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The language of violence

by Marco P. Schott and Susan Bonath
"Newspeak" is what George Orwell called a language invented specifically by the Party to control the masses. Today, we are further along. The new language, invented specifically to enforce the Corona measures, seems harmless. Almost unobtrusively, the untruth creeps into our brains through frequent repetition. For example, it is often said that "the virus" requires a certain action.
The language of violence
In the Corona Crisis, the powerful hold the population captive behind bars of words.
By Marco P. Schott
[This article published on April 1, 2021 is translated from the German on the Internet, Die Sprache der Gewalt | Rubikon.news.]

"Newspeak" is what George Orwell called a language invented specifically by the Party to control the masses. As the famous year 1984 approached, it was said that the writer had been mistaken in his dystopian vision of terror. Things had not turned out so badly. Today, we are further along. The new language, invented specifically to enforce the Corona measures, seems harmless. Almost unobtrusively, the untruth creeps into our brains through frequent repetition. For example, it is often said that "the virus" requires a certain action, thus obscuring the authorship of state institutions. The Orwellian dictum "freedom is slavery" is also found again; compulsory vaccination and testing are sold to us as the path to "new freedoms." But the intensity with which the propaganda is currently breaking over us also leaves room for hope: Why all this trouble, wouldn't the powerful be afraid of an enlightened population capable of thinking for itself?

The Conglomerate
The governments of the world, flanked by their leading media and propaganda apparatuses, are swimming in the wake of an obviously megalomaniac RKI & WHO AG, Klaus Schwab's Davos clan (1), financially strong pharmaceutical corporations (2) and the usual suspects, the GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) (3).

If you want to get a very instructive overview of this global chess move, put in chronological order, I recommend Paul Schreyer's lecture: "Pandemic Plan Games - Preparing a New Era?" (4).

In any case, the ambitious conglomerate managed, in an unprecedented feat of strength and in only a few months, to reduce our existence to that of a caged chicken by means of regulations and a disturbing set of nonsensical rules.

With this, the basic right to free development and the right to work were unceremoniously removed from our lives. In addition to this painful shackle, there is also an oppressive muzzle of thought. Because with the propagandistically staged introduction of the corona denier, the mask denier and vaccination critic, in short the conspiracy theorist, the basis of the fundamental right of free expression was taken away: the expression of an opinion. Whereby it is claimed that all this has nothing to do with each other and that such claims are only the disturbed fantasies of some conspiracy theorists (5).

The control system
The makers of the control system of our brave new world are uncompromising against any criticism. No matter how reasonable the opponents present their arguments, they always meet with the same ignorance. Not only does anyone who confronts their dogmatic roller feel the fist of propaganda, no, in the not too distant future one will also have to reckon with finding oneself in a closed institution if one does not submit (6).

How could such a merciless control construct be established and enforced in such a short time? Certainly not with the benevolent consent of cooperative citizens. But neither could it be achieved by holding a carbine at gunpoint or carrying out executions in marketplaces.

Death squads were not necessary for this. Nevertheless, we have what we have: a state-imposed, media-launched health dictatorship!

A global dictatorship that first imprisons its population and then blackmails them with a generous vaccination offer and mass self-testing orgies.

The question arises as to how such a thing could become possible at all.

The answer is obvious, such a thing goes only with force!

But even if a fist, which rams itself mercilessly with not insignificant pain into a face, first comes to mind with this word, we have to do it in our case with another form of the force. Not a fist, but no less painful for that.

What form of violence are we dealing with? Certainly and definitely not one that emanates from the people. Rather with one that directly addresses our psyche and from there embraces the entire physique (7).

Violence with and through language
Generally, violence is defined as: the power, authority to rule over someone - state, judicial, parental, priestly, divine power,
unlawful action whereby someone is forced to do something.
Unfortunately, both definitions only describe the word, but do not explain how exactly the human psyche can be put under such pressure that people let everything happen to them.

Let's examine how our language is currently used. For what influences the psyche more directly, more immediately than what we read, hear and see - in short: language? As a reminder, who doesn't know the funny feeling of being told by grandma as a child, "You sure look pale!"

In George Orwell's novel "1984," the state language of Oceania is called Neusprech. Newspeak is the result of Miniwahr, the Ministry of Truth. Miniwahr is tirelessly engaged in optimizing Neusprech for its propaganda purposes. For this purpose, existing terms are modified and new terms are introduced.

