Holy Week in Austria: Atonement Should be Made of Sterner Stuff

Adding insult to (vaxx) injury, state broadcaster ORF's 'apology' boils down to 'who could've known?' An amorality tale according to the 'Event 201' playbook

Apr 07, 2023

And now this happened in the middle of this year’s Holy Week: notorious carpet-beggar and ‘expert™’ Gerald Gartlehner (‘Evidence-Based Medicine’, Danube U Krems) went on national TV a few days ago. Interviewed by Austria’s leading news anchor Armin Wolf, Gartlehner was adamant about one thing: hindsight is 20/20 vision, and if there were mistakes made, it’s the politicians who are responsible for them.

Here’s friend of these pages Thomas Oysmüller who wrote an excellent summary over at TKP.at (translation and emphases mine, with light edits for clarity):

Citizen-blaming on a grand scale: government experts and politicians who played a leading role in the Covid policy decisions are now (partially) admitting their mistakes…
Quietly and against a lot of other background media chit-chat, the Covid ‘pandemic’ is finally being wrapped up. Virtually everything that the critical counter-public [Gegenöffentlichkeit] has objected to for three years is now being admitted. And they continue to do so in an arrogant and know-it-all tone. The fascistoid and incendiary politics that have caused inconceivable damage—globally and regionally—are just about to be memory-holed. A small evaluation, perhaps, and then we’ll continue with business as usual.
A telling example of how the ‘Corona reckoning’ [Aufarbeitung] is working in Austria was given by government ‘expert™’ Gerald Gartlehner on Tuesday on the nightly news with ORF's Armin Wolf.
Before we get to this, let’s remind ourselves about a few facts: in March 2022 (!), he was still calling for compulsory vaccination for health-care workers, for example, while politicians had already suspended the infamous injection mandate. Back in early summer of 2021, he said that ‘compulsory vaccination would be worth considering’ there. At that time, he also wanted more onerous 3G [vaccine passport] obligations combined with fees for testing ‘to motivate people to get vaccinated’.

Please follow this link to watch a brief 23-second clip of Gartlehner admitting that the ‘lockdown for the unvaccinated’ was a kind of ‘bonus the vaccinated’ (Substack tells me it’s tricky to embed Tweets right now; they are working to resolve this; it’s 7 April 2023, 7:24 a.m. European time as I write this).

The Tweet reads (my translation):

According to this, Austria accidentally play-staged fascism and organised epidemiologically useless witch-hunts for unvaccinated people. Those responsible are still in office and pretend that nothing had happened.

I managed to watch about three minutes of Gartlehner’s interview, which is about three times that long. Then I turned it off: it’s not mind-f***** anymore, it’s poisonous. Back to Oysmüller’s piece, then.

Now Gartlehner is allowed to reflect comfortably on the last few years with Armin Wolf, who also loved the term ‘Schwurbler’ [un-translateable, but this is the defamatory term used by politicians, ‘experts™’, and ‘woke’ journalists in legacy media to denounce the ‘vaccine refuseniks’; it roughly translates into ‘anti-vaxxing tinfoil hat-wearing deplorable’ or the like, but for once the German term is shorter] and had used it against the mandate critics and pro-democracy activists. The ‘lockdown for the unvaccinated’ had only been a ‘political reward for the vaccinated’. School closures had achieved nothing. The mass tests after 2020 were pointless, yet Gartlehner omits that the mass testing frenzy was the beginning of Austria becoming a world-leader in Covid testing. After all, the public prosecutor's office is now investigating Vienna's testing company ‘Lead Horizon’. Here, too, the presumption of innocence applies. Their partner-in-shenanigans, laboratory company ‘Lifebrain’ is not (yet) under investigation.
Vaccination Continues, Groundhog Day-Style
How do you feel as a citizen when you have been pointing this out? The pointlessness of the (mass) tests, the dangers of school closures, the politicisation of vaccination for three years and counting? Quite a few have lost their jobs and their social environment for this. Now, all of these things are admitted by the powers that be, except for the danger associated with these modRNA injections. They remain the Golden Calf.
Gartlehner criticises the end of the public PR campaign for modRNA injections in Lower Austria. Despite the political arrangement, the Lower Austrian ‘vaccination bus’ continues to drive merrily through the country. Everyone who wants to get another jab will be able to get it. Yesterday, Thursday, the bus was in Hollabrunn, today it stops in Mistelbach, and on Saturday in Horn.
At about the same time, the Court of Audit published a new Corona report [see here for my reporting]: this whole operation has cost Austria 48 billion euros. Their reporting does not address testing and school closures. Nor, of course, does it show the price that common sense had to pay. Moreover, the ‘data’ used to justify policy were more or less arbitrary and not bore no relevance to what as happening. The biggest joke: the Court of Audits already had announced this in September 2021. What followed? Compulsory vaccination, a ‘lockdown for the unvaccinated’, and massive agitation by the political caste and legacy media. Their arguments? These meaningless numbers from the hospitals.
Now they want to close the chapter. Quietly. With a ‘reconciliation’ that reeks like it has been planned by the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins University. According to their pandemic documents from 2017, it is recommended to show understanding ‘after the pandemic’ and to approach the critical public: Lauterbach apologised, government ‘experts™’ admit certain things, and Bavaria opened a vaxx-injury phone hotline.
This reckoning is adding insult to injury for every citizen.

Bottom Lines

There’s not a whole lot to add here.

I’ve tried to keep the receipts: do venture to the front page and search for ‘Gerald Gartlehner’. Among the best examples of just how wrong this particular ‘expert™’ was, please see this: