Germany’s highest court has demanded greater protection for disabled people in Covid-related cases of “triage” — when doctors only treat those patients with a greater chance of survival and abandon others to their fate — in a significant victory for disability campaigners.
The constitutional court told Germany’s parliament to come up with a law that ensures people with disabilities are not discriminated against when it comes to the “allocation of intensive care treatments that have become scarce as a result of the pandemic”.
Germany’s health minister Karl Lauterbach welcomed the judgment. “People with disabilities need the state’s protection more than anyone else, particularly in cases of triage,” he tweeted. The priority was now to vaccinate enough people to ensure that triage never happens, he added.