Arch-Covidian Christina Berndt admits that press discussion of vaccines has been too one-sided, school closures ill-advised, but insists Germany should've locked down even harder

Everyone's favourite virus schoolmarm re-emerges with a podcast interview to discuss pandemic missteps after massive public uproar over the RKI protocols

Since the German government quietly withdrew the last Covidian idiocies last year, there has been much talk of the need for an Aufarbeitung, or an appraisal, of pandemic-era repressions. For the most part, this talk has happened in perfectly inverse proportion to anyone in power actually appraising anything.

The lockdown-happy and vaccine-crazed Süddeutsche Zeitung explains, in an unusually frank article, why so little has happened on this front:

There were repeated promises during the Covid crisis that the pandemic [response] would be thoroughly appraised. Yet this has not yet happened – and there seem to be several reasons for this. First of all, there was nothing to be gained politically from this issue, especially immediately after the pandemic. The country was collectively exhausted and, for a while at least, many people didn’t want to hear the word “Corona” again.

Additionally, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis meant that new issues soon dominated the political agenda. And then there is a further point, namely the concern that a critical reappraisal could be misused by conspiracy theorists, right-wing groups or the AfD. If the admission of specific wrong decisions is taken as supposed proof that all the pandemic measures were wrong and that those responsible at the time had nothing but sinister intentions, then the damage to democracy could be greater than if there is no appraisal. This fear was often voiced in Berlin.

The is the state of political discourse in Germany. The government gets to house-arrest and coercively vaccinate millions, and that does not damage democracy. What might damage democracy, however, is if anybody were forced to admit by any minimally objective review process that “conspiracy theorists” or “right-wing groups” or “the AfD” were fundamentally right about the wisdom of shutting down all of society over a respiratory virus. That would be a grave day indeed for German democracy, because as we all know, democracy is when you want what the establishment politicians from the establishment parties want to give you, and they give it to you. If you don’t want what they want to give you, that is potentially antidemocratic and you may be a case for the political police.

To prevent damage to our democracy, therefore, our rulers have tried to get everybody to forget about all the stupid stuff they did between 2020 and 2023. The problem with this strategy is that they do not yet totally monopolise public discourse. Their efforts to sweep Covid under the carpet have therefore amounted to ceding all criticism of lockdowns, school closures and mass vaccination to the opposition. An appraisal was always inevitable and it is happening informally, beyond the oversight of the schoolmarm hall monitors. It is withering and devastating indeed. With the release of the RKI pandemic protocols – which, even in heavily redacted form, have revealed that public health authority manipulated Covid risk assessments to justify lockdowns and knew from the start that FFP2 masks wouldn’t work – we have reached a tipping point. The self-appointed curators of public opinion have realised that their tactics of feigned ignorance and forced silence are backfiring. Suddenly they have decided that their voices need to be heard in the great pandemic reckoning after all.

Among the odious personalities who have discovered a new openness to the project of a pandemic reckoning is the lunatic science journalist and plague chronicle arch-villain Christina Berndt. Like all of the other ardent maskers and manic vaccinators, she is of course a picture of perfect health:

Berndt, longtime readers will remember, is the luminary who demanded that mask mandates be indefinitely extended, because if Germany were to lift them, she would be alone in her face diaper fetish and that would make her feel like a strange eccentric. After the last vestiges of the German hygiene regime collapsed unceremoniously in early 2023, Berndt came to discover a new love for shutting up about viruses. Her Twitter account has been dormant for months, and her steady stream of Covidian panic mongering for that daily single-ply toilet paper mill known as the Süddeutsche Zeitung has dried up entirely. Berndt, in short, has crawled back into the hole whence she came, and where she belongs.

Now that a Covid reckoning is on the menu, however, this font of virus wisdom feels her services are called for once again. Thus she’s produced a tedious podcast interview, in which she mimes an openness to the reassessment of her grave misdeeds and deeply stupid opinions, while confining this reassessment to a low-effort audio production that few will bother to listen to. Few, that is, beyond eugyppius.

