Last week, the Robert Koch Institut (the German CDC) released over 2,500 pages documenting the meetings of the “Covid Crisis Team” between January 2020 and April 2021. They did so in response to long-running litigation by journalists at Multipolar.
This is a major revelation – a rough German equivalent of the Fauci email releases from 2021 – which takes us directly into the internal discussions of the pandemic managers throughout the 2020 lockdowns and the early stages of the vaccination campaign. You can download the minutes and agendas yourself here. They’re heavily redacted, but they provide a dismal view of the whole pandemic circus and its idiotic, hapless coordinators. It will take me weeks to finish studying them, but German Twitter has done the Lord’s work unearthing many of the more important revelations, as does this surprisingly critical ZDF article. Here I want to highlight just three points.
1. As Multipolar already reported, there is an intriguing moment in the minutes on 16 March 2020, where we read that preparations had been completed to raise the overall pandemic “risk assessment” – then at “moderate” – as soon as some redacted person (in all likelihood, the Health Minister Jens Spahn) should give the signal. This apparently happened the next day, when the RKI suddenly decided on no clear basis that Covid risk was “high.” On 16 March, you’ll remember, Neil Ferguson and his Imperial College team had just posted their notorious paper calling for rolling lockdowns. This accords with much other evidence suggesting that Covid measures were a prior political decision that required exaggerating the danger.
2. Covid risk: At multiple points, the RKI acknowledges that Covid was far less dangerous than they publicly allowed. On 16 December 2020, at the start of the second, nearly unending German lockdown, we find them discussing lockdowns in Africa, and noting that they “have consequences” that are “in part worse than the consequences of Covid itself.” On 19 March 2021, they emphasise that “Covid-19 should not be compared with influenza, because normal influenza waves kill more people, although Covid-19 is worrying for other reasons.”
3. Masking: On 30 October 2020, the RKI were positively overflowing with scepticism about the effectiveness of FFP2 or N95 respirators. They called the use of FFP2 masks a measure for healthcare professionals only, and said that without correct fit and when used by untrained personnel, the masks would “have no effect.” Mandating FFP2s for community protection was therefore “not evidence-based” because there was no reason to think they would work outside professional healthcare contexts. They even suggested the public should be made aware of this, which of course never happened. Instead, within a few months we got our first FFP2 mask mandates anyway.
There are other things here too, such as the question raised on 8 January 2021, about whether the time had come to “depart from the narrative of herd immunity via vaccination” now that vaccines were actually available; a remark on 5 March 2021 that restrictions for the unvaccinated and as-yet-uninfected were “not technically justifiable” and contrary to World Health Organisation ethical guidelines; and an extended discussion on 19 March 2021, about why no mortality-reducing effects were yet visible after 7 million of the most vulnerable Germans had been jabbed.
We were all called lunatics, hobby virologists, conspiracy theorists and worse for our doubts that Covid was all that dangerous, that lockdowns were worth it, that mask mandates made any sense, and that excluding the unvaccinated from public life was remotely justifiable. A lot of us were banned and ostracised for saying these things. The RKI release shows that our public health managers were having exactly the same discussions in private the whole time. Our politicians told us that all of this lunacy was necessary because we had to FoLlOw ThE ScIenCe. In fact the scientists were mere tools of the prior political decision to force this entire pandemic theatre upon us; they functioned merely to lend the pandemic policies about which they themselves nourished hidden doubts a pseudoscientific aura.
The worst thing is that nothing will come of this, and nothing will come of the still greater revelations likely to follow either.