Karl Lauterbach does not deliver what people expected from him: the Minister of Health lacks a clear strategy and clear announcements. With his lack of communication, he has dismantled himself since taking office.
As is well known, Olaf Scholz did not want Karl Lauterbach in his cabinet. The SPD health expert was considered too eccentric and erratic, not a team player. But in public, Lauterbach enjoyed a reputation like Donnerhall. If anyone could prescribe a clear anti-corona strategy for the country, so the general tenor, it would be the medical professor. Scholz gave in and made his party comrade Lauterbach health minister.
It’s been a long, long time. Before the next Corona winter and the next pandemic wave, Lauterbach is not the man who leads, but rather who confuses. Sometimes he recommends the fourth vaccination for more or less everyone, then he doesn’t want to know anything about it. Sometimes he gives the impression that anyone who gets vaccinated every three months can avoid the threatening mask requirement, sometimes he doesn’t think it makes sense.
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If Lauterbach were alone in charge, the restrictions expected for autumn would have been much tougher than the government had planned. But he had to agree on a compromise with less strict conditions with Justice Minister Marco Buschmann from the FDP. Among other things, the plan resulted in exempting people from the obligation to wear a mask in restaurants or at cultural and sporting events if their vaccination is not older than three months. This has often been understood as a request to be vaccinated every three months. Lauterbach himself said at the time: “This is an incentive for vaccination.”
dr Hugo Müller-Vogg is a journalist, book author and former editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).
The health minister resisted this in a tweet: “Do you seriously believe that people get vaccinated every three months to be able to go to a restaurant without a mask??????”, he replied on Twitter to a corresponding question – with 6 question marks. And added: “If we saw that really often, we would change the rule, close the exception.”
You have to have studied medicine at Harvard to understand what Lauterbach could mean. On the one hand, the mask should be able to save anyone who has been vaccinated within the last three months. At the same time, nobody should be vaccinated every three months just to avoid having to wear a mask. Yes, what now, Minister? Should the three-month rule encourage vaccination or not?
Of course, no one can know what’s in store for us in the coming months. Whether there are new virus variants, for example, and how the new vaccine adapted to Omicron will work. The experts are by no means in agreement when it comes to vaccination and wearing a mask. A health minister who follows a clear course would be all the more important now. Who tells the citizens unequivocally how he assesses the situation, what he advises and what he himself cannot know.
Lauterbach not only confuses the citizens. His relationship with the head of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Lothar Wieler, is not the best either, although the RKI plays a central role in fighting the pandemic. At the beginning of the year, Lauterbach publicly dismantled Wieler because he allegedly announced on his own authority that the convalescent status would be reduced from six to three months. As the “Welt am Sonntag” has now found out, Lauterbach’s ministry was very well informed in advance. Nevertheless, Wieler has been counted since then.
The health minister did not always play open cards with the state premiers either. At the beginning of the year he had promised them that he would inform them in good time and that their objections would be taken into account, but he failed to do so. The then Prime Minister of Hesse, Volker Bouffier (CDU), felt “personally betrayed”. Reiner Haseloff (CDU), Prime Minister of Saxony-Anhalt, accused Lauterbach of being “taken by surprise”. Since then, Lauterbach’s credibility has been tarnished.
Lauterbach, who came into office as Corona Minister with a lot of early praise, does not deliver what people expected of him: a clear strategy and clear announcements, especially before the next Corona fall and winter. In the flood of his interviews and media appearances, he shines with detailed knowledge, but confuses the public more than he helps them. What use is the knowledge of every new Harvard study if no instructions for action follow from it?
Nine months after taking office, Lauterbach dismantled himself with his miserable communication. “Mister Corona” became “Professor Mess” – a shame actually.
