German Finance Minister: Vaccination is the Only Way out of the Pandemic
27 March 2021
By David Barwick – Frankfurt (Econostream) – German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz on Saturday said that the pandemic could only be overcome via vaccination, but that in the interim, more testing and social distancing are crucial.In an interview with German weekly Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Scholz said, ‘The only way out of this pandemic is through vaccination - but until enough citizens have been vaccinated, we have to do a lot more testing in order to detect chains of infection at an early stage, and we have to continue to massively reduce our contacts.’
‘[W]e have to do everything we can to ensure that we produce as much vaccine as possible and that this vaccine is administered as quickly as possible, that is the point now’, he said.
Scholz, who is his party’s candidate for Germany’s chancellorship in the September 26 elections, assured that the U.S. would ‘be able to rely on us as a partner in the fight for democracy’ and that he and his political party, the SPD, stood ‘for a well-equipped Bundeswehr.’
‘The relationship with Russia is a reason for a common European foreign policy; we need a European Ostpolitik’, he said. ‘Moscow has to accept that the European Union as a whole is its negotiating partner and not individual EU countries.’
Russia has to accept along with everyone else ‘the law and the inviolability of borders’, he said.