It is about word creations and abbreviations. It is about reducing complex contexts to one word. In the end, the result is a language that keeps the thoughts and behavior of the population on track. Among other things, by and with an extreme simplification of the language, the citizens of Oceania lose their intelligence and thus their independent thinking over time. Newspeak is the extended arm of Oceania's thought police. Newspeak makes the speaker unlearn his thinking (8).

It is true that a fist still lurks in the background, but it loses its meaning, because the more effective, the actual fist became the language. A lever that starts directly at the psyche. This lever, the specially designed language, attaches its words and concepts like parasites to the psyche. And so these language parasites then steer people through life.

So it happens that word-infected people think, say and do exactly what the propaganda apparatus and the institutions of power want them to think, say and do. Thus, self-censorship is implemented into thinking and becomes possible at all. So much for the novel, but what does Orwell's dystopia have to do with our brave new world?

Obviously the role of language! One could even get the idea that the great creators of our game took Orwell's novel as a textbook.

Who knows, maybe they did (9)!

The big sister
As examples, I would like to cite Angela Merkel's bizarre message to the nation. On May 23, 2020, Angela Merkel stepped in front of the camera with her typical mien and announced to her people, "This virus is an imposition on our democracy!" (10)

Thus, in just one sentence, she officially declared a virus public enemy number one, Corona became an Emmanuel Goldstein. As we know, propaganda works best with a clearly defined enemy. Better said with a clearly defined enemy image. In Orwell's novel, his name is Emmanuel Goldstein. And like Goldstein, Corona is not really tangible, more invisible than tangible. More of an image than something real. But very dangerous and the only reason for all the distress. And like Goldstein, Corona has infiltrated a civil society, providing the justification for why we must sit in the cage of a dictatorship, in our case a health dictatorship, from which we can only escape, if at all, by vaccination (11).

It was not the government's imposed decrees that robbed us of our basic rights overnight and dissolved our freedoms like a lump of sugar cubes in tea, no, it was the virus!

And to enforce this delusion, it doesn't even require the barrel of a Beretta in our mouths. The only thing that was needed for this is the high school of propaganda together with all the PR agencies and an obedient police force. Whereas now a kind of thought police lurks above everything and infiltrates society with lies and word creations. Especially when it comes to muzzling the opposition.

Ignorance, by the way, is the best breeding ground for reaping the poisonous fruits of propaganda. That's why the makers of the brave new world with their zealous fact-checkers insist so hysterically that we only get to read and hear neo-speak. Because they don't want us to know, they want us to understand and act accordingly.

It remains amazing that this prison needs neither barbed wire nor cold concrete walls. Apparently, terms, concepts and ugly pictures are enough. Terms and concepts that could have come from the witches' kitchen of an Edward Bernays. Such schoolmasterly terms as: Spacing rule, spit guard, inoculation offer and superspreaders (12).

A fist strikes, both temporal and spatial. Constructed language building blocks, on the other hand, such as 7-day incidence, AHA rules, social distancing, vaccination strategy, chains of infection, vaccination offer, lockdown, dwell ban, curfews, and mouth-to-nose coverage now surround us all the time with a matter-of-factness that one might think it was never any other way. This is how normality is created. If the word matrix can be used for a comparison, then it is certainly for what is happening right now.

If someone were to make use of his fundamental right to free development of his personality in a public space, he could quickly be disabused of this right by an environment of conformity, identified as a mask rejecter, corona denier or conspiracy theorist, and put in his place accordingly. In this way, the self-appointed power apparatus secures control. The self-appointed neo-speak propaganda ministry stops people in their tracks and in their tracks. They obey!

Terms determine thought and action more than one would like, and can thus create a rather paradoxical space-time continuum. Suddenly, we are faced with a vaccination offer that leaves us no choice. Mind you, it was the virus that caged us, and now it is the government that offers us a path to a better world with its offer.

The staff of the Miniwahr (Ministry of Truth) have done their homework. They are experts at pushing people into painful doublethink dilemmas with their neologisms.

