Austria’s health minister resigns

Austria’s Health Minister Rudolf Anschober has announced his resignation on health reasons after he collapsed a second time in a week ago, the 60-year-old said in Vienna on Tuesday.

“I realised that I now have to pull the emergency brake for myself’’, the Green politician said, adding that the country needs an absolutely fit health minister in this phase.

Anschober has been in charge of the health portfolio, which became the key ministry in the pandemic, since the start of the government of the conservative Austrian People’s Party (OeVP) and the Greens in January 2020.

He had been working through for 14 months.

Anschober had suffered a burnout during his years as provincial minister in Upper Austria.

In the summer of 2020, his no-nonsense demeanour made him so popular at times that he ousted Chancellor Sebastian Kurz from the top spot in opinion polls of federal politicians.

“One of my assets is that I actually become very calm in crisis situations,’’ Anschober once said.

However, he was also responsible for numerous technical errors in the flood of regulations issued by his office during the pandemic.

Most recently, he was also blamed for problems at the start of the vaccination campaign and communication breakdowns.

A top official in his department allegedly failed to inform him about the possibility of further orders for vaccine doses.

This led to an open conflict with Kurz.

Anschober’s departure meant that Kurz has to replace a member of the government for the second time.

In January, family and labour minister Christine Aschbacher resigned after allegations of plagiarism surrounding her master’s thesis and dissertation.