Free Republic

German Health Minister Jens Spahn said that those who have not been vaccinated are likely to catch COVID-19 by the end of this winter season, adding that some of those people will die, according to reports from The Associated Press. “By the end of this winter pretty much everyone in Germany ... will have been vaccinated, recovered or died,” Spahn told reporters in Berlin, according to the AP, adding, "With the highly contagious delta variant this is very, very likely and that’s why we are recommending vaccination so urgently." The AP reports that Germany has seen an increase of about...

German Health Minister Jens Spahn is planning compulsory coronavirus tests for travelers entering the country, regardless of where they travel from, Funke Media Group reported on Tuesday. The ministry is aiming for “an expansion of test requirements upon entry as quickly as possible,” according to a document seen by the media group. The goal is to curb the recent rapid rise in infections, especially with the highly contagious delta variant. Currently, air passengers and people entering from high-risk areas are obliged to provide a negative test or proof that they have been fully vaccinated or have recovered from an infection....

Germany moved one step closer to banning “conversion therapy” targeting transgender and gay people after its Cabinet approved a draft bill on Wednesday morning. The bill will next be presented to Germany’s lower house, Health Minister Jens Spahn told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland news group (RND). If the bill passes both houses of parliament, advertising or offering conversion therapy will be banned and infringements will carry fines of up to €30,000 ($33,000). After the proposed ban, only adults who freely seek out the controversial “therapy” will be legally permitted to undergo it. It is estimated that up to 2,000 conversion therapies...

German Health Minister Jens Spahn sent a clear, important signal on Monday when he declared that “homosexuality is not a disease and therefore does not need therapy to be treated.” He fleshed out his plans to ban so-called gay conversion therapy in Germany. The practice purports to transform homosexuals into heterosexuals. According to Spahn, anyone still found offering such “conversion therapies” will face up to one year in jail or a steep fine. Spahn’s step is both important and, unfortunately, still rather timely. That’s because many Germans are probably not even aware that each year, thousands of teenagers and adults...

German Health Minister Jens Spahn said Friday he will seek to ban conversion therapies that claim to change sexual orientation. “Homosexuality is not an illness, which is why it does not need to be treated,” Spahn, who is gay himself, told the Berlin daily left-leaning daily Die Tageszeitung. He hoped that a German law banning such therapies could be adopted by the middle of the year. […] “I do not believe in these therapies, mainly owing to my own homosexuality,” said Spahn, who represents the right wing of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU party. …

As a language, German has a near-unique quality to sum up a combination of feelings, conditions and elements in a single word. Add “umbehagen” to a list that would most certainly include zeitgeist, leitmotif and doppelganger. Umbehagen describes the angst, discomfort and malaise being experienced by Germans at changing social and political scenes — the arrival and settlement of more than a million refugees from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere would be one strand of this. And so too would be the rise of the right and Alternative for Germany (AfD), concerns over security and terror, or unsettling and disjointed noises...