After the FDP, the Union in the Bundestag is also calling for an enquête commission to be set up to deal with mistakes in corona policy. The health policy spokesman of the Union parliamentary group in the Bundestag, Tino Sorge (CDU), told the F.A.Z.: "It now finally needs a systematic reappraisal of the corona policy." The goal must be to "learn from mistakes and prepare the country for future health crises." The Commission must be set up before the summer, demands concern.

Kim Björn Becker

Editor in politics.

  • Follow I follow

"Together with scientists, external experts and members of the Bundestag, she should shed light on the political decisions since the outbreak of the pandemic, especially their effects on our society and economy." The committee should subject the Corona measures adopted in Germany to a critical examination in an international comparison. "We will also have to look at Sweden and other countries that have taken other paths in dealing with the pandemic, possibly better than Germany."

Parliament can set up an Enquête Commission "to prepare decisions on extensive and important issues", as stated in the Rules of Procedure of the Bundestag. In order for such a body to be able to start work, a quarter of MEPs must vote in favour. According to the Rules of Procedure, the Enquête Commission must submit its report "in good time" so that it can be debated in plenary by the end of the parliamentary term. There are still about two and a half years until the next regular election date in autumn 2025.

At the beginning of March, the FDP, which is co-governing in the traffic light coalition, had already demanded that a "pandemic" enquête commission had to be set up. "We must not now make the mistake of forgetting and simply carrying on as if nothing had happened," said the health policy spokesman of the FDP parliamentary group, Andrew Ullmann.

In a position paper, the FDP states that the commission it is striving for must "comprehensively identify and work through the uncovered deficiencies in the crisis capacity of our educational, social, economic and health system as well as the constitutional state divided by powers in the sense of improving resilience". This should be done according to scientific criteria. "Of course, it should not be about breaking the baton over political decision-makers who had to make serious decisions about life and death in an unclear information situation," said Bundestag Vice President Wolfgang Kubicki (FDP). "That would be cheap and populist."

The CDU health politician Tino Sorge accuses the incumbent Federal Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach (SPD), that he is now "secretly" glossing over his sometimes drastic positions of recent years. Among other things, concern related to Lauterbach's recent announcement that he wanted to better help the victims of the corona vaccination campaign in the future; Lauterbach had previously given the impression on Twitter that damage was practically not to be expected. At the beginning of the pandemic, the CDU in the form of Jens Spahn provided the Federal Minister of health.

A research by the F.A.Z. recently showed that almost 300 applications for care services for corona vaccine victims have now been recognized by the state authorities nationwide. This is almost twice as many as in October, when the F.A.Z. last collected the data. In total, almost 65 million people in Germany have received at least one vaccination against Sars-CoV-2; mathematically, there is currently a recognized vaccine damage to about 220,000 vaccinated. The corona vaccination is therefore still considered very safe overall.