Angela Merkel’s husband calls unvaccinated Germans 'lazy'

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s husband on Tuesday accused unvaccinated Germans of “laziness” as the country struggles to contain a dramatic surge in coronavirus infections.

Germany’s Covid-19 resurgence has in part been blamed on its relatively low vaccination rate compared with other Western European nations like France, Italy or Spain, with just 68 percent of the population fully jabbed.

“It is astonishing that a third of the population does not follow scientific findings,” Merkel’s husband, Joachim Sauer, said in an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica and picked up by German daily Die Welt.

“In part, this is due to a certain laziness and complacency of Germans,” said Sauer, who rarely speaks in public.

“The other group are people who follow a personal conviction, a kind of ideological reaction to what they consider a vaccination dictatorship,” Sauer said, a cohort he said also included doctors and scientists.

Like his famous wife, Sauer is a quantum chemist and was in Italy on an academic visit.

The couple keep a low profile and Sauer rarely speaks to the media. One of the few occasions when they are photographed together is during their annual visit to the Bayreuth opera festival.