Covidistan Putschists Dither

Trouble, Fear, and Loathing in Austria

As promised, here’s the round-up to bring you all up-to-date with developments in Austria. For those of you who wish to skip ahead, here’s a brief table of content:

1. The Committee of Public Safety Meets Again

2. Freedom Party Leader Kickl has ‘recovered’

3. Gaslighting the Public: Vaccine Effectiveness Edition

4. The Resistance Deepens and Spreads

5. ‘Other Items’ of Relevance: Energy, Legal Abuses, and Suicidal Youth

Last evening, self-identifying as left-liberal daily Der Standard led with a brief recap of yesterday’s meetings. Entitled ‘Lockdown With No End in Sight’, we learn that ‘the government leaders received representatives of the social partners as well as experts from the scientific and business communities in the Chancellery’. Yet,

‘the meeting was a “pure exchange of views” after a week of lockdown, the Ministry of Health said afterwards…new infections are now declining, but this is happening at a “very high level”

(…)

For the time being, however, there is no relief to report from the hospitals because [lockdown measures] manifest themselves with a few days delay. On Monday, 3,325 people were hospitalised with a Covid infection, that is 108 more than the day before, with 619 of [these 3,325] in need of intensive care.’

The “coming days” will now show how the infection situation will develop, according to the office of Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein (Greens).’

Today, a round table discussion took place in the Chancellery, co-chaired by Legislative and Constitutional Affairs Minister Karoline Edtstadler (ÖVP) and Mückstein. Here’s state broadcaster ORF on the non-decisions that were reached:

‘Experts from medicine, behavioural economics and the judiciary as well as the heads of the opposition parties SPÖ and NEOS, Pamela Rendi-Wagner and Beate Meinl-Reisinger, were also present.

A great deal of expertise had been obtained, Edtstadler said at a press conference after the meeting. Compulsory vaccination had not been their wish, but it was now necessary: “Compulsory vaccination can be justified if the overriding goal, public health protection, can be achieved with it”, Edstadler said.

[She] also apologised to those who had “fears and worries” about vaccination. She did not want to push them into a corner, but to convince them. At the moment, there are still many unanswered questions about vaccination mandates, both medically and constitutionally, hence today’s meeting was only a prelude.’

As more court rulings against governmental ‘vaxx mandates’ from the US pour in (see here and here), the Covidistan Committee of Public Safety apparently doubles down, albeit in a fairly typical ‘let’s see how much longer we may be able to postpone any decision lest it may be the wrong one’ mode.

Behold, I’ll give you Mückstein on this (and a brief comment at the end of this section below):

‘Mückstein stressed that there would be a “proper review” of four weeks for the corresponding law, which…will enter into force at the beginning of February.

The two government members [Edtstadler and Mückstein] did not provide any details, as many things still need to be discussed, such as the amount of the fines, whether one could be punished more than once for a violation of the vax mandate, and whether one could also avoid a sanction by vaccinating. Edtstadler added that compulsory vaccination would probably not apply to primary school children [aged 6-10], and that a lower age limit of 14 years would be possible.

Mückstein made a plea to people who have not yet been vaccinated: “Please don't wait until the law comes into force! Every vaccination counts right now to break the fourth wave, especially every booster vaccination. This can be seen in the example of Israel.”’

There’s a lot to unpack, so let me briefly add the following points:

I should hope there will be a ‘proper review’, for everything else will be thrown out by the Supreme Court, if such a deficient ‘piece’ of legislation actually makes it through parliament. I for one am willing to go on the record that I doubt that these desires will enter into force as they are currently (sort-of) discussed (for more on this, see the ‘resistance deepens’ section below).

How glad I am—that my children won’t attend school in Covidistan. Dear government and medical professionals, keep in mind that what you are proposing may lead to a large and growing number of furious parents in short time due to the completely expectable incidence of severe health problems that esp. the mRNA ‘vaccines’ will cause in underage people.

Also, what about the age limit? Primary schooling in Covidistan covers grades 1-4, so what do you intimate by the age limit of 14? Shouldn’t we lower the voting age (currently 16) to 14 to allow those a say who stand to be directly, and not inevitably so, harmed from these policies? In purely practical terms, here’s some free advice: those 14 year-olds you wish to force-vaccinate will be voters next time around (scheduled, regularly, for 2024): good luck with the youth vote.

Finally, Mr. Mückstein, your ‘plea’ is not only disingenuous, to say the least, it’s utterly disgusting. Next time to speak, do think about this: if you announce your coercive intents before you push for corresponding legislation, this doesn’t make said legislation any less coercive, in particular in terms of bodily autonomy and the potential for harm. Keep in mind that you’re on the record, and there won’t be any escape from liability when all is said and done.

