On Thursday, while speaking at a business summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the people who were unvaccinated, even when the fourth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic swept through Germany, should realise that they are duty bound towards the society to keep it safe.
Merkel, who spoke at an Asia-Pacific business summit as the invited guest of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, said that it was the responsibility of lawmakers to design the case for significant intervention strategies by being truthful to the public.
‘We have to make it clear that I have the right to get vaccinated, and that is a great fortune, a huge achievement of science and technology,’ Merkel said over a video link. ‘But I also have a certain obligation to contribute to protecting society,’ she added.
Covid-19 case numbers have risen in recent weeks across Europe, prompting experts to fear that health-care systems will become overburdened once more, in part because unvaccinated people are still spreading the disease to the elderly and vulnerable.
Though many of the unvaccinated are in age categories that seem to be statistically far more l likely to have milder attacks of Covid 19, they could still pass the infection on to elderly people with weakened immune systems, who could end up in critical care units despite being vaccinated.
Merkel, who was being interviewed by Microsoft president Brad Smith, went on to say that the obstacles of the pandemic and climate change were similar because they were both exponential systems whose intensity was difficult to be gauged at the beginning of a growth curve.
‘When you see the beginning of an exponential increase, you have to act immediately,’ Merkel said. ‘An understanding of what exponential means isn’t widespread in our societies. That’s also why we’ve been so unconcerned about climate change – it, too, has exponential growth, and we need to act now, when it’s not clear how the numbers will grow,’ she remarked.
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