The most obtrusive characteristic of Berndt’s interview, is what a grating and obnoxious speaker she is. Her tone is that of a school teacher reciting instructions to a class of mentally deficient imbeciles. She speaks too slowly and with overmuch emphasis on random words; her tone has an unreflective, sickly and syrupy quality. It’s like she’s holding some children’s book and pointing all the while at the pictures to guide our attention. This is the voice of a woman who has never had an original or contrarian thought, and believes that is among her greatest virtues.

At the beginning we get some self-congratulatory if illuminating autobiographical notes. Berndt explains that she’d left the science editorial team at Süddeutsche Zeitung to work on the weekend paper before the Covid hysteria started. When the virus first hit the headlines, though, she hastily transferred back, because she was especially interested in pandemical matters and believed that “more man and woman power” would be needed to cover this brave new story. “Since I’ve been a journalist we’ve been waiting for a pandemic,” she explains. “We always knew something was coming.”

This great selection into the project of pandemic panic promotion happened all across society in 2020. All the most disturbed and hygienically obsessed people emerged from their heretofore hidden lairs to serve on university mask mandate committees, to dream up hygiene regulations for public transit, to establish lanes of unidirectional travel in their office hallways and to produce an unending stream of deranged drivel for major print and broadcast media. This vile breed were lurking among us the whole time, we simply never noticed they were there before. Those more moderate and reasonable types – those who cared about all the other things that the hygiene dictatorship would trample underfoot – were simply overwhelmed by the onslaught. This dynamic explains much Covid-era extremism.

Like many science journalists, Berndt is very proud of her expertise. She studied biochemistry at university and she wrote a doctoral thesis in the field of immunology. Why we should care about any of this, however, is obscure, because all she wants to talk about is the importance of suspending one’s own judgment and fOllOwInG tHe SciENce. The game, as Berndt sees it, is to seek out that extraspecial cohort of oracular experts who deserve uncritical belief. Christian Drosten of course gets a special mention here; “at the beginning he simply had the greatest expertise.” That Drosten is a laboratory virologist who actually has no expertise at all in immunology, in economics, in childhood development, or in many of other countless areas affected by pandemic measures, never occurs to Berndt. “Expert” in her vocabulary is a word that denotes “those who say what I want to hear.” Thus she notes that other virologists who were less enthusiastic about locking down, like Hendrik Streeck, for that reason disqualified themselves from expert status.

Berndt is clearly terrified of viruses. She calls Covid a “death-bringing sickness,” and she praises masks as a means of personal hygienic empowerment. Community masking gave everybody something they could do personally to stop the evil Covid, and that’s why it was so important.

You may remember that there was a great if subtle divide among the pandemic agitators. On the one hand and in the beginning there was Team Lockdown – those most enthusiastic about closures and masks, and less deeply committed to mass vaccination. Later on there came Team Vaccine, who were less interested in pandemic restrictions except as a means of incentivising their precious jabs. As Berndt speaks, she reveals herself to be a member of the former tribe. For this group, the great pandemic reckoning will amount to admitting mild errors on the vaccine question. Team Vaccine, when they come to the microphone, will presumably tell us that the lockdowns were a bit much.

When asked what the Süddeutsche Zeitung got wrong, Berndt therefore admits that her paper should’ve reported more clearly on the risks of vaccine injury and that they were unbalanced in their discussion of vaccine mandates:

You’ll have to forgive us for commenting too one-sidedly in some cases, especially on the subject of mandatory vaccination. The editorial team was really in favour of vaccine mandates. Personally, I wasn’t, because I always thought that you shouldn’t force people to do something like that and that it really is too much of an intervention. But the majority of my colleagues were in favour of vaccine mandates at the time. And I think we should have worked harder to find colleagues who were of a different opinion and encouraged them to write more, so that we could have maintained a better balance.

While Berndt indeed wrote the odd piece against vaccine mandates in 2021 (“You can’t force people,” she wrote in November of that year), as a card-carrying Team Lockdowner she was at the very same time a massive fan of state intervention, and this muddled her position considerably. Thus she also wrote approvingly that restrictions on the unvaccinated amounted to a de facto vaccine mandate, and explained at length why this was a good thing. Still worse, as public acceptance for measures began to collapse with the spread of Omicron in 2022, Berndt decided that maybe vaccine mandates weren’t that bad after all:

Vaccine mandates should be the leading topic in Germany right now. … Right now, though … that is being drowned out by the shrill discussion about mandates to reopen … [T]he people can conclude but one thing – that vaccination is no longer so important. It’s a conclusion that can only please the virus.

