The Chancellor is leaving office next week. In a video message – she has shot more than 600 in 16 years in power, she urges her fellow citizens to get vaccinated.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel again pleaded for vaccination against Covid-19, Saturday, December 4, in the last episode of a series of more than 600 video podcasts through which she had become accustomed, for sixteen years, to address his fellow citizens. “I once again urge you to take this treacherous virus seriously”, she said in her message, before stepping down from power next week. “The new Omicron variant just seems to be even more contagious than the previous ones.”
“Get vaccinated. It does not matter whether it is a primary vaccination or a booster. Any vaccination is useful.”
Angela Merkel, German Chancellorin a video message
She again called the fourth wave of Covid-19 hitting Germany a “very serious”, even “dramatic” in some areas where intensive care units are overcrowded. “It is all the more bitter since it could be avoided. With effective and safe vaccines, we have the key in hand.”, insisted Angela Merkel. The leader, who is due to hand over the baton next Wednesday to the future Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz, also thanked “the large majority” of those who “follow the rules”.
Angela Merkel turns the page of these messages addressed to the Germans. “At the time, it was quite exceptional for a head of government to address the public so directly on the internet”, she notes in this episode. Our first recording, in 2006 before the start of the FIFA World Cup in Germany, had a much lighter theme than that of the pandemic: “my wish at the time, that the World Cup was also a big party outside the stadiums, was granted like a summer fairy tale”, she recalls. If she used this medium to approach “subjects that are close to his heart”, it has multiplied, for almost two years, the messages on the pandemic.