Germany, "standing atop a billion-dollar mountain of masks" purchased by the panicked Merkel government in 2020, begins to "thermally reprocess" (i.e., incinerate) the rapidly expiring surplus

States, meanwhile, balking at storage costs, beg the federal government to take back the unwanted oversupply.

Finally, there is snow.

From Welt:

Authorities have come up with a term that sounds at least halfway sane. They’re calling it “thermal reprocessing.” Four federal states now claim to have thermally reprocessed – or, in plain language, to have incinerated – a total of 17.25 million expired Corona masks.

Baden-Württemberg has destroyed 6.1 million masks, Saxony 5.5 million, North Rhine-Westphalia 5 million, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 656,000 …

The Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) in Berlin has also “thermally recycled” masks in recent months. The number so far is “less than one million units,” a spokesperson said … The destroyed masks were purchased during the peak of the pandemic, and have exceeded their expiration date …

The federal and state governments are currently standing atop a billion-dollar mountain of masks. According to information provided by the Ministry of Health in September, there are a total of 3.7 billion masks in the federal inventory … The federal states have have an additional 180 million Corona masks at their disposal ...

The states want to burn even more masks, but for the moment they’re not allowed, because much of the surplus in their possession is technically federal property. Thus they’ve begun begging the government to take the masks back:

“The Interior ministry of Hesse, together with many ministries of other states, have turned to the federal government with an urgent request to either take back their unusable masks … or grant permission for their destruction…” says a spokesperson. Unfortunately, the federal government has not yet agreed. “The Federal Ministry of Health has referenced uncertainties in customs law that the government has not yet been able to clarify.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say the Scholz government is reluctant to write off the masks purely because of the negative publicity it’ll generate. I can’t imagine how customs regulations would prevent the Health Ministry from destroying its own expiring property.

Karsten Klein, chairman of the FDP faction in the Bundestag Budget Committee, has criticised the previous government’s over-procurement: “The coalition has inherited a hugely expensive mask mountain [Merkel health minister] Jens Spahn. As important as federal support for procuring masks was in 2020, under Spahn it led to literal frenzied buying that completely lost sight of actual demand” …

But we haven’t even gotten to the best part. The idiot pandemicists are still hoarding masks, even as they’re burning them:

… Additionally, the "National Health Protection Reserve is still stockpiling masks. The Reserve was established in mid-2020 by the Merkel government to prevent future shortages. According to the Ministry of Health, there are currently 245 million masks in the reserve, part of which will expire at the end of 2023.

Doubts about the usefulness of the Reserve are growing. In November, the Budget Committee called on the government to … examine “whether a federal physical stockpile for the health system is at all necessary or economical” …

For the taxpayer, mask procurement is very expensive. The costs at the federal level alone have totalled 5.8 billion Euros since the beginning of the pandemic.

It’s just so astounding, this entirely pointless and still ongoing mass delusion. Masks do nothing to stop infection, we have spent three years learning in excruciating detail that they do nothing to stop infection, we are now setting fire to millions of masks heedlessly purchased at the height of pandemic hysteria when there was every reason to expect that masks would do nothing to stop infection, and still we’re pouring millions of Euros into some kind of retarded national strategic mask reserve that will also surely be incinerated in the coming years because masks do nothing to stop infection. Even more unfathomable is this ridiculous fiction that useless products which do nothing can ever “expire.” What is the fear, that expired masks will do even more of nothing than new masks?

Everything about Corona is such a multifaceted ridiculous farce.