So, this is a crazy story.

On 7 April, the German Bundestag debated a proposal to mandate vaccination for all Germans 60 years of age or older. Happily, the legislation was defeated, but the matter raises an important question:

How many of the 60+ crowd are already vaccinated, anyway? If the number is very high, then any mandate is surely pointless, whatever anyone believes about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.

According to the Robert Koch Institut, 88.9% of all Germans 60 and older have received at least one dose of Lauterbach’s favourite elixir. But, as RKI have been forced to acknowledge, that is number is a lower bound. A lot of vaccinations go unrecorded. Thus the RKI also publish separate survey data, and the latest such survey (see p. 10) puts the 60+ rate substantially higher, at 95.8%.

Remarkably, the report bearing these numbers ought to have appeared in March, but its publication was delayed until 14 April – precisely one week after the Bundestag debated the 60+ mandate. Please do not be so naive, as to assume that delay was an accident.

As everybody knows, nine out of ten serious Corona infections occur among the 60+ demographic, and almost everybody in this demographic has been vaccinated. The RKI, however, suppressed its own survey research and effectively understated the rate of vaccination to support the case for vaccine mandates – which mandates have no statistical hope of achieving anything, because as good as nobody over 60 years of age in Germany is unvaccinated.

As some point you have to ask, what we are even doing here.