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Once a vaccine is available and enough people are immunized, the virus will run out of breath - this mantra has been repeating politics for months.

The first vaccines are now available, but problems arise with part two of the requirement, readiness for vaccination.

Ironically, the staff in nursing homes is said to be particularly stubborn - for Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) a reason to increase the pressure on certain groups.

In an interview with WELT AM SONNTAG he called for a new statement from the ethics council, which should deliver a "final assessment": "At the end of January we will take stock, and then we should ask the ethics council to comment on this sensitive question."

With this, Söder subtly brings the subject of mandatory vaccination back on the agenda for certain professional groups.

It is well known that such a compulsory vaccination has been in place for measles since March 2020.

So the coercion is legally feasible.

Should the ethics council also approve the corona vaccination requirement for individual professional groups or at least not reject it outright, the debate could flare up again.

As a whole, this committee has already clearly spoken out against compulsory vaccination and has referred to human self-determination.

However, individual members such as the Giessen law professor Steffen Augsberg consider compulsory vaccination for certain professional groups or areas of activity to be conceivable.

Augsberg told Hessischer Rundfunk in December whether the compulsion would be necessary in intensive care units, for example, depends on how many volunteered to be immunized.

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But the committee still thinks: It will work without coercion.

The chairwoman Alena Buyx, professor of medical ethics and licensed doctor, has just repeated: “For those who are vaccinated, fear of Covid is largely over!

Who doesn't want that? ", Buyx told the" Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung ".

Fractions in the Bundestag against mandatory vaccination

In the Bundestag there are also only a few who would like to have nurses or doctors forcibly vaccinated.

"At the moment, there is nothing to be said for compulsory vaccination," says the health policy spokeswoman for the CDU / CSU parliamentary group, Karin Maag, WELT, and initially requests reliable data as to whether the skepticism is actually as pronounced as it is rumored.

The Greens also consider reports of a lack of willingness to vaccinate health workers to be far from proven and warn against a blanket condemnation of entire professional groups.

The green reporter for protection against infection, Kordula Schulz-Asche, advises the federal government to devote more time to information and education - and to solving problems in the local vaccination campaigns, “not least in Bavaria”.

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How high or low the willingness to vaccinate in the care sector cannot currently be assessed.

Occasional reports of success are already coming from the clinics, from Bavaria, for example, where, according to the Bavarian Hospital Association, over 15,000 employees have already had their first injections.

Clinicians 'and nurses' willingness to vaccinate is significantly higher than assumed weeks ago, it said at the end of last week.

In other parts of Germany, too, such as Saxony, the willingness to participate in the hospitals is said to be high.

The university hospitals in Leipzig and Dresden report more inquiries than available vaccination doses.

In Dresden the readiness is "in individual areas over 90 percent", said the medical director Michael Albert.

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Apparently it looks different in nursing homes, but the picture is extremely diffuse.

Bernd Meurer, President of the Federal Association of Private Providers of Social Services (bpa), does not want to lump all institutions together.

In some homes, almost all employees want to be vaccinated, in others there are two-thirds who refuse the injection, as he said.

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A survey by the German Society for Internal Intensive Care Medicine and Emergency Medicine (DGIIN) and the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI), which the “German Medical Journal” reported on before Christmas, i.e. before the start of vaccination, also gave cause for concern.

At that time, around 73 percent of doctors, but only just under 50 percent of nurses in Germany signaled their readiness for the spades.

A spokeswoman for DIVI now said that these numbers were long out of date.

The FDP health expert Andrew Ullmann is himself a university professor of infectious diseases.

In his experience, compulsory vaccination could even be a great danger.

"Mandatory vaccination would be wrong and could even reduce the willingness to vaccinate in the population."

Instead, Ullmann advocates a sophisticated communication strategy to convince the population of the effectiveness of a vaccination and to remove the basis of false information.

"There is still a lot of catching up to do here, Federal Health Minister Spahn has a duty." A debate about mandatory vaccinations would only come into question if Covid-19 were a disease with the highest mortality, such as smallpox.

“Or if a vaccination makes it impossible to pass the infection on.

According to the current state of research, this is not the case. "

The AfD parliamentary group vice-president Sebastian Munzenmaier also clearly rejects an obligation to vaccinate, "because such an obligation contradicts our liberal image of man."

In any case, the AfD does not consider the Ethics Council to be the decisive address in this sensitive question: "The decision about a possible vaccination must be made by politicians, they must not hide behind a democratically illegitimate body such as the Ethics Council."

Berliners should be able to choose which vaccine they get

The criticism of the federal government's vaccination strategy continues.

In addition, there is confusion as to whether there is an option for those willing to vaccinate after a second vaccine is approved.

Jens Spahn says no, but Berlin's health senator holds against it.

Source: WELT / Perdita Heise

However, the chairman of the health committee in the Bundestag, Erwin Rüddel (CDU), had recently shown himself to be much more skeptical in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”.

The vaccination rates are too low in many places, says Rüddel, and he is not at all satisfied with the carers' low willingness to vaccinate.

"You have to ask yourself whether something went wrong in your training."

But even Bavaria's Prime Minister Söder is apparently not comfortable with the idea of ​​relying exclusively on coercion.

His idea: to lead by example.

“I also recommend increasing the willingness to vaccinate by also having role models from public life vaccinated.

With this, people realize: the vaccine is safe. "