While we’re studying the absurd political about-face of Western media, from 2021 headlines crowing about how “China Beat the Virus and Roared Back” with the help of lockdowns, to strange new 2022 stories about how “China Protests Over ‘Zero Covid’ Follow Months of Economic Pain,” I am inspired to review some recent history regarding an obscure German academic named Otto Kölbl.

Kölbl is a Germanist and a doctoral student at the University of Lausanne, where as late as 2021, he received pay for part-time work grading German language exams. Prior to that, he’d spent a year teaching at the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'An, China, and there’s not much else on his CV. Kölbl, in other words, is a low-level academic nobody, and yet that didn’t stop the German Interior Ministry from calling upon his unique expertise at the start of the pandemic to assist in drafting a strategy paper to justify enduring mass containment policies in the Federal Republic. This document, little more than a repackaged version of Tomas Pueyo’s viral blog posts, provided the earliest rationale for lockdowns in Germany; curve-crushing bureaucrats used it behind the scenes to scare politicians and journalists into supporting the novel policies.

Why did the Interior Ministry ask a nobody like Kölbl to help them in their pseudoscientific modelling endeavours?