Doublethink is also a neologism term and describes the awkward circumstance a person finds himself in when he has to accept statements that contradict each other as a perfectly logical and reasonable entity. I dare to doubt that, over time, this doesn't make one feel like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Back to the vaccination offer. Of course it suggests freedom of choice, but at the same time the mini-truth brought out the term solidarity with updated meaning.

Solidarity now means you better get vaccinated, otherwise you are someone who tramples on public health, someone who questions herd immunity is a traitor (13).

It is obvious that the only way back, if at all, will be through vaccination. It does not matter how many people will lose their health or worse their lives in the process. We will probably not see and feel the full consequences of the gene cocktail for several years. Unfortunately, too few yet see that they are only being driven further into the same trap by this diabolical proposition.

This is doublethink. This is neo-speak in 2021. This is control with and through language. This is psychological violence. This is how an offer becomes coercion, solidarity becomes blackmail. Words lose their meaning and suddenly mean the opposite.

A distorted view and the completed puzzle
Slowly the puzzle completes itself, a picture becomes visible and shows what we are dealing with. Ursula von der Leyen's acting debut does nothing to change this. In 2020, Ursula von der Leyen put on a performance worthy of an Oscar by appealing to people's trust in their own, hopefully still healthy, common sense and, well, their trust in RKI & WHO GmbH & Co. KG (14).

In any case, the leading media deserved the bronze propaganda fist award in this game. They more than lived up to their task as mouthpieces of the entire power apparatus, in keeping with the motto "It's all a question of paying the right money" (15).

The gold-plated plastic bear, however, goes to the federal government. In order to give its health terror a sensible veneer, it reached deep into the mini-true propaganda bag of tricks. Let's take the oh-so-scientifically sound Leopoldina expert opinion of December 8, 2020 as an example of this (16).

The full story of the Leopoldina and its role as an extended arm of the federal government can be found on KenFM. The very differentiated interview with Prof. Dr. Michael Esfeld brings illuminating connections to light. Esfeld vividly shows how the Leopoldina was used and probably still is used by the government - one could also say "instrumentalized" - to give a pseudoscientific touch to its destructive prescription policy (17). And once again, the leading media act as mouthpieces and dutifully and obediently pass the expert opinion on to the public. At this point, our harmoniously cooperating government and leading media couple deserves "standing ovations."

This is how a fake becomes a working basis. An attitude, behind which supposedly the entire Leopoldina stands. Far from it, because in the meantime scientists of the Leopoldina are speaking out who claim otherwise. Unfortunately, or rather naturally, there is nothing to be found in the leading media. Of course not, because otherwise they would get one on the lid from Miniwahr.

Again it shows how the Miniwahr propaganda apparatus has harnessed the leading media to its cart. How else could the aberrations be capped in this world that is probably still far too democratic for them? And at the same time it explains why the less awakened, as before, dance to the tune of the violence-speech-control apparatus. Because without the devoted cooperation the usurpation would have failed.

We know how important the Volksempfänger was for the Nazis.

With bacon you catch mice ...
... and people with fear. With words and pictures, Miniwahr's Leitmedien-Propaganda-AG created a Kafkaesque parallel world in just a few months. With editorial diligence, a relatively ordinary, flu-like virus became a frightening monster, an unpredictable mutant. A true monster.

While the biological virus spread boredly around the globe, with no extraordinarily unusual consequences, leaving its usual traces of flu behind, Miniwahr's language viruses were able to create an unprecedented drama out of thin air. A drama in which some are earning a very golden nose.

The legendary phrase "Follow the money!" is more apt than ever, and following the money would certainly reveal remarkable money flows and things, perhaps something like a villa like the one bought in 2020 by Jens Georg Spahn and his partner Daniel Funke. I'll just say: "Employer of Spahn's husband sold masks to Ministry of Health" (18).

How did all this become possible? After all, we live in the 21st century. In a federal republic. In a constitutional state with human rights, a superlative Basic Law whose preamble contains such wonderful words as:

"Conscious of its responsibility before God and man, inspired by the will to serve the peace of the world as an equal member of a united Europe, the German people, by virtue of its constitutional power, have given themselves this Basic Law."

In order not to sully the fabulous wordwork with blood, neck shots and waterboarding were dispensed with as methods of violence. Miniwahr's top ten are not made up of brutes, after all. After all, they only mean well when they drive people into bankruptcy or insanity while their bank accounts burst at the seams.

