RKI protocols reveal pandemic managers providing "fictitiously accurate" R-values and overstating Covid risk on the explicit directions of their political overseers in the Health Ministry

Lothar Wieler, veterinarian and head of the Robert Koch Institut during the Covid pandemic. Like others of his ilk, he played a scientist for the television cameras, while working behind the scenes to implement the profoundly unscientific plans of his political minders.

Two weeks ago, a court forced the Robert Koch Institut to release the internal protocols of their “Covid Crisis Team” meetings between January 2020 and April 2021, and the fallout continues as I type this. Regime media are screaming loudly and with remarkable energy to anyone who will listen that there is nothing to see here. Die Zeit complains that it is “A Gift for the Conspiracy Theorists”; Der Spiegel declares that the protocols have caused “great excitement” but contain “little that is new”; and tagesschau have their own writeup on “the RKI files and the scandal that isn’t one.” All of these pieces are very long on special pleading and very short on direct citations to the documents in question. When it comes to lockdowns and mass vaccination, the incuriosity of our journalists knows no bounds.

Karl Lauterbach, Europe’s dumbest health minister, is having a particularly bad time. He started the week claiming that the protocols were extensively redacted primarily to protect employees from the “hatred and agitation” of the people they work for; the RKI, he said, worked “independently of politics” and “saved many lives during the pandemic.” He also blamed “foreign governments” for promoting “conspiracy theories” relating to the protocols in social media.

As so often, Lauterbach had misread the room. The virologist Hendrik Streeck noted that “entire pages relating to the vaccines have been blacked out” and said he found himself “asking what the public isn’t supposed to see here.” FDP politician Walter Kubicki, meanwhile, called for more transparency and demanded access to the unredacted documents. He also renewed an older request that the RKI release their heretofore secret “Stop Covid” study, which according to Lauterbach shows that the German management of the pandemic was a fantastic success and saved all manner of lives, but which for some reason he has refused to let anybody read. It was at this point that the chancellor’s office had enough of the terrible publicity and forced their arrant minister to stop embarrassing an already widely loathed government. Suddenly Lauterbach promised to release his secret (and presumably deeply stupid) study at the end of the year, but his minders must’ve told him that wasn’t good enough. Now he says that was a mere typographical error and that he’ll provide it by the end of the month. He has also changed his tune on the RKI protocols, promising to re-issue them in “substantially unredacted form” and professing a newfound devotion to “full transparency.” I for one am enjoying Lauterbach’s public humiliation and hope that it continues indefinitely.

All the while, German Twitter continues to investigate the releases, finding in their many pages ever new reasons to doubt Lauterbach’s claims that the RKI operated purely scientifically and independent of politics.

On 6 May 2020, for example, the Interior Ministry asked why the RKI were publishing reproduction numbers calculated to two decimal places, when these figures were probably not accurate beyond a value of 0.5. The Bundeswehr Surgeon General Hans-Ulrich Holtherm, head of the crisis team, was forced to tell the Interior Ministry that the RKI was lending this impression of “fictitious accuracy” on the instructions of Health Minister Jens Spahn:

We encounter another telling snippet on 29 June 2020, when German case counts were effectively zero. The RKI nevertheless refused to revise their assessment of the Covid risk down from “high,” because a “direction of the Health Ministry” required them to leave it unchanged into July:

The RKI crisis team met every day, most of the time discussing nothing more than tiresome infection statistics, scientific studies and various administrative banalities. Their terse and lapidary protocols are often hard to interpret, and only in relatively rare unguarded moments do they shed light on the broader political picture. When they do slip up, however, and when the censors aren’t there to save them with their black markers, they paint a devastating picture.

Many commenters, in response to my first piece on this document trove, asked where the pressure to freak out about Covid and lock down came from, if not the public health establishment. The story is somewhat different in every country, but in Germany, it’s clear that this was a cultural virus that overtook the press and the political elite before much of The Science we were meant to be following even knew what was going on. Remember that the international epidemiological establishment had spent years preaching against so much as border closures in the event of a pandemic. We were all supposed to do what Sweden did, and Germany was not even equipped to implement the technocratic lockdowns envisioned by Neil Ferguson, because the pandemic models that justify closures are an eccentricity of the Anglosphere. This disconnect is why Covid messaging was so stupidly contradictory and idiotic, and it is an enduring scandal that our dumb and oblivious journalist class to this day remain wilfully blind to the farce.