He didn’t want to write a short statement, but he did want a kind of release from his time as Minister of Health and his resignation for health reasons. “A settlement with Sebastian Kurz would only obscure the view of the essentials,” says Anschober in an interview with ORF.at at the foot of Vienna’s Küniglberg. With his own experiences, as he describes, Anschober wants to look ahead and learn lessons from the pandemic. Because he doesn’t see that everything went badly when managing this global crisis. Rather, that Europe has understood very well, albeit following a certain start, that certain tasks can only be solved together. “For me, the vaccine development and procurement was already an expression of a joint effort, otherwise it would not have happened so quickly,” said the green ex-politician. But, as he also says: “We have a global crisis all over the world, but we are still trying to change it nationally or locally.”
Uniform measures to build confidence
He sees a similar picture in Austria, where crisis management began as a joint effort – and ended up stranded in small-scale local solutions. “When someone sees that things are being implemented completely differently 50 kilometers away, that doesn’t exactly strengthen understanding and trust,” says Anschober. It was understood that the crisis might only be solved together. Also, and the Ukraine war shows that as a kind of mission: “You can’t do well if others are doing badly elsewhere.” That’s why solutions for major crises can only be tackled on a larger scale and with a common approach will.
Talk with ex-minister of health Rudolf Anschober
Anschober wants a common low-incidence policy for Europe. “Only if we keep the incidences low nationwide can we get a pandemic under control” – for him this also means that the health ministers in Europe need more powers – and that there must be decisions for intensified European measures. “We now have to prepare ourselves for the fall together,” advises Anschober, who also reminds us that the pandemic is simply not over.
Reorganization for the WHO?
For him, the WHO should also be reorganized from the lessons of the pandemic – “preferably as a data hub for developments in the world pandemic”. Anschober is certain that the phenomenon of zoonoses will continue to increase, so one must be prepared for further scenarios. The belief that SARS-Covid will also be spared, as with similar flu waves in the past, has just turned out to be wrong.
The book
Rudolf Anschober: Pandemia. insights and prospects. Zsolnay, 270 pages, 24.70 euros.
“Out of the small-small towards a European pandemic policy” is what Anschober, who knows state and federal politics, but also the staccato of crisis summits, would like to take away as a message from his own experiences. But the most important thing for him in the relationship between politics and the population is: “We need to have a sense of achievement once more – and trust must be restored.”
Austria and the levels of Realpolitik
In Austria, there is a need for clear federal competencies and even clearer division of roles in dealing with the pandemic, he says. When asked whether Austria, as the world champion of realpolitik, which follows its very own laws, needs more rules, Anschober replies: Actually, people are often ahead of politics. He also does not want to lump all countries together because it has worked very well in some places. In any case, Anschober also firmly believes that there needs to be an approach between the federal states and Vienna, especially given that a city with two million inhabitants sometimes has very different needs than other parts of the country. Nevertheless, solutions should always be found with a view to the whole: “What you can see in this pandemic is that the small-scale nature of things also has its own populism.”
In any case, he is glad that the populist slogan that one is only doing well when others are doing badly is not being fulfilled – “the opposite is the case”. Due to the threats of the present, there is now a new awareness – and this should be used. Also to show how closely the individual crises were connected in the end, and how we were also looking for holistic solutions. In any case, he wants to look for conversation on his reading tour – and that he will not always only meet friends, he is also aware of them. How much people want to read the pandemic in retrospect right now, that will be the milestone for the success of the book. It might be an impetus for an intensive debate.