So how was and is the unbelievable pulled off? After all, the full extent of the catastrophe is starting to come into view. Regardless of whether the stock index rises. We see the consequences, which could be summarized with the following sentence:

The greatest possible harm to the greatest possible number of citizens with the greatest possible benefit to the smallest number of the already well-off.

How do you get people to hang themselves in the attic? How do you get entrepreneurs, in full consciousness mind you, to give up everything they've built up over the years? How do you put this madness into practice without the help of a Gestapo, an SS, a death squad? How is it possible? The answer is sobering.

The uncomfortable fairy tale
With a well-told story, also called "story telling"! That's essentially all the mini-truth does all the time. It repeats the same fairy tale over and over. Day after day. Week after week. The fairy tale of the evil virus and the good vaccine. And to keep the audience interested, the fairy tale becomes more bizarre. Mutants or a Brazilian variant P.1 501Y.V3 can jump out of the bushes. This is how loosenings with handbrakes come about and, of course, these tireless perms. This maintains the tension. And because a wicked witch shouldn't tell her story herself, Miniwahr relies on the beaming smiles of his refreshing hosts and celebrities and lets them tell the tale over and over again.

In his fairy tale lessons, Miniwahr reaches into the bag of tricks of linguistic special effects and no less deeply into the bag of tricks of clever marketing surprises. However, they come across as a bit clumsy. Like this boring "Germany rolls up its arms!" campaign.

When I asked the Press and Information Office of the Federal Government which agency is currently advising the Federal Government on PR and advertising issues concerning Corona, I received the following answer from the head of the service: "... from his framework contract agency 'Zum Goldenen Hirschen'". If only she had contacted agencies like Hill & Knowlton.

For everyone who doesn't know Hill & Knowlton, they went down in history in 1990 with their incubator lie (19) as the best propaganda coup. And was hired by WHO in May 2020, get this, to put a breezier, more humane face on the restrictive Covid 19 prescription policy (20).

A document circulating on the Internet (21) reveals that Hill & Knowlton collected 135,000 euros for the job. If any agency can make a nuclear bomb look like a good thing, it should be Hill & Knowlton. When it comes to inventiveness and telling wacky stories, this agency plays in the top league.

Not quite at the top, though; that's where the Edelman PR agency, the largest PR agency in the world, plays. In 2019, its president and CEO Richard Edelman, along with other bigwigs from world politics and business, was part of the mysterious live-action role-playing for the over-the-hill, called Event 201. If one examines the planning games that have been taking place again and again for several years and their environment, one understands the remarkable synchronicity with which the governments have established the Corona Empire. If there was no collusion, then I don't know (22)!

Incidentally, the advertising and PR expenditures of the federal government amounted to about 150 million euros in 2020, and just 60 million euros crossed the table in 2019 (23).

We remember Hansel and Gretel, there it was hunger and gingerbread that drove our poor brother and sister into the clutches of the evil witch. Miniwahr's fairy tale lesson just drives us to hunger, and the gingerbread, well, that should be the injection into our upper arm muscle.

And those who don't want to roll up their sleeves for it will probably be thrown to the witch.

But after all, being there is everything, and prescribed immaturity injected with propaganda is the ticket to the great Corona empire!
Welcome to the infinite video conference!
I'm afraid the only way out of this loopy episode is to face this blunt propaganda, become aware of it, and immunize yourself against it with useful knowledge and actual education.

This still works best in the real world, face to face and without a mask.
In the end, it will come down to a matter of conscience.
Because in truth nobody stands behind you and says what you have to do!
It is always your decision!
And who knows, at some point someone will ask the question:
"What did you do then?"

Marco P. Schott, born in 1971, published the comic "Cracy Smarty," the story of a small square, in 1995, four years after graduating from high school, and completed an apprenticeship as a media designer in 1999. After confusing JobCenter measures and passable further education, he nervously read a text on a reading stage in 2006 about a man who was too nervous to get his life together as a writer. In 2007, he published the novel "The Green Star." Since further training as a screenwriter in 2013, he has been writing short stories, essays, film and theater concepts, and screenplays.

