As Karl Lauterbach doubles down on his strange mask rules and presses vaccine regulators to recommend fourth doses to ever younger age groups, he finds himself every day more isolated. A member of the Standing Vacccine Committee said in a Welt interview that he wished the Mad Vaccinator “could keep better control of his tongue,” and a Hamburg virologist has called Lauterbach’s proposed rules “political, with no scientific basis.”

Meanwhile, as more and more journalists depart for holidays abroad, our press awakens to the fact that the pandemic is over everywhere but here. “New Corona Rules Are Hardly an Issue Anywhere Else in Eruope,” realises Bayerischer Rundfunk, scratching its head. Even the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s dumbest newspaper and platform for creepy Lauterbach fangirl Christina Berndt (who has been oddly silent of late) finds itself wondering if Germany might be taking the pandemic too seriously, and astonished at Lauterbach’s proposal, which they find “unsuitable … medically questionable … and … likely to alienate people once and for all from further Corona protection measures.” In the normally unreadable Gutmensch comment section of this left-liberal paper, you have people announcing to general applause that they’re done with Corona vaccines now and forever. My how the times have changed.

It was in this context that Lauterbach granted an interview to ZDF last night, where he tried once again to defend his dumb mask exemptions, and announced his plans to … tinker with the colour scheme of the German vaccine pass:

Our plan is that on the Corona-Warn App, as long as you’re within three months of vaccination, the certificate simply has a different colour, so the normal vaccine certificate, which appears blue, would then be green, so everyone immediately sees when they go in that this is a fresh certificate.

That is the Health Minister of a major European nation, high on Paxlovid and God knows what else, dreaming about how to enforce selective mask mandates by adjusting the background colours on a cellphone app. This is the world that we are in right now, this is actually happening.

It’s hard to unwind Lauterbach’s psychology from a distance. The evidence suggests – contrary to his own statements – that he had a bad reaction to his first AstraZeneca jab and has received no further doses. At the same time, he’s genuinely terrified of SARS-2, he tests himself daily, and he thinks of little else. He also lives alone, drinks too much, preaches the evils of salt and prefers press appearances and publicity to administration and politics. His former wife has said publicly that she regrets his cabinet appointment, because he’s not up to the job. Once upon a time Camp Corona was a pretty inclusive place, full of all kinds of people. Now the normal types have all boiled off, and mentally disturbed Lauterbachs and grifting Feigl-Dings are all that’s left. This thing really is ending now.