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Passengers at the airport: can you throw drunk people out?
Photo: AJ_Watt / Getty Images
At the beginning, a shocking news: In Germany there is already merciless selection based on the current Corona status, daily, hundreds or thousands of times.
A scandal!
And hardly anyone talks about it!
The simple truth is: In many places, for good reason, it is required that you do a rapid corona test before you can do anything.
For example, visiting elderly relatives in an old people's or nursing home.
If there should have been a heated debate about "test privileges" on this topic, I beg your pardon: In any case, it passed me by unnoticed.
No interviews with the Ethics Council
But I also don't think that such a debate is necessary: it would be irresponsible and completely absurd not to use the opportunity to limit the risk of infection in this way.
Presumably, therefore, there is no heated debate and no members of the German ethics council have to give interviews to professionally classify the blatant privileges of tested nursing home visitors.
Incidentally, there are similar regulations in other places: cruise operators, for example, have their employees and passengers tested for the corona virus before they are allowed to go on board, which probably has to do with the various corona outbreaks on cruise ships in 2020.
Is vaccination opposition a "worldview"?
It goes without saying that private companies have the right to decide for themselves who they want to serve and who not, especially when it comes to protecting the rest of their customers.
The exceptions are in the General Equal Treatment Act.
This provides that "discrimination based on race or ethnic origin, gender, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual identity must be prevented or eliminated".
Christian Stöcker, arrow to the right
Photo: SPIEGEL ONLINE
Born 1973, is a cognitive psychologist and has been a professor at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW) since autumn 2016.
There he is responsible for the "Digital Communication" course.
Before that, he headed the Netzwelt department at SPIEGEL ONLINE.
The only one of these criteria that could even come close to "not vaccinated", and even that only under questionable conditions, would be: If one interprets the refusal to vaccinate as an expression of a "worldview".
That would mean, however, that conspiracy theories will be declared an official quasi-religion with all the corresponding privileges in the future.
It is to be hoped that no one intends to do this, because if there is no special medical indication, people who refuse to be vaccinated are actually antisocial solidarity refusers.
But this is a topic for the desirable future, in which everyone
could be
vaccinated
.
Can you throw drunk people out?
If you listen to the right-wing politicians of the Union and the SPD who have recently spoken out on this issue, you might think that they already have other plans.
"It is unacceptable that airlines only take vaccinated people with them or that restaurants deny access to non-vaccinated people," said Johannes Fechner, legal policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, at the end of December.
His colleague Volker Ullrich from the CSU regional group recognized "a regulatory loophole that we have to address".
Many bars and clubs have, in normal times, bouncers throwing out bullying drunks.
They do this because bullying drunks may spoil the evening for the other guests.
Is that also a "loophole"?
Unless there is a specific medical indication, those who refuse to be vaccinated are actually anti-social solidarity refusers.
After all, a corona infection doesn't just spoil an evening, but possibly the rest of your life.
Anyone who tries to extend the General Equal Treatment Act to the issue of "may be the carrier of a potentially fatal disease" will, at least that would be my assumption as a legal layperson, collide with great force with the Federal Constitutional Court.
Constitutional lawyers see it similarly.
As superfluous as it is absurd
The debate and the term "vaccination privileges" are otherwise as superfluous as they are absurd for several reasons.
There is currently not enough vaccine for anyone who wants to be vaccinated anyway.
If there is a privilege, it is to be vaccinated in the first place.
It is still unclear whether vaccinated people really no longer pose a risk of infection.
In most situations, "privileges" make little sense to individuals anyway.
Everyone has to keep their distance, but not me, is my vaccination certificate here?
Just imagine that in practice.
What you have to have a vaccination or test for is not only decided at national level.
This is not a national issue
The last important point in the list above has been little discussed so far.
The topic of testing and vaccination will play a central role in the foreseeable future, especially in international travel.
A few examples: In the "Executive Order" of the new US President Joe Biden on Corona containment with regard to travel, it says, among other things, that one will check whether Covid-19 vaccinations can be linked to international vaccination certificates and then produce electronic versions of them could.
Denmark is currently having digital passports produced that can be used to prove a corona vaccination.
The international aviation organization IATA is developing a "Travel Pass" with information about tests and vaccinations.
Several airlines want to use it.
And of course, individual countries have long since passed specific regulations governing who is allowed to enter and under what conditions.
We have long been privileged
These developments take place quickly and completely independently of the considerations of German politicians.
There will be real "vaccination privileges" especially in global travel, whether the Union and the SPD consider this to be justifiable or not.
This in turn opens up a view of a post-pandemic world in which such clearance certificates could in future be part of everyday life at the borders, at airports and train stations around the world: In this world, which has certainly become more cautious in the long term, there may be a new class of actually particularly privileged people who, thanks to their perfect vaccination status and certified health, can enter and leave the country particularly quickly and easily.
Fast track
for vaccination card holders.
more on the subject
Icon: Spiegel PlusIcon: Spiegel Plus Corona bottleneck: How the state could quickly provide more vaccination dosesAn analysis by Kristina Gnirke, Martin U. Müller, Thomas Schulz and Gerald Traufetter
Of course, such privileges have long existed: for the Japanese, citizens of Singapore, South Korea - and for Germans.
Their passports are currently the most useful in the world, they allow visa-free entry into almost all countries on the globe.
The post-corona caution will further intensify this international type of privilege or, depending on your point of view, discrimination in case of doubt: Those who come from a rich country are allowed to do more.
Icon: The mirror
