Deranged regime virologoid Christian Drosten explains that lockdowns were necessary in Germany because Germans lack education, social cohesion and respect for government recommendations

Over the years, I’ve said a lot about the malevolent virologoid and villain-of-the-blog Christian Drosten. As irregular court adviser to Angela Merkel’s government, Drosten was the public face of hygiene restrictions in the Federal Republic of Germany for years, and there is hardly a Covidian abomination that this man did not promote. Happily, in the absence of a trumped-up virus emergency, Drosten’s stock has fallen. He’s abandoned his Twitter account, his state media podcast has been defunct for over two years, and he rarely appears in the media. At the same time, he will never quite go away. He claims to hate the attention, he claims to live only for his research, and yet he keeps crawling back into the limelight to say obnoxious, dishonest and ridiculous things.

We last met Drosten explaining all the stuff we need to do for that sacred and much-awaited happening known as The Next Pandemic. Above all, Drosten explained that we must keep school closures and lockdowns around as policy options, and we also need to establish unelected virus truth panels staffed with experts who will tell the politicians what to do.

Drosten makes his latest unwelcome reappearance via his new book, and that is the first order of business. It’s called Did We Get through It All? An Overdue Discussion on a Pandemic that Will Not be the Last, and it takes the form of an extended interview with the journalist Georg Mascolo. It’s been sitting on my desk for weeks, but I’ve been reluctant to review it, because I’ve had enough of Drosten to last a lifetime and I can already imagine what he’s going to say. If you want a post on it though, I’ll certainly write one.

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When people write books, it is customary for them to poop around all the major press outlets to talk them up. For this reason, Drosten and his co-author Mascolo gave an interview to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) last Saturday, in which Drosten continued his habit of making disturbing statements. Among other things, he said that Germany needed Covid lockdowns because Germans are stupid and resistant to government recommendations, that excess mortality is a bad way to assess the pandemic response and that he’s worried about ThE NExT PaNDeMIc because public enthusiasm for responding to pandemics has tanked. Needless to say, the interview has attracted a lot of attention in alternative media and on German Twitter.

Drosten opens by explaining that he’s returned to the public eye “because it’s necessary.” There has been a “reinterpretation” of the pandemic, such that “there is no longer a clear message to draw from” it and “memories are becoming blurred.” He thinks that “everyone” finds this “unsettling,” by which he means that he finds it unsettling, and thus he “had to take action.” So here we are.

There follows the exchange that has the internet abuzz:

NZZ: Germany and Switzerland are regarded as countries that came through the pandemic relatively well. Switzerland, however, has managed this with fewer measures and a more liberal attitude. Were people in Germany been unnecessarily restricted?

Drosten: Switzerland benefited from better starting conditions. Switzerland is in a better economic position, it is small in terms of area, the travel network is smaller, there is a high level of education and good social cohesion. More personal responsibility is possible. These are all basic prerequisites in Switzerland that we don’t have in Germany, which is why Switzerland was able to act more liberally. Switzerland actually acted with an excellent sense of proportion; the policy advice in particular was very good.

That’s right, Germans are too stupid for their liberal freedoms, so Drosten had to house-arrest them, and he’ll house-arrest them again if he’s given half the chance. One of the reasons Drosten is so infuriating but also so useful, is that he’s terrible at public relations. You’re not actually supposed to say this stuff, but he’s so oblivious and arrogant, he has no problem revealing that he regards the public as mere cattle to be corralled according to whatever novel social engineering project he happens to be promoting.

I don’t want to give the man too much credit, though, because he’s quite clearly just pulling stuff out of his ass here. The strictness or laxness of pandemic measures don’t predict case numbers or virus mortality anywhere. The virus just did what it was going to do regardless of how liberal or authoritarian the response was. If you confront Drosten with a place that locked down harder and had better virus outcomes, he’ll say that’s because of the measures. If you show him a place that didn’t lock down as hard and still had better outcomes, he’ll seize upon whatever post hoc rationalisations he can find.

You see this when he tries to explain Sweden, which did not lock down and had better results than Germany in the end:

Firstly, Sweden, like Switzerland, has special conditions compared to Germany. For example, an area similar in size to Germany, but only a tenth of the population and also a comparatively better education as well as a different culture of cohesion and a tendency to follow government recommendations. For a fair comparison, one should look at similarly structured and large industrialised countries such as Italy, Spain, France or Poland.

Once again, Germans are stupider, less cohesive and more hostile to “government recommendations” than Swedes, so we needed to be locked up for their sins. But also too, Sweden has a lower average population density and it’s not a “large industrialised country.” It’s not even worth picking these claims apart, because not even Drosten believes them. He’s just saying anything.

As he keeps talking, it gets even worse. He says that “it’s a great fallacy” to assess the pandemic response “by looking at excess mortality.” He can’t say that this is because excess mortality statistics easily and irrefutably reveal that everything we did to stop Covid was stupid, so he offers a lot of bluster instead:

It’s too simplistic and fundamentally wrong. With excess mortality in particular, the longer you wait, the more everything evens out, and then vaccination and many other factors play a role. The discussion about Sweden, however, is about its measures in the period before vaccination. A lot of people died in Sweden in the first wave, far more than in other Scandinavian countries. The number of deaths was particularly high in care homes for the elderly. You have to realise this: These measures were not arbitrary, but served a purpose that many seem to have forgotten.

If “the longer you wait, the more everything evens out,” then lockdowns – at best – can only have been saving people who were at death’s door anyway. Otherwise, there is no reason to confine the question to the pre-vaccination period alone; excess mortality statistics permit us to judge the totality of the response. Higher mortality earlier in the pandemic correlates very well with much lower mortality later in the pandemic, which is why Sweden did worse than the rest of Scandinavia initially, but much better later on. The overwhelming lesson of mortality statistics is the selfsame lesson that the entire field of public health knew perfectly well before the lockdown mind virus colonised their brains in 2020: There’s no winning against a highly transmissible respiratory pathogen. With the harshest restrictions, you merely delay the inevitable, while ruining everybody’s lives and psychological well-being in the meantime.

Drosten expands his venture into self-justifying dishonesty. He calls it a “mathematical certainty that around 1% of those infected would’ve died” in the first wave if Germany hadn’t locked down, and that “perhaps a quarter of the population would’ve been infected.” This is total nonsense. First, the pre-Omicron Covid mortality rate was far below 1%, and anyway infections were already in seasonal decline before Germany imposed any measures. The leaked RKI protocols show that our public health mandarins knew infections were already levelling off on 25 March 2020, despite massive increases in testing.

There is at least a ray of light in this tiresome interview. At the end, NZZ asks about the “next pandemic,” and whether we’ll be a better position for it. Drosten, whose mood seems to have soured throughout the conversation, offers only this curt response:

Someone who works in politics told me that the appetite for this whole topic is gone now. And I find that absolutely worrying. The fact that there needs to be an appetite for such an issue – where human lives are at stake.

Yes, Mr Drosten, the public have to have an appetite for your preferred policies, however Scientific you imagine them to be. That’s what “democracy” is supposed to mean. Human lives are always at stake in politics, and there is no Saving Lives Exemption for doing whatever the fuck you want. If you don’t like it, that’s just too bad. You and your ilk should’ve thought about all of this before you forced that entire useless parade of pandemic nonsense on the German people. We endured years of arbitrary hygiene tyranny to no purpose, and that is precisely why “the appetite for this whole topic is gone now.”