Freedom Party Leader Kickl has ‘recovered’

Recovered from his Covid-19 infection, FPÖ chairman Herbert Kickl is ‘back’. At a press conference earlier today, he called out the government for its divisive stance in ‘a dimension never before seen in democratic history’, which reminded him of the ‘darkest times’ in Austria history (presumably between 1933 and 1945, for all I know).

With regard to the new ‘variant’, Kickl said it is ‘clear’ that it is harmless. While he didn’t offer many qualifications—such as the fact that investigations into the Omicron variant are ongoing (for which Kickl should be chastised, in my opinion, but I think he’s mostly correct about the variant’s likely impact)—he is correct about the media-driven fearmongering.

Moving on to ‘vaccination’, Kickl said that he’s not ‘opposed’ to vaccines per se, but that he is against the “vaccination mandates”, noting that he’s also against additional copays and deductibles for ‘the unvaccinated’ (which had been floated by the Committee of Public Safety).

Kickl further chastised the Committee that the Freedom Party was the only parliamentary faction that had not been invited to the Health Minister’s round table. (The Committee stated they were not invited because they outright opposed the mandates, hence, as the Committee’s circulatory ‘logic’ goes, this stance seemingly justified the exclusion.)

As to the Committee’s intended vax mandate, Kickl said: ‘We have the most stupid, mendacious, and sadistic government.’ The anti-government protests reflected the ‘middle of our society’, while adding that he would be looking forward to more demonstrations. Finally, Kickl mentioned that an individual complaint against the lockdown measures had been filed with the Constitutional Court, which will reconvene later in December.

The Gaslighting Continues: Vaccine Effectiveness Edition

A few days ago, I brought to your attention a ‘primer’ on the recent Cohort Study on vaccine effectiveness by the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES, the Austrian FDA equivalent).

I won’t go over the particulars again, but I’m going to pull up the ‘disclaimer’ the agency added (in German ‘only’, which the English summary omits; my emphasis):

‘AGES currently has no reliable data on the severity of Covid-19, severity of the Covid-19 disease, and no information about hospitalisation or intensive care requirements for Covid-19 patients. Therefore, the efficacy of the vaccines in preventing severe and lethal severe courses and lethal outcome of SARS-CoV2 infection CANNOT be calculated.’

Why, you may rightly ask, would I bring this up again?

Here’s Daniela Schmid, one of the authors of said AGES study, as per a brief news item on state media ORF today (my emphasis):

‘Scientific studies have long since proven the high protection rates of the Covid 19 vaccine. But for the first time in Austria, AGES epidemiologists have now succeeded in proving the vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing severe illness in daily practice.

The Covid-19 vaccine protects about 95 per cent against hospital admission after SARS-CoV-2 infection, said AGES expert Daniela Schmid yesterday evening at an online training session for doctors.’

Now, I’m a fairly simple-minded person, and here’s what I did: I knew about that cohort study a couple of days ago (see my comment above), so I double-checked with the AGES website to enquire whether or not there’s new data. Turns out, there’s no new data available.

Thus, I must assume Ms. Schmid referred to that cohort study, which disproves her words uttered yesterday, 29 Nov. 2021, in said ‘online training session for doctors’.

In my book, I’d call this ‘a lie’.

In the law books, this is called ‘malfeasance’.

The Resistance Deepens and Spreads

Remember when I reported about ‘50+’ federal police in Vorarlberg, Covidistan’s smallest state? Much like the rest of the country, Vorarlberg’s police is severely under-staffed, which makes this a pretty problematic open letter.

And earlier today, I found another comparable nugget over at state broadcaster ORF, which leads with the following paragraph:

‘If compulsory vaccination really enters into law, 150 teachers in Vorarlberg intend to quit. At least that is what is claimed in an anonymous letter addressed to the State Education Directorate. Willi Witzemann, in charge of personnel for compulsory education, is concerned because the teacher shortage is already dramatic.’

You see, it’s not ‘just’ police who are pissed off. The dissent has spilled over into teaching staff. Mind you, ‘compulsory education’ in Covidistan is nine years, i.e., extending over the age bracket 6-15. Most teaching staff in primary and secondary schools in the country are—women, and at least 150 of these teachers (and presumably also their partners) are pissed and disgusted enough to walk away from tenured, life-time positions as government employees because of the vax mandate.

So, what does this all mean? Teachers in Covidistan are typically either federal or state employees. Last week, it’s the police that announced its disaffection and disagreement with the government. This week it’s the teachers, especially those who would ‘look after’ most of the other parents’ kids during the day. Talk about ‘spillover effects’.

