Upset in Germany over the vaccination in Munich of hotel employees arriving from Italy

The German Health Minister, Jens Spahn, during the presentation of the digital covid passport, last week in Berlin.ANDREAS GORA / POOL / EFE

Since when has there been a free market for vaccines in the European Union? The question is heard these days in the German media after it became known that a luxury hotel complex in Sardinia (Italy) paid for the plane trip of its hundred employees to Munich, the capital of Bavaria, to be vaccinated there. The answer is that it does not exist, it is not legal, but it has happened. And nothing less than in "strict Germany", as the Italian public television program RAI3 calls it, which uncovered the case on May 30. The manager of the Forte Village complex appears saying that, given the slowness of the Italian public health system, his company had decided to contract the vaccination in Germany to create “a protective environment” for its guests this summer.

The case threatens to create a new problem for the German Health Minister, Jens Spahn, because the Munich doctor who punctured the vaccines has said that the trip was organized by someone from the federal government and has suggested that the reason is that "they spend their holidays there" .

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That a foreign company can access 100 doses of BioNTech-Pfizer for payment in Germany has felt very bad in a country that still has half of its population waiting for the first immunization and whose vaccination system has been chaotic and arbitrary since in In April private doctors' consultations were allowed to decide who gets the doses. The lack of control has led to a drain through which healthy young people have been vaccinated earlier than sick people or those over 60 years of age. Several opposition politicians, as well as Bavarian President Markus Söder, from Angela Merkel's sister party of the CDU, have criticized what happened in Munich and wonder how it could have happened. Many questions remain in the air:Who authorized people who do not reside in Germany and do not have German health insurance to be vaccinated? Did the contract include, in addition to the trip, the cost of the doses? And the most important: Where did the vaccines come from?

It was the

resort

itself

the one that alerted journalists by announcing in a press release that it had vaccinated all its staff to prepare for the summer season. In the RAI program the manager tells it as if it were the most normal thing: “We took the flight in Cagliari at nine in the morning. At eleven o'clock we were in Bavaria. At half past twelve we were finished. In the intermission we waited with Bavarian beer and at five o'clock we returned to Cagliari with our vaccination certificate ”. The program also interviewed the German doctor in charge of the punctures, Udo Beckenbauer, a well-known internist in Munich with a private practice in the city center. "It was an exceptional situation, it is not common," he acknowledges. The journalist who interviews him then asks him if any company could contract with him a vaccination of foreigners:"If I register them as my patients, yes." Beckenbauer assured on its website - disabled and "under maintenance" since Monday - that its clients are large multinationals.

A questioned minister

The doubts about what happened are added to the problems that Spahn already drags, questioned by another scandal that has not yet been completely clarified: the supposed attempt to place millions of masks of questioned quality that his ministry had bought among disadvantaged people: homeless, disabled and recipients of the minimum income.

The opposition is studying how to investigate the case, whether through a commission of inquiry in the Bundestag or by entrusting it to the Court of Auditors.

The deployment of free test centers, without control and taken advantage of by some businessmen to defraud the State, is also pending analysis.

The SPD and the Greens, in the middle of the pre-campaign, hit Spahn with both questions as soon as they get the chance.

The vaccination scandal grew in intensity after this Sunday the program broadcast a second part of the interview and Beckenbauer assured that the German Government had participated in the organization of the Italian workers' trip. "I do not know why. They asked me to give the vaccines, "he added to the surprise of the journalist. "For some reason it was allowed," he continued. Employees of the Italian holiday resort practically did not have to leave the airport. They were vaccinated at a hotel located between Terminals 1 and 2, the Hilton Munich Airport. It happened on May 21, more than two weeks before authorities lifted the prioritization and allowed everyone over 12 to make an appointment to get vaccinated.The journalist asked several times why the German government had helped a private company. "Because they go there on vacation," said the doctor. “At the airport there were many doctors; it was kind of organized, ”Beckenbauer added. "Confusion about the role of the federal government," headlined this Monday

Süddeutsche Zeitung

, the first German medium to tell the story.

The Ministry of Health has denied having participated in the organization of that trip.

He also claims to know nothing, much less to have authorized the Bavarian Health Department, the federal state where the irregular vaccination occurred.

But neither one nor the other clarifies where the vaccines came from or if they are investigating to demand responsibility.

The Government of Bavaria did not respond to the request for information from EL PAÍS about the status of the investigation.

On Monday, Beckenbauer backed down through his attorney, Thomas Pfister, who called his client's statements "inaccurate."

"The Ministry of Health and Mr. Spahn had nothing to do with it," he added in statements to the

Süddeutsche Zeitung.

, who asked him if he had received any calls from Berlin to change his story. The Munich doctor made these statements "out of an exaggerated need for recognition and a certain naivety in dealing with the media," according to his lawyer.