Dr. Johann Reisinger is head of the internal intensive care unit of the Sisters of Mercy in Linz. Of all Covid patients in intensive care units, around 80 percent are older than 50 years, and most of them have known risk factors such as high blood pressure, heart failure or diabetes, reports the doctor. Of the patients younger than 50 years of age who end up in an intensive care unit with Covid, 80 percent are more or less overweight.
“Perhaps the envisaged compulsory vaccination should be restricted to these groups of people and the cornucopia of vaccination should not be uniformly emptied across the entire population (including healthy children and adolescents). Perhaps such a compromise would calm the socio-politically heated situation somewhat, which would certainly be urgently needed, ”the intensive care doctor wrote in a letter to the editor in“ OÖN ”.
Reisinger sees himself sitting in the middle of the argument. On the one hand, there are those who, unimpressed by overcrowded intensive care units and high death rates, try to suppress the sad reality and sometimes demonstratively play into the hands of the virus.
On the other hand, there is a pharmaceutical industry that largely “forgot” when designing the large vaccination studies on people over the age of 75 who were most at risk from Covid and “apparently acted suboptimally when carrying out the studies, as well as with the purchase contracts for the vaccine proceeds with a lack of transparency and callousness ”, as the doctor continues.
Speaking of suboptimal: The doctor also criticizes politics: “Next to it there is a somewhat confused Austrian health policy that does not even have its key figures in its head (and, for example, has been pretending to be imaginative intensive care bed resources on the AGES dashboard for months), as well as one for decades The developing epidemic of obesity (with all subsequent diseases) watches largely without reaction, which is driven by a food industry with lots of sugar, fat, salt and far too much meat consumption by a psychologically tricky food industry. “
As a result, however, the breeding ground for this Covid crisis was prepared in a thoughtless way, and probably also for other future events of a similar nature. Unfortunately, very few people are aware of this connection and, remarkably, is not really discussed in public. Which, given the large group of overweight intensive care patients mentioned above, is urgently needed.