Finally, in this section, here’s Interior Minister Nehammer again (yes, of that last Sunday press conference infamy), and to unpack what he had to say earlier today, we turn again to Der Standard, whose staff used to hate all things related to police, law, and order before the Greens entered into government. How the times have changed, but I digress. Here’s Nehammer earlier today (my emphases):

‘Nehammer (ÖVP) became very emotional on the subject of the Corona protests and tried to speak to the conscience of the opponents of the measures. “We all want our freedom back”, said Nehammer. The way to get there, however, is not through violence, but through vaccination, he said. He appeals to all those who want to demonstrate “to take another look inside themselves”, Austrian Press Agency quotes him as saying…“They see Corona as an opportunity of a lifetime”. With the new large-scale demonstration planned by the FPÖ [come 4 Dec. 2021], police officers will be very challenged. People in Austria have the right to demonstrate, “but it must be clear to all perpetrators of violence that we will prosecute every offence. We will not stand by while the Jewish star is worn and the Holocaust is trivialised”.

He said the Corona ordinances [take note] were not an end in themselves, but necessary because the virus was rampant and the ICUs are full. He found it “highly irresponsible” of the FPÖ to stir up hatred, anger and rage: “This pouring of oil on the fire is highly dangerous.…The virus concerns us all. We have all been through a lot. We also want our freedom back.” But no one is helped by escalation, he said.’

As I mentioned in last weekend’s posting, police are under-staffed. I know from a relative (an in-law who’s a police officer in Vienna) that the situation is so dire that at times entire precincts have to be closed down due to manpower shortages.

Now you know that, too, and for all I care, we must assume the putschist régime knows it as well. While I personally find Nehammer’s appeal to conscience quite beyond (on second thought, maybe it’s projection, for he appears to have no conscience to speak of), here’s something else I thought while reading his utterances:

I smell: fear.

The régime knows it’s threading a very, very thin line here, and for all I care, I think the régime also understands that it’s running both on fumes and out of time.

Why, you may ask? Well, here’s three more items that appeared in the media over the past two days.

‘Other Items’ of Relevance: Energy, Legal Abuses, and Suicidal Youth

According to state broadcaster ORF, ‘energy prices are, on average, 25% higher this year than 12 months earlier’. Citing October as their point of reference (my emphases),

‘natural gas costs 15.6% more, electricity is up by 9.6%. Compared to the previous month of September, energy prices rose by 4.6%, which is largely responsible for inflation hike of 3.7% in October. Year-on-year, this constitutes a 22.8 per cent increase…electricity prices in particular continue to rise…all of which…suggests that electricity prices will increase by around 50% as of 1 January 2022.’

In other news, Covid-19 has provided law enforcement with additional income streams. As reported by Der Standard, the current situation is unprecedented (my emphasis):

‘For a long time, there were only a few, but sometimes quite sensational, incidents around the danger to people from communicable diseases. In 2019, there were three cases that received wider media coverage: A Vienna police officer was bitten on the hand by a man who had Hepatitis C, and two other cases came to light through court cases. In one, an HIV-infected man had unprotected sex with a woman even though he knew he had had AIDS for years; in another, a Carinthian man infected with Hepatitis spat on several people.

(…)

Then came the pandemic and the offence took on a completely new meaning. The cases that reached the state prosecutors’ offices under §178 and §179 of the Criminal Code literally exploded. The first paragraph describes the deliberate endangerment of people by communicable diseases, the second the offence of negligence. Taken together, the two paragraphs hit Austria’s state prosecutorial offices 20 times as often this year [2021] as in 2019.’

Finally, a word about the dire consequences of the Covid-19 measures: suicide attempts among adolescents have effectively double, according to state media (my emphases):

‘We generally have a lot of young people who come with depressive behaviour and also with acute suicidal tendencies. This has come to a head in recent months’, Paul Plener, head of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Vienna General Hospital, went on the record.

Acute cases can still be treated, however, “those who need inpatient treatment, but are less acutely endangering their own lives, sometimes must wait for months”. This situation is becoming more and more concerning, according to Plener, for the depressive developments in many patients “very often have their origin in the pandemic, with the loss of social contacts, but also with the loss of current daily structure”.’

Earlier today, I concluded with Heinrich Heine’s beautiful poem Night Thoughts.

When I read especially the last item—and I am a parent, mind you—this breaks my heart. And it makes my so incredibly angry at the putschist régime.

If at night, I of Austria think
No sleep for me, awake I blink
No more am I able my eyes to close
And hot tear after hot tear from me flows.