Chaos in Germany

[Rwy in Sight]

It all depends if the Chinese vaccine has or can produce the necessary documentation.

[llondel]

It all depends if the Chinese vaccine has or can produce the necessary documentation.

Presumably in all EU languages, not just German.

[Rwy in Sight]

It all depends if the Chinese vaccine has or can produce the necessary documentation.

Presumably in all EU languages, not just German.

Obviously more paper more documents just like the EU style.

[OFSO]

Germans held Carnival processions in parking lots on Friday, in their cars, wearing costumes. Who said Germans don't have a sense of humour! Vorsprung Durch Technik, indeed.

[OFSO]

German Covid-19 deaths at marginally under 71,000 yesterday. Unused AZ vaccinations in store in Germany well over a million. (Source: France 24 this morning).

[OFSO]

Germany is famed for Vorsprung durch Technik, engineering knowhow and general competence. No wonder then that its Covid-19 vaccination drive is fast becoming a national embarrassment.

So far, the country has administered only 6.2m doses of the coronavirus jab, compared with 75.2m in the US and 21m in the UK. Perhaps most strikingly, it has 2.3m shots lying around unused.

“Even Morocco is vaccinating more quickly than Germany,” said Marco Buschmann, an MP with the opposition Free Democrats.


Bild Zeitung summed up the national mood last week with the front-page headline “Dear Britons, we beneiden [envy] you”. Britain had just announced it would come out of its lockdown on June 21, while “here there is no hope”, the mass circulation daily lamented. (The riposte from Bild’s UK equivalent, The Sun, ran: “Wir beneiden dich nicht.”)

This is in stark contrast to the first wave of the pandemic, when Germany’s crisis response was the envy of the world. It went into lockdown early, set up an exemplary contact-tracing system and quickly curbed the virus, ending up with one of the lowest infection rates in Europe.

But the second wave over the winter struck Germany much harder, with the more contagious British mutation stymying efforts to deal the virus a knockout blow. A shutdown declared last December is still in place and a shortage of vaccines has dashed hopes of a swift return to normal life.

Widespread public frustration initially found an outlet in criticism of the EU and its botched vaccine procurement strategy. But with millions of doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines now arriving in Germany, criticism has shifted to the German authorities and their seeming inability to administer all the shots they have.

“It was bad enough that the EU ordered too little vaccine, too late, but now we have all these jabs being stockpiled, unused,” said Ulrich Weigeldt, head of the German Association of General Practitioners. “It’s a scandal.”

Officials say shots are not just “lying around” but are being deliberately held back for the required second dose. But it is nevertheless clear that many thousands of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is restricted to those aged between 18 and 64, are going unused, largely because of its poor reputation with the German public.

“In the public debate it’s perceived — unfairly — as not as good as the others,” said Mario Czaja, head of the German Red Cross in Berlin. No-shows for AstraZeneca appointments are widespread.

But even to get an appointment in the first place, users must navigate a digital platform that has become a byword for clunkiness. Visitors to the portal, embraced by five of Germany’s 16 states, have to go through 10 online steps, including 2-factor authentication — a tricky task for an octogenarian. In Poland, by contrast, you simply enter your social security number.

“The system’s a piece of *****,” said one German health official in a state that had embraced the platform. He said he and his colleagues “want to shoot ourselves it’s so bad. I can’t believe we chained ourselves to this.”


The official said that for months the website was only able to give users one appointment — although two are needed for a full inoculation — and does not allow them to go on a waiting list to be notified when more vaccine doses become available. “It’s totally amateurish and incredibly inflexible,” he said.

The sense of shame is growing. “This chaos with the allocation of vaccine appointments is absolutely unworthy of a high-tech nation like Germany,” said Achim Berg, head of Bitkom, a digital lobby group.

Public perceptions of the system were not helped when authorities in the state of Lower Saxony mailed vaccination letters to a number of dead people, triggering public outrage.

MPs, even some from Angela Merkel’s centre-right bloc, have called for urgent action to reform the appointment system. “What’s been happening in the past few weeks in some regions, with people aged 80 and over being put on hold for hours and getting stuck in online waiting rooms — that’s unacceptable, it’s undignified, and it shows a lack of respect for elderly people in this country,” Ralph Brinkhaus, head of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, told the Bundestag last month.

Christine Aschenberg-Dugnus, health policy expert for the Free Democrats, said Germany should have spent last summer preparing for the vaccination drive and figuring out how best to distribute shots to its 82m population. “We missed our chance to digitise the entire health system,” she said.

She pointed to Israel, whose immunisation campaign was led by big health maintenance organisations (HMOs) rather than the state. “The HMO communicates with all its members over an app,” she said. “It knows everything about them and knew exactly who was first in line for a shot. That’s why it all happened so much more quickly than here.”

[k3k3]

My 84 year old MiL in Germany has received a letter telling her to phone 116 117 to make an appointment for vaccination, the number is constantly engaged. There is one COVID vaccination centre for more than 250,000 people spread over 630 square km.

I've just looked where the vaccination centre in Kreis Heinsberg is, Brüsseler Allee 5 Erkelenz, it's in the middle of nowhere, no public transport links, completely fu**ed up.

[Pontius Navigator]

But in Brit speak, she was offered

[OFSO]

Ze Chermans are ze motions goink thru, nicht wahre?

[k3k3]

Keine bewegung in sicht, nur eine Verkehrsmarmalade.

