German Officials Overstated ‘Covid’ Risk on Directions of Government, FOI Reveals

Two weeks ago, a court forced the Robert Koch Institute – Germany’s CDC – to release the internal protocols of its “Covid Crisis Team” meetings between January 2020 and April 2021, and the fallout continues as I type this. Regime media are screaming loudly and with remarkable energy to anyone who will listen that there is nothing to see here. Die Zeit complains that it is “A Gift for the Conspiracy Theorists”; Der Spiegel declares that the protocols have caused “great excitement” but contain “little that is new”; and tagesschau has its own write-up on “the RKI files and the scandal that isn’t one”. All of these pieces are very long on special pleading and very short on direct citations from the documents in question. When it comes to lockdowns and mass vaccination, the incuriosity of our journalists knows no bounds.

Karl Lauterbach, Europe’s dumbest Health Minister, is having a particularly bad time. He started the week claiming that the protocols were extensively redacted primarily to protect employees from the “hatred and agitation” of the people they work for; the RKI, he said, worked “independently of politics” and “saved many lives during the pandemic”. He also blamed “foreign governments” for promoting “conspiracy theories” relating to the protocols in social media.

As so often, Lauterbach had misread the room. The virologist Hendrik Streeck noted that “entire pages relating to the vaccines have been blacked out” and said he found himself “asking what the public isn’t supposed to see here”. FDP politician Walter Kubicki, meanwhile, called for more transparency and demanded access to the unredacted documents. He also renewed an older request that the RKI release its heretofore secret “Stop Covid” study, which according to Lauterbach shows that the German management of the pandemic was a fantastic success and saved all manner of lives, but which for some reason he has refused to let anybody read. It was at this point that the Chancellor’s office had enough of the terrible publicity and forced its arrant minister to stop embarrassing an already widely loathed Government. Suddenly Lauterbach promised to release his secret (and presumably deeply stupid) study at the end of the year, but his minders must have told him that wasn’t good enough. Now he says that was a mere typographical error and that he’ll provide it by the end of the month. He has also changed his tune on the RKI protocols, promising to re-issue them in “substantially unredacted form” and professing a newfound devotion to “full transparency”. I for one am enjoying Lauterbach’s public humiliation and hope that it continues indefinitely.

All the while, German Twitter continues to investigate the releases, finding in their many pages ever new reasons to doubt Lauterbach’s claims that the RKI operated purely scientifically and independent of politics.

On May 6th 2020, for example, the Interior Ministry asked why the RKI was publishing reproduction numbers calculated to two decimal places, when these figures were probably not accurate beyond a value of 0.5. The Bundeswehr Surgeon General Hans-Ulrich Holtherm, head of the crisis team, was forced to tell the Interior Ministry that the RKI was lending this impression of “fictitious accuracy” on the instructions of Health Minister Jens Spahn.

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