For people who are not vaccinated against Corona, quarantine could also have financial consequences in the future. In numerous federal states there are plans to abolish the continued payment of wages for unvaccinated people if they have to isolate themselves on official orders. Bavaria’s Health Minister Klaus Holetschek (CSU) told the SZ: “It cannot be that the community has to pay for it if the risk of infection could have been avoided.” If someone does not get vaccinated, although there are no health reasons against it, there is no entitlement to reimbursement of the loss of earnings from his point of view.
So far: Anyone who cannot work because of a quarantine order – for example because of contact with a person suffering from Covid-19 – is entitled to state compensation. This is how it is regulated in the Infection Protection Act. In practice, this means that the company continues to pay the salary and is reimbursed by the state. However, people who are fully vaccinated usually do not have to go into quarantine after coming into contact with infected people – because the risk of infecting themselves and passing on the virus is considered to be very low.
That is why not only Bavaria’s Minister of Health has plans to end the continued payment of wages. In North Rhine-Westphalia, too, there are signs of abolition this week. The current wave is “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said Health Minister Karl-Josef Laumann (CDU) in the Düsseldorf state parliament: “If I take the liberty of not being vaccinated, then I have to for the consequences that arise from it, too take full responsibility personally. ” In Baden-Württemberg, the end of continued wages for unvaccinated people has already been decided from September 15th, Rhineland-Palatinate will follow suit on October 1st. There are also considerations in this direction in Hesse and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Lower Saxony’s health minister Daniela Behrens (SPD) told the SZ that payments would be ceased from mid-October onwards, after all, by then “everyone would have received a vaccination offer”.
Lauterbach considers wage losses for unvaccinated people to be wrong
However, there are also dissenting voices: In Berlin, the state government apparently has no intention of canceling payments for unvaccinated people, and Hamburg is also said to have no plans in this direction at the moment. The SPD health politician Karl Lauterbach wrote on Twitter that he thinks wage losses for unvaccinated people are wrong: “We just haven’t reached many of them with our campaign.”
The end of the continued payment of wages is legally covered. In the Infection Protection Act, the exclusion of entitlement to compensation for loss of earnings is explicitly provided if the quarantine could have been avoided by a recommended vaccination. Federal Minister of Health Jens Spahn (CDU) also signaled support for the decision of many countries. “In the end, it is the taxpayers who finance the wage replacement benefit – for someone who could have been vaccinated.”