It is a "private opinion" - which, thanks to a ministry letterhead, is making waves: An employee of the interior department shoots sideways. Now it is slowed down.
- In a heated mood, an employee of the Interior Ministry is causing the next scandal - he is reprimanding the corona measures with an official letterhead.
- Minister Horst Seehofer's (CSU) house reacted clearly on Sunday.
- The number of corona cases meanwhile exceeds the officially set limit values in several counties.
- Here is our Corona Virus Reporting Guide * and our “Corona News” on Facebook. The current Corona case numbers for Germany can be found here as a map *.
Berlin - With increasing sharpness, measures to protect against the corona pandemic are being debated - apparently there are disagreements in individual cases even into the German executive. For example, an employee of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) commented critically on the corona measures in a supposedly official mission.
The timing of the mini-scandal is delicate: at the weekend, people across Germany protested against the restrictions in the pandemic - sometimes ignoring the rules necessary to protect against infection. At the same time, infection indicators are rising again in Germany. The author of the letter is now feeling the consequences of official law. He had no responsibility, mandate or permission for his statements.
Corona virus: private opinion via official channels - BMI employee causes a scandal
The employee had "in a multi-page document using the BMI letterhead and official communication channels its critical private opinion on the Corona-crisis management of the federal government distributed", the house explained by department chief Horst Seehofer (CSU) on Sunday in Berlin.
"In-house measures" ensure that he can not continue, the statement said. According to a Spiegel report, the 80-page paper is said to have gone to a large distributor both internally and externally. At the weekend it ended up on the controversial right-wing side of Tichy's insight - where the speaker was depicted as a kind of whistleblower.
Corona virus: "Global false alarm" - Ministry employees acted without permission
In the paper, the author takes the view that dealing with Covid-19 is a "global false alarm". The danger of the new type of corona virus is "not greater than that of many other viruses". The measures ordered by the authorities caused more damage than they used. In the Corona crisis, the state may have to accept the accusation of being "one of the largest Fakenews producers".
"As far as is known, the drafting was also carried out with the participation of third parties outside the Federal Ministry of the Interior," says the House's statement. Recently, many experts, including the well-known virologist Christian Drosten , had appealed to the social networks, among others, to stop the spread of fakenews on the Corona theme.
Corona in Germany: Seehofer employee shoots sideways - "not acceptable"
The independent "analysis" of the employee now took place outside the functional responsibility of the author and the organizational unit in the ministry for which he worked, the Interior Ministry said. "There was no order or authorization for this compilation."
It is not acceptable for private opinions and collections to be written using official symbols, such as the official letterhead, and made available to the public.
Horst Seehofer CSU party friend and Bavaria's interior minister Joachim Herrmann did not comment critically on the events of individual corona demonstrations in Bavaria until Sunday in an interview with Munich's Merkur *.
AFP / fn
* Merkur.de is part of the nationwide Ippen-Digital editors network.