Sources and notes:
(1) https://www.corbettreport.com/your-guide-to-the-great-reset/
(2) https://www.lynxbroker.de/boerse/boerse-kurse/aktien/die-besten-aktien/die-besten-pharma-aktien/
(3) https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Corona-macht-Zuckerberg-reicher-article21958347.html
(4) https://wissen-ist-relevant.de/vortrage/paul-schreyer-pandemie-planspiele-vorbereitung-einer-neuen-aera/
(5) https://taz.de/Corona-und-Verschwoerungstheoretiker/!5675712/
(6) https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/polizei-bringt-quarantaene-verweigerer-in-corona-krankenhaus-100.html
(7) https://www.corbettreport.com/only-sociopaths-reject-the-new-normal-propagandawatch/
(8) https://www.deutschlandfunknova.de/beitrag/wortschatz-so-veraendert-corona-unsere-sprache
(9) https://www.corbettreport.com/stop-calling-it-contact-tracing-propagandawatch/
(10) https://www.dw.com/de/merkel-das-virus-ist-eine-demokratische-zumutung/a-54729946
(11) https://www.leonberger-kreiszeitung.de/inhalt.online-diskussion-mit-aerzteschaft-einziger-weg-aus-der-pandemie-ist-die-impfung.84a930a6-fcdc-47c6-a060-87e8b39ceda6.html
(12) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1F6HFDINE0
(13) https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/impfpflicht-was-denn-sonst-a-2846adb0-a468-48a9-8397-ba50fbe08a68
(14) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NR5lEAvar4
(15) https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/fernsehpreis-corona-berichterstattung-101.html
(16) https://www.leopoldina.org/presse-1/pressemitteilungen/pressemitteilung/press/2758/
(17) https://kenfm.de/mutigmacher-tv-wissenschaftliche-politik-interview-mit-prof-dr-michael-esfeld/
(18) https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article228841271/Arbeitgeber-von-Spahn-Ehemann-verkaufte-Masken-an-Gesundheitsministerium.html
(19) https://www.mdr.de/medien360g/medienwissen/video-historische-fake-news-folge-vier-brutkastenluege100.html
(20) https://dailycaller.com/2020/07/17/world-health-organization-coronavirus-celebrity-influencers/
(21) https://efile.fara.gov/docs/3301-Exhibit-AB-20200714-38.pdf
(22) https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1562-james-corbett-tackles-event-201-the-great-reset-and-the-end-of-humanity/
(23) https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1187817/umfrage/werbeausgaben-der-bundesregierung-und-der-ministerien-in-deutschland/
_____________________________________________________
The Clinic Lie
The overcrowding of clinics that has been conjured up for a year has not even begun to become reality.
By Susan Bonath
[This article published on March 31, 2021 is translated from the German on the Internet, Die Kliniklüge | Rubikon.news.]

Horror pictures from Bergamo, a daily bombardment with "infection figures", accompanied by ever new warning cries of an overload of the clinics: since March 2020, the policy justifies lockdown upon lockdown with a look into the crystal ball. But despite all the dystopias, a data analysis shows historically low utilization of German hospitals in the first year of the pandemic.

"Historically low bed utilization"
Germany is in a permanent lockdown. Hardly anyone can still comprehend the ever-new rules. With mass tests in schools and daycare centers, politicians are now also allowing the so-called incidence value to rise, and healthy minors are threatened with ever new quarantines. The numbers of those testing positive are rising, and as was the case throughout the previous year, medical experts are once again warning of an overload of clinics. The scientific director of the register of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI), which records capacities and bed occupancy, also tried his hand at politics: a tougher lockdown is needed to prevent serious cases.

The new dystopia is called the "killer mutation," a coronavirus mutation first spotted in the U.K. that is said to be much more contagious and deadly than the previous one. Despite all the promises made last year - "never again lockdown" - and without any proof of the effectiveness of the massive restrictions on freedom, German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) is now seeking nationwide curfews, while the political campaign for vaccination with side-effect-rich vaccines is in full swing.
But despite the dystopia of hospitals bursting at the seams, the reality is different: Germany has never had hospitals overcrowded with patients - on the contrary. An analysis by the Institute for Hospital Charges (InEK) found "historically low bed utilization" in German hospitals in the first year of the pandemic. The overload is apparently due solely to staff shortages and profit-oriented mismanagement in the healthcare system.

