minister Johannes Rauch took to the lectern, as reported by multiple outlets, with the below picture and a couple of quotes from a piece published by Der Standard at 7 p.m. Vienna time.

Caption: Johannes Rauch re-introduces federal mask mandates—and wants healthcare workers who test positive but remain asymptomatic to continue to go to work.

As usual, the presser was full of virtue-signalling blabber and borderline moronic announcements: indoor mask mandates shall be re-instated from Wednesday onwards because ‘the prognostications that underlay the openings didn’t come true’, and, as Der Standard holds, Mr. Rauch allegedly voiced his opposition to them (easy to do, for he wasn’t in office then—this is called ‘hindsight’, which of course affords 20:20 vision, cue the ‘would you have killed Baby Hitler questions in US electoral campaigns).

This decision was reached because—like their Norwegian counterparts, by the way—that the Omicron (all variants) wave will crest ‘in the next two weeks’, which Der Standard fearmongers will mean ‘in excess of 50,000 cases per day’. Mr. Rauch, though, admits (my emphases):

‘This [the Omicron wave peaking] will have concrete consequences…we always held that there must be no overload of the healthcare system, and while the ICUs are currently not overflowing, regular wards are, in part, close to capacity.’

As regards healthcare staff, the situation is ‘close to breaking [äußerst angespannt] we experience acute staff shortages, and it is very hard to remain operational.’ Therefore, one must act, declared the Health Minister.

How did the Covidinistas act? Well, in two areas:

Mask mandates are scheduled to enter into force come Wednesday, because ‘the matter is legally complex’ and Mr. Rauch doesn’t want the Constitutional Court to strike down the mandate.

Because of the severity of staff shortages, ‘some healthcare workers, and only under specific conditions’, may be allowed to go to work even if they test positive for Sars-Cov-2.

Sidenote: this testing mania is close to full-tilt now. Remember, my (triple-injected) parents both tested positive for Sars-Cov-2 last week, and while they are fine (a ‘mild’ cold), my mother told me the following yesterday (18 March): if you are a three-dose recipient and test positive for Sars-Cov-2, you can ‘test yourself free’ of quarantine, or self-isolation, on day 5—and you count as ‘non-infectious’ if your cycle threshold was above 30. Word on the streets has it that another avenue discussed to reduce the staff shortages was to lower the CT value to 25. Test, but verify, anyone?

Of course, Mr. Rauch also announced a renewed ‘get vaccinated’ campaign to kick off on Monday to restore the cratering injection uptake. In addition, continued work from home has also been ‘recommended’.

More Anti-Vaxxer Anger: Red Cross Chairman Quits

As the saying goes, one can easily observe a—fair or foul—compromise in politics by neither side being happy. Of course, Covid-19 mandates are a wonderful illustration of this axiom, so, I give you more information on one of Covidistan’s leading pro-injection and pro-mandates luminaries: meet Mr. Gerry Foitik, Federal Chairman of the Red Cross.

As reported by the hardcore vaxx cheerleaders Jan Marchart, Katharina Mittelstaedt, and Colette M. Schmidt over at Der Standard, Mr. Foitik quit the régime’s GECKO committee because of his opposition to the insufficiently hard measures. The lede reads:

After a long time, Health Minister Rauch announced new mandates, but before he did so, he had to quell rising dissent [aufkeimende Revolution] among his experts.

The story is quickly told: in protest, Mr. Foitik left the GECKO meeting to make his dissent visible to all. So, with Mr. Rauch now announcing a new set of mandates ‘in all essential areas’ such as grocery stores, public transport, pharmacies, and the like, as well as in shops, businesses, and cultural institutions. In other words: mask mandates are fully back.

Here’s more from that piece about the GECKO meeting yesterday (my emphases):

Many panelists were unhappy with the government because [the government] elected to partially ignore their [the experts’] recommendations and didn’t consult with [the experts’] with respect to the recent revocations of the mandates and the changes to the testing regime.

Yet, there’s more. So far, the GECKO panelists, led by Chief Medical Officer Katharina Reich, had to negotiate with ministerial cabinets rather than look for scientific-medical evidence, as related by a GECKO member. So far, it is alleged that any topics discussed by the panel had to be pre-cleared with the Chancellery and the Health Ministry before GECKO could begin discussing them.

Even though the piece continues to ‘inform’ its readers of other dissenters—esp. former Defence Minister Thomas Starlinger and microbiologist Andreas Bergthaler—it was only Mr. Foitik who left in disgust.

The reason was the Covid management of the government, which he can no longer support…virologist Herwig Kollaritsch, on the other hand, saw no reason to leave the task force, for he always had an impact due to his vaccine-related expertise: ‘This is no time for personal misgivings.’…Still, Kollaritsch could imagine a point when some task force members ‘lost faith’ [verdrießlich] if the panel—as has happened before—is abused by politicians to support measures despite evidence to the contrary.

So, there you have it, the three axioms of Covidistan’s Covid Management (CCM), conventionally summarised in three bullet points for easy replication elsewhere:

1. Set up a super-large, extra-inclusive board of experts (GECKO has 22 members) that shows the populace that politics is guided by the best and the brightest experts.

2. Use the experts’ recommendations to push for unpopular, contradictory, and/or counter-intuitive policies (mandates), so politicians get claim that they are ‘following The Science’ etc.

3. If politically expedient, politicians may then elect to ignore the same recommendations to try to placate an increasingly wary populace.

If in doubt, rinse and repeat, until the populace is thoroughly disoriented and resigns itself to their fate. Unless they rise up.

Where Does This Lead To (and how does this end, if it ever does)?

For additional insights on these issues, I shall now relate the outcome of our domestic discussions (that is, my wife’s and mine dinner conversations). We looked at all of these issues, of course carefully, and we came up with the following tentative considerations:

This is all utterly deranged now: there are no such mandates whatsoever in Norway, and as we’ve discussed way back in early February, Covidistan has a higher injection uptake than (say) Norway and many more and more intrusive mandates that virtually all the Nordic countries—but the outcomes are far, far worse.

There are far fewer hospitalisations, ICU admissions, and the like over here, which allows us to tentatively conclude, in an evidence-based manner and with loads of real-world data, that these mandates don’t work.

This, of course, leads to the following questions:

• Are Covidistan’s politicians and experts simply more idiotic?

• Would their persistence in Covidistan and elsewhere have ‘other’ reasons?

• And, if so, what may these ‘other’ reasons be?

Stay tuned to learn more about our dinner chats, in the meantime, please let me know what you think about these issues.

Stay calm and strong, and don’t give in.