By Kai Rebmann
Britta Ernst is the wife of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and was Minister of Education in Brandenburg until April 2023. An official reason for the Social Democrat’s resignation was never disclosed. While some observers rumor that her handling of the teacher shortage in local schools has been her undoing, others blame the extremely encroaching Corona policies for the chancellor’s wife’s exit.
Now Ernst has been caught up once again with her past as a measure hardliner and has been cited by the AfD before the Corona investigative committee in the Brandenburg state parliament. Accordingly, there was nothing to be seen or felt of a real will to come to terms with the situation – quite the opposite. At least that is the complaint of AfD member of parliament Lars Hünich, one of the driving forces behind the investigative committee of which he is a member.
Ernst overrode STIKO recommendations
Whether it was about vaccination, compulsory testing or masks in schools – Brandenburg was always at least one step ahead of most other federal states. The possibility of long-term side effects was also always denied by the Ministry of Education in Potsdam. And Britta Ernst even disregarded the official STIKO recommendations for the vaccination of children and adolescents.
However, the chancellor’s wife then shot the famous bird with a vaccination campaign of a special kind. A brochure told students 12 and older that they could be vaccinated with their parents’ consent. In addition, there was this note: “In individual cases, it is also possible without the consent of the parents. For this, detailed discussions with the doctor are necessary to determine whether you can consent alone.
It would be hard to formulate such a thing much more vaguely than that. For the AfD parliamentary group in Potsdam, these and other measures that did not prove to be nonsensical at best, or harmful at worst, only in retrospect, were then also reason enough to request several committees of inquiry.
SPD and Greens have no questions
From the very beginning, the SPD parliamentary group in particular showed remarkably little interest in an open-ended reappraisal of the Corona policy. Among other things, the comrades called the committee the “most superfluous investigative committee in the history of the Brandenburg state parliament” or “pure show event of the AfD parliamentary group”.
So it’s the old game in the German political circus. Just because an investigative committee was forced by the “wrong people”, it cannot per se be useful, let alone necessary.
What role do facts that have already come to light, such as an astonishingly high number of vaccination failures or glaring learning deficits among German children and adolescents as a result of months of school closures, play?
And so it comes as little surprise that the latest meeting of the Corona investigative committee in Potsdam began the way the last one ended a few weeks ago(reitschuster.de reported) – with stubborn stonewalling tactics. Brigitte Keller-Stanislawski, the former employee of the Paul Ehrlich Institute, who was again summoned as a witness, repeatedly referred to an alleged lack of permission to testify and was obviously unable or unwilling to contribute anything illuminating – if she was asked any questions at all.
The representatives of the SPD and the Greens actually managed to get through this phase of the meeting without a single question. The attempt to at least shed some light on the Corona darkness was thus reserved in particular for the AfD deputies present. But even this was all too often stopped by the chairman, Danny Eichelbaum (CDU), who criticized that the questions asked had “no direct Brandenburg reference”.
Chancellor's wife takes the stand
The second part focused on the interrogation of Britta Ernst. The former Minister of Education rejected as far as possible any responsibility for the measures she had approved – insofar as they affected schools in Brandenburg.
Member of Parliament Lars Hünich (AfD), who is one of the driving forces behind the investigative committee, explained in an interview with reitschuster.de that the chancellor’s wife had passed the buck either to the Ministry of Health – since she herself was not a doctor after all and had therefore received and followed recommendations from there – or even to concerned parents of schoolchildren.
According to the report, the latter had repeatedly approached the Ministry of Education, particularly on the question of vaccination, asking for a uniform regulation on vaccination recommendations for schoolchildren.
Example: In the summer of 2021, there was a vaccination recommendation on the part of the STIKO for children and adolescents between the ages of 12 and 16 if they suffered from certain pre-existing conditions. At the time, Britta Ernst lobbied the STIKO to extend this recommendation to all members of this age group – apparently to eliminate supposed “ambiguities” regarding the nature of pre-existing conditions.
Since on this day by far not all open questions could be answered, the chancellor’s wife must appear a second time before the Corona investigation committee in Potsdam. The corresponding meeting has been scheduled for Nov. 17, 2023, according to Hünich.
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Kai Rebmann is a publicist and publisher. He manages a publishing company and runs his own blog.
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