You gradually lose your desire to look for funny punchlines in the Corona talk rounds. The situation now seems too serious, the discussions are too similar – and too little happens in the end. “Another Corona winter: Will the hospitals hold out?” Is the subject of this “Hard but fair” program, and as bitter as it sounds: It is beneficial for the debate that only two out of six guests are politicians that evening .
The broadcast begins – strong and different than usual – with a seven-minute report from the corona station, which the pulmonologist Cihan Çelik runs at the Darmstadt Clinic. You can see the staff juggling beds. “What a lot of people have to understand, of course, is that the bottleneck is not equipment and beds that you can lie in, but nurses and staff who have to look after the people,” says Çelik.
A 32-year-old patient who speaks with a weak voice and a breathing tube in his nose is particularly impressive. When Çelik asked why he hadn’t had himself vaccinated, he just put his hand to his head. “It was crazy not to do it. You can see where it is going,” he says. “I would get vaccinated every week now, for me.”
The contribution and Çelik’s descriptions make it clear what gigantic problems the hospitals are currently facing. So it seems all the smaller how the two invited politicians initially practice pointing the blame on one another. CSU General Secretary Markus Blume reinforces “the regulation that the traffic light parties have now decided in the Bundestag”, the Deputy Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Joachim Stamp, FDP, counters: “Mr. Blume, you had the corresponding measures much earlier have to decide, and you know it too. “
Getting angry about unvaccinated people in a really Christian way, that’s possible
In contrast, the new chairwoman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, Annette Kurschus, is refreshingly clear. A person can be annoyed “also in a Christian way” about another, she says about the resentment that many vaccinated people feel towards opponents of the vaccination. Her comment on the compulsory vaccination: “I am changing a position. We are learning.” Only to postpone later: “We now have such a highly dangerous situation. Now protecting the vulnerable groups is more important than bringing together different opinions.”
CSU man Blume, known to play in Söder’s “Team Caution”, also refers to “processes that everyone had in their heads” and advocates a general vaccination requirement. And when he leaves his desk and stands in front of the FDP man Stamp, moderator Plasberg finally even squeezes a kind of commitment to the obligation to be imposed from him. “When we look at how we want to get out of this spiral, I too have a great deal of skepticism about how it should work differently,” he says. And: “Personally, I can imagine it, yes.” The politicians do not specify exactly how a compulsory vaccination would be controlled and sanctioned. To begin with, the signal is crucial, says Blume.
Plasberg concedes the closing words to the church woman Kurschus. In 50 seconds she should formulate what she would like from the politicians. Their answer: “That in what they decide and do they really see the people first and not the potential voters who give them their votes.” No punch line.
Kathrin Müller-Lancé would like to claim that she only visits the Arte media library. But then she likes to look exclusively at RTL to see what the celebrities are doing.