There’s no question that Omicron has made a big difference to our situation. … If only we don’t immediately give in to the impatient demands for reopening and open every last door and gate before it, then the number of patients in hospitals and intensive care units in this Omicron wave in all likelihood will remain manageable.

Only the present situation has changed, though. Overall we’re still in a pandemic. Germany remains in the middle of it. This is due to our vaccination rates, which are still too low, and also, ironically, to the fact that relatively few people in this country have built up immune protection through infection. Omicron will do little to change this. …

[I]f vaccine mandates are coming, then they must come quickly, because people must be vaccinated and boosted by autumn, when the pandemic starts again … Those who base their decision about vaccine mandates on the current situation, still haven't understood the purpose of vaccination. Vaccination is not about today, it’s about preventing harm tomorrow. …

Consistent with her Team Lockdown allegiances, Berndt is totally unapologetic about pandemic restrictions, complaining only that Germany didn’t lock down earlier and harder for the winter 2020 wave. She claims that “people were dying like flies in some countries” and that the present view of lockdowns as the product of exaggerated and unnecessary hysteria is “an error of hindsight.”

As for school closures, Berndt pleads that nobody could’ve known all the harm it would cause. How amazing it was, to learn that subjecting young children to months of forced isolation could cause psychological problems. The world just abounds in surprises and mysteries like this:

I don’t think many people expected, nor did I, that mental illness would rise so steeply. We rather thought that social participation would not improve, that the gap between the educated and the uneducated would widen, that children simply need to go to school for healthy development, to have a regular daily routine. That it actually had such a strong effect on depression, eating disorders and anxiety disorders ... I didn’t expect it to be so extreme.

“Politicians decided to protect the elderly,” she says, “of course also in the belief that it wouldn’t harm the young so much.” That this “belief,” if it ever existed, was wrong and that restrictions were deeply harmful is something that millions of people saw at the time, but Berndt is a blissfully ignorant idiot who lives in an isolated bubble of like-minded oblivious right-thinkers. For her, any thought or observation uncertified by the virological priesthood doesn’t exist. Berndt says that in retrospect we should’ve forced more people to work from home and kept the schools open. Just as she became more open to vaccine mandates as the political will for closures evaporated, she can only conceive of opening schools if the workforce is house-arrested in compensation. Chastened in one area, she demands wholly new overreach in another.

Berndt admits that her ilk treated the unvaccinated and critics of the hygiene regime poorly, but you must understand that people were just so afraid. Emotions were running high, it’s totally understandable that so many important and powerful people lost their minds and ranted about the “tyranny of the unvaccinated” for months on end. This of course has caused lasting social divisions, which are regrettable mainly because this polarisation is being “exploited by the right.” That people flock to the political opposition when the establishment turn out to be a bunch of tyrannical incompetent maniacs is never the fault of tyrannical incompetent maniacs like Berndt. It is rather the fault of the people who argued against her insanity from the beginning.

Our virus teacher insists that with all of our masking and all of our locking down, Germany came through the pandemic “relatively well.” Confronted with the fact that Sweden didn’t do any of these things and emerged from the pandemic with even lower excess mortality, Berndt descends into the usual cloud of self-contradictory obfuscation. You can’t make cross-national comparisons! It’s not that simple! All countries are different! Unaware that she’s undermining the basis for any objective claim about how well or poorly Germany may have fared, she begins to adduce these differences. Countries have age structure differences, they have vaccine uptake differences, they have healthcare system differences, they have lifestyle differences. Sweden indeed must be a distant fairytale land, it is like it is on the moon or something, that is how different it is. Apparently unaware that there exists in Sweden a city called Stockholm, where over 20% of all Swedes live, Berndt insists that our Scandinavian neighbour is thinly settled and has “hardly any urban centres.” Switching tactics, she announces suddenly that also too Sweden did have measures though. For example, Swedish authorities advised the olds not to go outside and universities did distance learning, so maybe they did lock down after all just like Germany, and we can compare! Heads, Berndt wins; tails, we lose.

