Spiders, mice, golden retrievers: when health ministers meet animals, things can get exciting. This is shown by an incident at a press conference in Australia.
As a health minister, you fight on many fronts. At the front of syphilis, for example, foot-and-mouth disease or swine rash. You can protect living beings from syphilis, foot-and-mouth disease and swine rash if you are not afraid that the drugs would be bad for your physical integrity. It’s just stupid when you have a completely different problem on your leg. Like the Australian Minister of Health, Yvette D’Ath. When she was giving a Corona press conference, a journalist shouted: “Minister, you have a spider there!” On the leg.
Now it’s always such a thing with verbal contributions from journalists at press conferences. As a politician, you should never let yourself be disturbed. Otherwise what happens to you what once happened to GDR man Günter Schabowski when the journalist Riccardo Ehrman asked: You give some kind of answer (for example: “Private trips abroad are allowed immediately”) and – bang – everything is different. So the Minister of Health kept calm and then said, “Okay, can someone please remove this spider?”
For something like that you have subordinates, in this case the Chief Health Officer Dr. John Gerrard, who studied at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Dr. Gerrard had some paper in hand with which he successfully removed the Huntsman spider from the politician’s leg. Fortunately, nothing happened to the spider, otherwise there would have been a shit storm from the animal rights activists. The minister then said: “See how controlled I can be” – and continued the conference.
A giant crab spider on a palm tree, such a specimen was now also on the leg of the Australian Minister of Health, Yvette D’Ath.
(Photo: Joshua Prieto via www.imago-images.de/imago images / ZUMA Wire)
Health ministers are now more and less lucky with animals. Jens Spahn was once resented for a photo in which he was seen with Lola, the dog of the US Ambassador Richard Grenell, who is not very popular in Germany. The former Austrian Health Minister Rudolf Anschober, however, was reprimanded for a Facebook photo in which he hugged his Golden Retriever Agur. Anschober wrote: “That was a good weekend.” In the middle of the pandemic, many saw it differently. And the North Rhine-Westphalian Minister of Health Karl-Josef Laumann recently had a problem with animals. His canteen was closed because of mouse infestation.
After all, neither Lola nor Agur nor Laumann’s mice posed a threat to humanity. Incidentally, not from the spider on the minister’s leg, which looks terrifying but whose bites are not dangerous to humans. In this respect, everyone can now take care of the “tiger” again, as Karl Lauterbach (what was he again?) Calls the corona virus.