Mr. Kalbitzer, the federal government wants to advertise vaccinations in the coming week with posters, soccer professionals and the incumbent "Miss Germany".

Is this a way of reaching vaccination skeptics - or should one rather increase the pressure on those who have not been vaccinated?

Sebastian Eder

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET.

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To advertise with role models is certainly a good partial tactic.

Pressure also works, the only question is what side effects it has.

As a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, I treat many freelance artists and self-employed people who are critical of vaccination.

They only get vaccinated because, as theater actors or singers, they are concerned that they will no longer be able to perform if they have not been vaccinated.

I do not know whether this does not have side effects for society as a whole if we do not convince people but force them.

Why are these people skeptical about vaccination?

The COSMO data from the University of Erfurt are very informative: It is mainly about a lack of trust in public authorities and experts.

You have to believe that vaccinations are worthwhile on the one hand because they work well and on the other hand they have no side effects and long-term consequences that could be suppressed.

I speak a lot to people who are skeptical of vaccinations.

They are unsettled by the activism of certain experts and journalists.

What do you mean?

Even if they are often portrayed as dull, many vaccine skeptics are very clever people. They become skeptical when they see that a biologist like Melanie Brinkmann, who has so far mainly researched cellular mechanisms in viral diseases, is becoming an expert in child infectiology and epidemiology during the pandemic and is promoting No-Covid. This blurs the line between expertise and activism. Many people notice this and it causes skepticism: Can you trust the experts, who also advise the government - or are they activists who are afraid themselves and do not speak objectively about facts? There has been a certain gold rush mood among scientists who can get a lot of attention very quickly in this pandemic.

Melanie Brinkmann recently told the newspaper Die Zeit that "several hundred children and young people" could lose their lives in Germany in winter due to Corona. In the NDR podcast, Christian Drosten said in the NDR podcast that he was annoyed by “both extremes in the public discussion”, that is, trivializing and horror scenarios: “Unfortunately, both extremes are also operated by doctors.” Drosten believes that this is the case "Destructive" because you incite the fearful and the careless against each other.

Brinkmann quoted figures from the USA and then extrapolated them. At least one would have to say that children are rarely tested in some parts of the USA - but in our country in primary schools. The number of unreported cases is then much higher there, which is why this calculation does not work. With many experts, I already know what they are going to ask for before I even read an interview. That’s a bad sign. It's different with Christian Drosten. You can recognize his quality by the fact that he sometimes corrects his own earlier assessments - that is real science and not activism. It is time for more objectivity. We are in a situation in Germany in which we have fairly safe vaccines and at the same time a virus that is becoming more and more aggressive due to its mutations. That's why it's important to convince skeptics.But that only works if you can trust that you are dealing with objective experts who speak about objective data and not their personal opinion, for which they then look for figures that are as suitable as possible.

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