No movement in sight, just a traffic jam.

(Yes, I know a traffic jam is a Stau.)

[OFSO]

FT says Germany is paying four energy companies €2.8 billion to stop generating nuclear power. A really good deal. Wish I had a nuclear reactor in my cellar.

More seriously, how and from where do they replace the energy? German friends say - with eyeball rolling - buy it from France.

[OFSO]

German chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right bloc has been rocked by scandal after two of its MPs announced they were resigning following disclosures that they had personally profited from government deals to procure coronavirus face masks.

The announcements risk damaging the party ahead of two important regional elections next Sunday in the western states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate.

The polls are seen as a critical test for Armin Laschet, the new leader of Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, who was only elected in January and is still seeking to stamp his authority on the party.

[llondel]

FT says Germany is paying four energy companies €2.8 billion to stop generating nuclear power. A really good deal. Wish I had a nuclear reactor in my cellar.

More seriously, how and from where do they replace the energy? German friends say - with eyeball rolling - buy it from France.

It was some time ago, but the French had quite a few nuclear generators. That's partly why the UK imported the odd GW or so from France when they were either a bit short or it was cheaper than local fossil fuel generation.

[OFSO]

Taking the TGV train up the Rhône valley and you see nuclear power station stations one after another, all steaming away. Obviously no risk of tsunamis, which is why Merkel closed Germany's.

[bob2s]

The way the Green movement seem to be taking over I think it's time to start looking at shares in candle factories',also shares in toxic waste dumps given the huge number of wind turbines that are blighting the landscape.No Greenie seems to want to talk about getting rid of all the carbon fiber in turbine blades when the turbines reach their useful life.25 years seems to be the supposed life if not even less. All the detritus from solar panels etc.also needs to be taken into aaccount,they to have a limited life(a very short one judging by people complaining about the Chinese ones drop off in output).All this shutting down of
coal fed power stations and nuclear power stations that have given us reliable power for years is i believe premature as technology has a way to go before we can have the same reliability from renewable energy,I just wish people would look at both sides of the argument rather than just going ahead setting targets to phase out our present energy sources.

[OFSO]

The looming collapse of Greensill Bank has sent shockwaves through German municipalities, which held up to €500m with the lender that was not subject to ECB-imposed negative interest rates — but also not covered by deposit insurance.

German financial watchdog BaFin last week froze the operations of the Bremen-based bank and filed a criminal complaint over potential balance sheet manipulation, days before London-based owner Greensill Capital filed for insolvency.

People familiar with the matter expect a formal wind-down of Greensill Bank, one of the few German lenders that accepted large deposits without charging negative interest rates, within days.


Public sector clients of Germany's private sector banks stopped being covered by the country’s deposit insurance scheme in 2017 in a change prompted by the costly rescues of municipalities that banked with defunct lenders such as Lehman Brothers and Maple Bank.

Verena Göppert, deputy head of the German association of cities and towns, said that decision was “a mistake as it cannot be properly justified”.

Greensill’s German municipal depositors include the Hesse state capital of Wiesbaden (€20m), the university town of Giessen (€10m), the Cologne opera (€15m), and the sewage plant of a suburb of Hannover (€8.5m).

They also number one of Germany's 16 federal states. Thuringia, in eastern Germany, deposited €50m.

Heike Taubert, Thuringia’s Social Democrat finance minister, said the state banked with Greensill Bank in the context of liquidity management “to avoid the ECB-imposed significant fees”.

The ECB has since 2014 lowered interest rates into negative territory in an attempt to revamp the eurozone’s lacklustre economy.

Many banks — including the municipality-owned local savings banks or Sparkassen — have started to charge 0.5 per cent per year to institutional depositors. However, unlike public sector deposits at privately owned banks, those at savings banks are insured against the collapse of the lender.

“If we were depositing all our liquidity of €200m with our local savings bank, this would cost us €1m per year,” Axel Imholz, the treasurer of Wiesbaden, told the Financial Times. He added that Greensill Bank had unqualified audits, a high credit rating and was supervised by BaFin. “We cannot dispatch our own auditors into the banks,” said Imholz.

The situation in Cologne is particularly bad as the money deposited with Greensill Bank was borrowed for the construction and renovation of the local theatre and opera house — a €600m project scheduled to be finished by 2024.The city late last year received a €100m tranche of the loan, which was parked at several different lenders as it was not immediately needed, it told the FT.

Schadenfreude, sadly.

[OFSO]

The German Financial Authority BaFin did audit Greensill but were not allowed to publish the audit due to German confidentiality laws. Couldn't make it up, could you.

[Pontius Navigator]

The question should be asked, why did these lenders have €500m floating around.

Our UK District had placed its reserves with an Icelandic bank. The reserves were equally to two years tax take. Poof, gone.

[OFSO]

There are so many honest, safe repositories for spare cash, but Germans being somewhat limited in fiscal knowledge they only thought of banks, banks or, er banks.

"The best way to double your money, Mr Bond, is to fold it in half and put it in your pocket." (Auric Goldfinger, played by that splendid actor Gert Frobe.)

[OFSO]

Merkel is defying the EU and ordering the Sputnik vaccine from Russia. No wait, she's ASKING permission of Brussels to order the Sputnik vaccine from Russia. Wonder how long she'll wait for an reply. Meanwhile deaths in Germany rising exponentially. Source, F24 TV Right This Minute.