The student movement against the Profits Before Lives policy, developing under the slogan #WirWerdenLaut, is met with overwhelming solidarity from parents, teachers and other workers. A team of reporters World Socialist Web Site reported from Frankfurt on the recent strikes by students against the epidemic and subsequently received countless statements of support.
“Finally!”, writes Susanne L. on Facebook: “That’s right, you all have to do it, every student, every teacher!” Uwe S. from Landshut adds: “Big from the little ones! That gives hope for a useful future!” A user comments on Tiktok: “I think it’s really great and very reasonable, as you think! I am fully on your side and I understand you!”
On Facebook, the WSWS reports on the student protests were “liked” by hundreds of users in various groups and commented on by dozens. Ulrike W. writes about:
“The students have been neglected throughout the Corona period. The school was always open for the benefit of the children. It sounds like mockery. Statements like ‘School is not a pandemic driver’ were made with full conviction – a joke. Equipping schools for digital distance learning pays lip service. With the current failure due to quarantine and illness of teachers and students, it is hardly possible to reach the learning quota. How many students have been left behind by this stressful situation because they received no support and could not be encouraged? How many students will leave school without a degree? What do you intend to do for them?’
Monika M., a member of the network of action committees for safe education, writes about the students’ protests: “What this government is doing is anti-child and anti-family. In the hope that a Karl Lauterbach would protect my grandchildren and children, I actually voted for the SPD in the last election – again after many years. What can I say: It really hurts when you have to realize that our government only defines the health and education of our children by having them attend ailing schools instead of introducing innovative educational concepts.”
Jennifer, an educator from Hesse, states: “If at least children from the vulnerable group were offered the possibility of homeschooling, one could ‘perhaps’ lose faith in a deliberate contamination for the benefit of the economy. However, since coercion is also used here and parents are threatened with reprisals up to and including being taken into care by the state, although Since everything is available for distance learning, those responsible have lost all credibility.”
The anger at Schleswig-Holstein’s Education Minister Karin Prien (CDU), who, as President of the Conference of Ministers of Education (KMK), is also responsible for the profit-driven infection policy at schools and daycare centers nationwide, is particularly great on social media. Kirsten E. explains this on Facebook under the WSWS report:
“At the end of the day, it’s all about the parents going to work. As far as Mrs. Prien is concerned, she didn’t care a weary mark about the children’s health from the start. By the time the children who are ill today have received their diagnoses of the permanent damage caused by Long Covid, her place has been filled and she and all her other ministers are happy about their salaries, while these children are immediately retired from school and thus for the rest of their have to eke out an existence at the subsistence level.”
Yessi H. reports on how children and their relatives are literally forced to become infected despite their best efforts:
“Because Ms. Prien wants the schools to be open by hook or by crook, my children have now also been infected. My daughter just before the vaccination and my son just before the booster. For two years everything was tried to prevent it from happening. Now the parents and children were not even given a choice. Vaccination for under 12s was only released shortly before Christmas. So you got an appointment in January and then asked to leave the child in homeschooling until after the vaccination. That was not approved – only in cases of hardship. And exactly four days before the appointment, my daughter got sick. What choice did I have as a parent?”
One written by several parent initiatives Petition, which calls for the resignation of Karin Prien (CDU) as Education Minister of Schleswig-Holstein and President of the Conference of Ministers of Education (KMK), has already received hundreds of signatures within a few hours. Prien had called for a systematic end to “tests and masks in schools” and spread the long-debunked lie that children “With Covid-19 extremely rare because Covid-19” would die. According to the politician, the fact that “children die” is “tragic”, but one has to “differentiate” according to the previous illnesses of these children.
The minister avoided the overwhelming criticism of her positions by deactivating her Twitter account. She received support from right-wing media and commentators, who slandered critical parents and teachers as “crazy terrorists” and “completely unleashed Twitter mobs” and called for them to be “locked up” and “treated”.
The reason for Prien’s breathtaking statements was the contribution of a Twitter user who had found that according to the official data from the RKI, the number of children dying of Covid is growing faster and faster: more children have died since October alone than in the entire previous period of the pandemic. Of the officially 65 Covid-19 deaths under the age of 20, 17 have died in the past four weeks. The authors of the petition point out that “deaths among under-20-year-olds are even individually checked and validated by the RKI”, so that the RKI’s statistics only include those children whose death “can be traced back to Covid-19”. .
In fact, however, the official number of Covid deaths among children is only the sad tip of the proverbial iceberg. The UK’s Office for National Statistics estimates that 12.9 percent of infected children aged 2 to 11 and 14.5 percent of adolescents aged 12 to 16 still complain of symptoms five weeks after infection. Scientists and medical professionals have long emphasized that Covid-19 is one of the most dangerous diseases for children:
“We do not know of any childhood illness that is as stressful as Covid disease,” explained Karl Zwiauer, pediatrician and member of the Austrian vaccination committee, to the Austrian broadcaster ORF in September last year. “None of the conventional childhood diseases that can currently be combated by vaccination has such a high disease burden as the SARS-CoV2 infection,” says the long-standing head of the Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at the University Hospital St. Pölten.
Aggressive denial of scientific evidence has characterized the actions of all government politicians, regardless of their party affiliation, since the beginning of the pandemic. Education ministers, in particular, have repeatedly resorted to pseudo-scientific studies to fulfill their mandate to “do everything possible to keep schools open”, while targeting critical students, parents and teachers with official attempts at intimidation. Prien himself had recently tried to play off the concerns of the students and the interests of particularly at-risk patients against each other.
Against this background, it is significant that Prien’s federal state of Schleswig-Holstein is already planning particularly far-reaching opening steps that will lead to the devastating development in Denmark being traced. In the state that borders Schleswig-Holstein, the exponentially increasing number of deaths is already exceeding almost everything that has been seen before. If the number of deaths lags behind the number of infections by about two weeks – as can be seen in Denmark – then in a few weeks around 1000 deaths a day can also be assumed here in Germany.
The adjusted hospitalization incidence was 11.75 at the threshold of the highest warning level of the RKI. Hospitalization incidence is currently increasing most rapidly in the over-80 age group (23.9 – an increase of 4.35 compared to the previous week), but it is also increasing rapidly in the second highest age group and among 0-4 year olds to.
According to the current RKI weekly report at the end of January, the even more contagious omicron subtype BA.2, which was first detected in Denmark, was already responsible for 8.1 percent of all new infections and threatens to further prolong the mass deaths. Israel, which usually precedes European developments by a few weeks, recently recorded more daily deaths than at any other time during the pandemic.
The inhuman views expressed by KMK President Prien are in fact those of the entire ruling class. At the end of January, Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach (SPD) spoke in a quickly deleted Twitter post of an “acceptable record of deaths”, which the current “plan” of his ministry envisages. Federal Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann explained last week on the talk show “Sandra Maischberger” that the aim of government action was never to minimize the number of deaths, but to allow everything that would not lead to an “overburdening of the health system”.
This was reported on Monday medical journal about the submission of a “gradual plan”, which is to be decided on Wednesday by the federal and state governments. The new “plan” calls for all protective measures to be “gradually” removed by March 20 – starting with the lifting of retail access restrictions.