Millions of patients fewer than a year earlier
According to data published so far only in the Ärzteblatt, the number of treatment cases billed in 2020 actually fell massively by almost 13 percent compared with 2019, from 19.2 to 16.8 million. This means that in 2020, hospitals in the Federal Republic treated 2.4 million fewer patients than in 2019.

Authors Ulrike Nimptsch and Reinhard Busse of the Technical University (TU) Berlin recorded a particularly sharp decline in case numbers in small and medium-sized hospitals. There, the days of stay per patient shrank by 15 and 13 percent, respectively, and in large hospitals by 11 percent. Bed utilization has thus fallen to a "historic all-time low". Based on the number of beds, this was 75 percent in 2019. By contrast, in pandemic year one, small hospitals were just 62.1 percent occupied, medium hospitals 66.3 percent, and large hospitals 71.2 percent.

"COVID-19 patients" without COVID?
The new data confirm a partial analysis of 431 German hospitals published by the Initiative for Quality Medicine (IQM) in February. The conclusion from this: patient decline of more than 13 percent, fewer intensive care and ventilator cases, also fewer patients with respiratory diseases, which include the infection known as COVID-19.

The latter suggests:
Many sick people designated by hospitals as "COVID-19 patients" apparently have no COVID-19 symptoms at all.
The DIVI does not have case-related data; the criterion for classification as a COVID-19 case is a positive test, they said when asked by the author. However, the data of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) support this assumption. According to the data, since March 2020, pneumonia has been diagnosed in just under one percent of the approximately 2.7 million people who have tested positive in Germany to date. On March 23, 2021, this figure was 26,723 people affected. By comparison, German hospitals treat up to 290,000 patients with pneumonia each year.

A ZEIT investigation also revealed that up to 30 percent of all clinic patients who were identified as COVID patients came because of completely different problems, such as after an accident or for childbirth. They were only tested positive by chance. The Nordkurier newspaper, among others, reported on this.

No sign of upgrading of clinics
The much-vaunted mass rush to intensive care units also failed to materialize in 2020. According to InEK data, the large hospitals recorded about one percent more patients. According to the analysis, small and medium-sized hospitals treated five and two percent fewer critically ill patients than in 2019.

The fact that hospitals with fewer than 600 beds nevertheless complained of higher utilization of intensive care units had a different cause: they reduced their beds in these by seven percent from 6,697 in 2019 to 6,237 in 2020.

By contrast, as the large hospitals upgraded their capacities, the number of nursing places in intensive care units in Germany rose marginally from 26,581 to 26,787 during this period.

In other words: despite all the propagated horror scenarios and the financial injections from the tax pot and grandiose announcements by German Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU), the hospitals upgraded their intensive care units by a total of only 206 beds, while the government banished the entire population to an unprecedented lockdown - in order to avoid overcrowding.

Tax money for intensive care beds probably wasted
In March 2020, the German Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) had lent more than half a billion euros in taxpayers' money, which the hospitals were to use to increase their intensive care beds from an alleged 28,000 to around 40,000.

At first, it even looked like it. Last summer, for example, the DIVI register reported more than 33,000 beds at times. But the number shrank visibly. By the end of October 2020, DIVI had registered just under 29,000 occupiable beds, by the end of December it was already less than 27,000, and by the end of March 2021, the intensive care registry even showed fewer than 24,000 occupiable beds for adults.

Nationwide, fewer than 3,000 intensive care beds for children
According to DIVI spokesperson Nina Meckel, the recent decline in beds is only due to a change in presentation. She told the author at the beginning of March on request that the pediatric intensive care beds have now been excluded and are shown separately. Because: "Corona patients do not end up in the pediatric ward," Meckel said. But that does not explain the decline in the number of beds reported last year. This, Meckel said, is probably not due to the number of beds available, but also operable by staff. She cautioned:

"The lack of intensive care capacity, of course, has something to do with the glaring shortage of staff. In addition, there are isolation, protection and quarantine measures, and many nurses have had to care for their own children and are probably down because of that."
There are two scandals associated with this: the numbers reported in 2020 suggested many more intensive care beds than could actually be occupied. Second, the Federal Republic has a shockingly low intensive care capacity for children - on March 29, 2021, there were exactly 2,790 beds nationwide.

