Florian Schönhofer is angry. Not about the fact that he had to close his bar now. At the time in mid-November when he decided to take this step, he had to, namely not yet. The 47-year-old operator of Café Kosmos at the main train station is mad at the city of Munich and at the response from health officer Beatrix Zurek to his request. He wanted to reopen a vaccination center, as he had done earlier this year. But Zurek refused.
SZ: You have already set up a vaccination center in your bar at the main train station. How did it go
Florian Schönhofer: You need a resident doctor or a company doctor, a hygiene plan, tried and tested processes, material, personnel. I organized all of this in the summer and then we were allowed to vaccinate. Our company doctor was only allowed to vaccinate people from the relevant companies. So we vaccinated as many colleagues from nightlife and gastronomy as possible in the summer.
Then the incidence went down, so did the bar requirements, the vaccination quota went up, and you turned the vaccination center into a bar again.
Exactly. Until we said: This is no longer responsible, a bar in the current situation. At the same time I asked the city again whether we could function as a vaccination center again. Everything is still there, now even experience from the first time.
How would that work for you?
If I get a permit, I’ll go over to the pharmacy and have 60,000 doses of vaccine next week. We could then inoculate them around the clock. Literally around the clock, seven days a week, not according to the opening times as in practices and vaccination centers. And then there’s the location, right by the main train station, if that’s not ideal, all of this together.
But?
But I received an angry, succinct, email from Ms. Zurek that I would first have to deal with the subject under commercial law.
However, a critical examination of things is already appropriate on the subject. There has been some economic abuse related to the pandemic.
Sure, but we have already proven that we work well and seriously. And when it also says: We have a system in the city that works, then that’s nonsense, as you can see right now. When there was still no vaccine, okay, you could say from the country or the city: let’s organize it. But now? This is really a scandal.
How do you go on now?
I have 20 people on short-time work who would love to work. And I have doctors and nurses. And then the city says that they should help in the vaccination centers. Or we should look for a porter.
Why not?
Because the porters are all totally overloaded, have no staff and therefore cannot board. And because the vaccination centers do not vaccinate around the clock and are not central either. We have huge advantages. And we are night restaurateurs, we work in the evenings and at night when everyone has time to get vaccinated.
Do you earn better there than with the bar?
Oh, that’s not my point, otherwise I wouldn’t have closed the bar before the tougher rules. I didn’t earn anything from the first campaign either, but the doctors who vaccinate me must of course earn something. No, I work in gastronomy because I want to deal with people, because I like people in general and they are close to my heart. For the same reason I want to vaccinate them now, quite simply.
Doesn’t sound like you’re giving up now.
Under no circumstance. There is a variant in which we have to rededicate the bar as a doctor’s office, with a couch and everything. Then it would run across the Bund and could go. Because that’s what I found out. The federal government is different from the city. And if you have learned something from the past 20 months, and what the Robert Koch Institute repeatedly criticizes, then it is: We have to get out of this rigidity that things have to be approved and checked a thousand times over. I am an initiative from the citizenship. If we were to run as a municipal vaccination center, that would help immediately. Instead, the city casually tells me that it can’t be done that way. That’s totally annoying. We should create the conditions in the city so that citizens can get involved in this serious crisis. Anyway, I’ll stay tuned.