“Traffic light” brings General against Corona – Handelsblatt Morning Briefing

The new location will make the football stadiums emptier and the vaccination sites fuller. It’s hard to believe that on Saturday 50,000 fans in Cologne, close together and often without a mask, watched the Bundesliga match against Mönchengladbach. Even if you had to be vaccinated or recovered in Cologne (2G) – that was assault with announcement. After his colleagues in the south of Germany with the permanently active topic setter Markus Söder in the pole position, Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil is now the first social democratic head of government to demand a general vaccination requirement. With Omikron there is a new threat, said the politician from Hanover: “We will have to make a massive effort to increase vaccination protection very quickly.”

In Italy there is a 60-year-old general, tried and tested in the mountains of Afghanistan, who organized a highly successful vaccination campaign. The vaccination rate there is 78 percent, the incidence is not even a quarter of the German value. According to the Italo pattern of the veteran Francesco Figliuolo, at the request of the designated Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a military should also take over the management of the Corona crisis team in Germany: Major General Carsten Breuer, 56, previously responsible for operations in Germany as commander of the German Armed Forces. It should start this week. Scholz: “We will do everything that is necessary. There is nothing that cannot be taken into account. “

The future colleague for finance, Christian Lindner (FDP), calls for better logistics for vaccinations and contact restrictions, but turned against the undifferentiated lockdown desire that has captured part of the media and politics: “From our point of view, curfews are an instrument , which has a very high social price with a benefit that has not been clearly proven. ”The“ Ultima Ratio ”is not always the last solution.

A right-wing populist millionaire from Lübeck just wanted to do pandemic protection himself with his own vaccines. Winfried Stöcker is the name of the man who has already donated large sums to the AfD and is now paying attention, he has developed his own vaccine and will test it on himself. At the weekend, volunteers wanted to vaccinate Stöcker against corona with the serum at Lübeck airport, which belongs to him. However, the substance is not approved. Only the police stopped the action, during which 150 people were waiting in the airport and 50 had already received a vaccination dose.

Incidentally, Stöcker also owns the historic Art Nouveau department store in Görlitz – there he canceled a planned benefit concert for refugees without further ado: “So many foreign refugees are not welcome to me.” He stopped the event, he said in an interview, “because I do not want to support the abuse of our right to asylum. ”

A few days after the SPD, Greens and FDP agreed on a new coalition in the federal government, there is also a political deal for a new government in the federal capital, Berlin – the big ungovernable ones, where the airport does not get beyond the charm and efficiency of a cruise terminal in Malta. The coalition agreement between the SPD, the Greens and the Left is to be presented on Monday.

But the governing mayor-designate Franziska Giffey (SPD) did not want to wait that long. She rushed ahead on Instagram and Twitter with the news that there was “a political agreement on all outstanding points in the coalition agreement”. Now the final editing work would be done on the text. In contrast to the traffic light coalition, the form and style are not right here. Other participants in the negotiating group perceive Giffey’s PR number as an “unsettled solo effort” – somehow “prototypical for the course of the last 36 hours.”

Of course, it is a joke in the history of the stock exchange that the vaccine manufacturer Biontech from Mainz is listed on Wall Street, but is not one of the top 40 German companies in the German share index (Dax). In the meantime, the long-time champion SAP has been replaced at the top of the most valuable companies by the industrial gases group Linde – a structure with a traditional German name and a gas division in Pullach, Bavaria, but has long had its tax domicile in Ireland and a de facto headquarters in the USA. All of this followed from the merger with the US company Praxair.

In any case, Linde now has a market value of more than 145 billion euros, four billion more than SAP. In the Handelsblatt interview SAP CEO Christian Klein, 41, is optimistic about winning back the hearts of investors: “SAP is becoming one of the largest cloud providers.” The bombast of words is only surpassed by Friedrich Schiller: “From the cloud the blessing wells, the rain pours; / From the cloud, with no choice, the beam twitches. ”

And then there is the Aachen pharmaceutical company Grünenthal, where the owner family is six Decades after her dangerous sleeping pill Contergan was withdrawn from the market, she first apologized to the victims. On behalf of the whole family and for the “entire content of this time of 60 years”, said shareholder Michael Wirtz. His apology is addressed to “a large and also essentially unknown quantity of affected people in Germany, but also in Europe”.

Wirtz was so compassionate in a recorded conversation with Georg Löwenhauser, once head of the Federal Association of Thalidomide Victims. Those affected expected a statement from the Wirtz family, “not hidden behind a legal entity of Grünenthal GmbH,” Löwenhauser had previously stated. Contergan with the active ingredient thalidomide was a sleeping and sedative that was advertised as harmless and sold without a prescription to pregnant women. In Germany alone around 5,000 children were born with malformations, around 10,000 internationally. “By repentance,” Shakespeare already put it, “the eternal wrath is satisfied.”

I wish you a peaceful start to the week.

I warmly greet you
you
Hans-Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor

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