As if the Corona plague were not already the worst health threat Europe has had to endure since the plague epidemics of the Middle Ages, the officials of their countries are stabbing the population in the back through inertia, passive resistance and deliberate opposition. Politicians everywhere seem powerless against it.
Everyone still seemed to have been taken by surprise by the first wave of corona. Despite new and worsening waves of influenza every year, no healthcare system in Europe (not to mention the rest of the world) was really prepared for the onslaught of such a deadly virus. For decades, the false credo of unconditional profitability of health care systems has jeopardized widespread medical care. Alleged overcapacity in the hospital system was eliminated. Any necessary stockpiling and precautions were reduced to a minimum.
The situation was no different in the pharmaceutical industry. For cost reasons, the production of raw materials for drug manufacture and even of high-quality drugs themselves was relocated to countries, whose quality standards had been increasingly questioned by experts for some time. Europe has become dependent on mostly Far Eastern suppliers for the supply of many medical products.
When the Corona epidemic broke out, nothing necessary was sufficiently stocked. Not enough breathing masks, protective gloves, not to mention intensive care beds, medical and nursing staff. Brutal procurement battles were the result. Aircraft loaded with medical products for Europe were simply hijacked and diverted by militarily threatening powers. Europe found no answer.
But the real health threat lies in the internal administrative apparatus of the European countries. An inkling of how things would turn out was given during the last summer months in Germany's school system. From March 2020 to August 2020, the responsible school authorities and ministries of education had a full six months to set up sustainable and resilient educational systems that could have offered pupils, trainees and students a modern alternative education even under the conditions of a virulent mass epidemic. Nothing happened! Instead, there has been complete inertia among teaching staff, trench warfare and class warfare in ministries of education and school boards over the ideological question of whether lessons should be digitized at all, and if so, whether they should be. Initiatives by parents, e.g., to purchase ventilation systems at their own expense in order to maintain face-to-face teaching, were thwarted by the bureaucracy with flimsy references to technology that did not comply with regulations.
All this then escalated to absurdity in the second Corona epidemic wave starting in November 2020. The way the first tested vaccines were repeatedly delayed in their use by the responsible health authorities made it clear how arrogantly authorities simply put the lives of thousands of people at risk just so that the paths of their regulations would not be disturbed. As for the licensing of vaccines, it was probably less about clarifying medical and pharmacological issues and more about evaluating legal liability issues, with all their familiar legal dalliance. The unprecedented impudence, arrogance and contempt for humanity with which the authorities dealt with the epidemic then became apparent when everything came to a head in the approval process in Europe during the Christmas holiday season. Both the European and the German authorities initially had the guts to announce a date for the approval only after the Christmas holidays. Exclusively in order not to disturb the holiday rest of the officials. When the storm of indignation broke out over this, things suddenly moved faster, but not more unbureaucratically.
No sooner were vaccines licensed than it turned out that there was not enough production capacity at all to supply the European population even close to the deadline in the next eight weeks. While other non-European countries have used tricks to gain advantages in ordering vaccines from European manufacturers and brag about having their population herd-immunized by the end of March, the European citizens are once again seen as the stupid sheep who have been fooled by their officials and have to be patient until well into the summer of 2021.
For the outrageous way of official passive resistance, the daily due report of the current corona figures can be used every week. How can it be that over the weekend no or only fragmentary figures are reported to the Robert Koch Institute, just because some state authorities think that they do not work on weekends and thus have to report. It is unacceptable that offices go merrily into the weekend even when people are dying of the disease every day.