The podcast goes on like this for another ten minutes, but I’ve had enough, and I suspect you have too.

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Christina Berndt and her chins have been a great and enduring font of material for the plague chronicle, but lately I’ve become reluctant to write about people like her. Partly, I fear about contributing to the outrageously inflated cult surrounding our doubtful tribe of virus luminaries. Berndt’s newspaper still bills her as a leading journalist voice on all things Covid, but the truth is that this tiresome woman doesn’t matter at all. Had she been kidnapped by deeply unfortunate aliens in February 2020, the German pandemic circus would’ve marched on undeterred by her loss. The line of identical ageing hygienically hysterical journalists is a mile long, and all of them spent the pandemic saying exactly the same threadbare unoriginal things to heavily overlapping audiences of regime faithful.

Berndt is interesting only as an archetype, to illustrate for us who these pandemic botherers are and how they regard their own misbehaviour in the cold light of day now that the party has ended and a faint embarrassment attaches to the excesses of the prior night. It takes a great deal of blind confidence and self-righteousness to support state intrusions like those Berndt has advocated, and these are defects of character that militate against any real assessment. Berndt feels she should make concessions and apologise for something; on some issues, perhaps, her colleagues overstepped. Closing the playgrounds and ticketing people for sitting on park benches was too much, the schools should’ve stayed open, but also we should’ve locked down even harder than we did and forced all employees to work from home. All the same, perhaps we should’ve been clearer about vaccine injuries, but we did our best, it was a great success, and also a learning experience. Too bad about all the psychologically maimed children.

Berndt reminds everyone she speaks to that she’s a trained immunologist, but she hasn’t done any research since her dissertation on AIDS in 1998. Instead, she’s become an aspiring self-help guru, producing a truly brave and path-breaking trilogy of books, each centred upon a different saccharine concept in pop-psychology. In 2013 she blessed us with Resilience: The Secret of Mental Toughness. What Makes Us Strong Against Stress, Depression and Burnout. Three years later, her breathless public were rewarded with Contentment: How to Achieve it and Why it is More Rewarding than Fleeting Happiness. Finally, a year before the pandemic, there appeared Individuation: How We Become Who We Want to Be. The Path to a Fulfilled Self.

This is a sad middle-aged woman who suffers from stress and depression, feels exhausted and unhappy, and who labours under that peculiarly modern malady of not knowing who she even is. What a blessing pandemic insanity turned out to be for worn-down confused dimwits like Berndt. Here was the chance to make a virtue out of hiding at home and drinking wine with one’s cats. Of course a woman who chooses to deal with her depression by writing a whole book about it will also struggle to cultivate the novel pieties of dissolution and idleness alone and in private. Berndt can’t feel good about herself unless everybody is stuck at home hiding from the virus like she is, just like she can’t feel good about masking unless everybody else is masking too. Covid may be a superdangerous virus in Berndt’s imagination, but social ridicule and disapproval are far worse.

War brings the bloodthirsty and the ruthless, but also the selfless and the heroic to the forefront of society. We have not had wars for a very long time. Instead, we had the pandemic, which was in many ways the opposite of a war. In war we send young men forth to confront enemies on the battlefield; in the pandemic, we ordered them to hide under their beds. The pandemic brought prominence not to the brave but to the self-obsessed, the cowardly and the weak. People like this have been expanding their control over politics and society with every generation since 1945, and Covid was a great leap forward for them. It’s no accident that Germany finds itself governed in the post-pandemic era by a lot of deranged and deformed bureaucratic monstrosities, from our cut-rate Dracula Karl Lauterbach to overweight Berndt avatars like Lisa Paus and Nancy Faeser, who are presently fighting to eradicate not a virus but the entire right half of the political spectrum. These losers have learned precisely nothing from their Covid failures, and as long as they are in power, the next pandemic will be vastly worse.