DIVI spokeswoman Meckel knows the problem. She spoke of a major drama that has existed for many years. "We have repeatedly drawn attention to it," she said. Despite all the reminders and warnings, nothing has changed to date.

Clinics broke, nurses unemployed or overworked
Following the profit logic of the market, the decreased case numbers in turn bring the hospitals into economic problems. Many hospitals are threatened with bankruptcy, as the German Hospital Association (DKG) recently warned. Because only enough patients who can be treated lucratively bring money into the coffers via flat rates per case.
Pandemic or no pandemic - where profits are shrinking, hospitals, like any other company, are cutting staff first.

A current example for it is the Asklepios Stadtklinik in bath Tölz: The private company wants to dismiss nine care forces there. The association of democratic physicians accuses the operator of "unscrupulous and profit-hungry profiteering in the health service". The Bremen-based hospital association Gesundheit Nord (Geno) also announced plans to cut 440 jobs by 2024. One must write again "black numbers", so the reasoning.

So it's hardly surprising: in the first year of the pandemic, the number of nursing staff in hospitals and old people's homes continued to fall. At the beginning of March, the Federal Employment Agency (BA) reported a decline of approximately 9,000 employees in this area in response to a question from the Left Party in the Bundestag. In Berlin, more than 800 nurses were sitting at home unemployed, according to the report. In the entire field of medical health professions, the BA recorded more than 4,500 professionals without a job in the capital at the end of 2020 - and that in a supposed health crisis of the century.

Sick people at risk from Corona policies
According to the report, the emergency in the healthcare system is less due to the corona pandemic than to the fact that politicians always left hospitals to market competition long before. That led hospitals to postpone treatments and surgeries every time there was a flu epidemic. Not only since Corona has nursing staff been chronically overworked and patients suffer from inadequate care.

In the spring of 2020, the federal government even ordered treatments and surgeries to be postponed to free up beds for COVID-19 patients. A lot of taxpayer money went to pay for those empty beds. For some hospitals, this was far more profitable than filling beds.

According to the InEK data analysis, case numbers in German hospitals therefore fell by 30 percent between March 9 and May 24, 2020. After that, they remained ten percent below the level of the previous year - despite the pandemic. This led to a dramatic shortage of care for patients with other illnesses - and to mass short-time working for nursing staff.

In July 2020, German Cancer Aid registered around 50,000 postponed cancer operations in the first three months of the pandemic. In December 2020, medical experts again warned of an undersupply of cancer patients. More and more procedures would be suspended. This, they said, puts those affected in a "threatening situation."

Clueless ministry, locked-down population
When asked by the author, the German Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) invoked the individual hospitals' own responsibility for staffing as well as a package of measures from pre-Corona times. Between the beginning of 2016 and the end of 2018, for example, the federal government had made a total of 660 million euros available to all of the approximately 1,800 hospitals nationwide to promote nursing positions. Since the beginning of 2020, nursing staff have also been remunerated independently of flat rates per case via a nursing budget, the spokeswoman explained. Just used it obviously nothing, as reality shows. Even more: To make the hospitals fit for the "pandemic of the century", the government did nothing.

Also, according to the spokeswoman, the BMG has no idea of collateral damage. How many cancer operations were postponed in 2020, clinics closed and beds reduced: The ministry has no data on this. Nor does the federal government know where the millions of taxpayers' money for more intensive care capacity has been wasted. And it probably doesn't want to know either. According to the BMG spokeswoman, many of the beds for which hospitals have received funding are "not, not yet, or no longer operational due to supply or staffing bottlenecks". Therefore, one could not speak of a reduction. On the basis of the DIVI data, the ministry could also not recognize a reduction. In short: Either nobody wants or can read these numbers there.

The BMG also attributes the low bed utilization to postponed treatments and operations. "As further cause a changed utilization behavior by patients is besides suspected , mused the spokeswoman. Many would have probably renounced treatment. The consequences are not known to the government and probably do not interest it. It is the population that will suffer in every respect - with one lockdown after another, inadequate health care, increasing impoverishment and lack of prospects, and presumably with endless depression.

Susan Bonath, born in the GDR, has worked as a freelance journalist since 2004 and has reported for junge Welt since 2010. Her main areas of work include criticism of capitalism, labor and social issues. She lives in Saxony-Anhalt.
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