Chief German pandemic botherer and renowned virus pest Karl Lauterbach in November 2020:

Here’s a good, topical summary on the question of whether schools are driving the second wave, whether they’re sites of superspreading, what the research shows. Dr. Zoe Hyde, an expert on Covid in children, says the research is clear, schools cause clusters of infections, they drive the pandemic, the research is clear. I agree.

Prof. Karl Lauterbach @Karl_Lauterbach

Hier wegen Aktualität gute Zusammenfassung zur Frage: sind Schulen Treiber der 2. Welle, gibt es dort Superspreading, wie ist Studienlage. ⁦@DrZoeHyde⁩, Expertin für Kinder-Covid: Schulen sind Cluster, treiben Pandemie, Studienlage klar. Stimme zu

theconversation.comChildren may transmit coronavirus at the same rate as adults: what we now know about schools and COVID-19The risk associated with schools is tied to the level of community transmission. The more community transmission there is, the more transmission there will be in schools.

11:00 AM ∙ Nov 24, 2020

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Chief German pandemic botherer, renowned virus pest and now Health Minister Karl Lauterbach just this morning:

…Lauterbach … has called the long closure of schools and day-care centres during the pandemic a mistake. Many businesses were “relatively spared” during the pandemic, he said … “But we went very hard on the schools and on the children.” …

“This was the advice from the scientists who advised the federal government at the time,” Lauterbach said. Back then, too little was known about Corona transmission. In retrospect, however, the belief that many infections occur in schools and day-care centres “did not prove to be correct in this way.” Other countries had “acted somewhat differently” and had set other priorities.

Schools and day-care centres closed for months during the first waves of Corona. Lauterbach was not yet the Federal Minister of Health at the time, but as an SPD health politician in the joint government with the CDU/CSU he was involved in important decisions …

Lauterbach said that he considered it difficult to ask for forgiveness in light of this retrospective assessment of the pandemic measures. … “Often our knowledge was simply not good enough,” Lauterbach said. This is a different matter, he said, than if the wrong policies had been deliberately enacted in the face of better knowledge at the time.

There’s a lot to say about this. The most obvious, is the open attempt to shift blame for catastrophic pandemic measures onto not-so-nebulous “scientists who advised the federal government” – a clear jab at Christian Drosten. And of course there is the very tired lie that nobody knew any better in 2020, even though by the Fall of that year – when Lauterbach zealously retweeted Covid lunatics like Zoe Hyde – his own government was publishing weekly contact tracing data that sourced the plurality of infections to care homes and could find almost none in educational or childcare settings, despite the heavy testing there. It’s especially frustrating to read statements like this now, because many, many of us spent a good part of November 2020 pointing precisely at these numbers, only to be thoroughly ignored.

What’s most important, though, is the emerging strategy that we see here and in other places, to contain the growing impression that our entire pandemic response has been a failure. Too many people have been complicit in these ruinous policies for there ever to be an open acknowledgment that they constitute a wholesale disaster. Instead, they’ll try to pick aspects of the containment regime to repudiate instead, in the hopes that limited admissions will calm their critics and forestall an avalanche. In Germany, they’ve decided that it’s the school closures that are to be officially regretted.

I suspect this is a preview of the strategy they’ll pursue with the mass vaccination campaign. Around this time next year, they’ll start to admit that in their zeal to save lives, they might’ve accidentally overvaccinated some younger cohorts. They didn’t know any better at the time, they’ll say. They were just acting in good faith, they’ll add.

Never believe them.