The latest journalistic abomination from Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading weekly news magazine, is a piece by Rafaela von Bredow and Veronika Hackenbroch, purporting to chronicle the three greatest Corona policy errors Germany has committed, in order to understand how we can best prepare ourselves for the fall and the new deadly variants that await:

Germany has already experienced two pandemic summers. Beautiful, carefree summers. But also two pandemic winters that did not go well, because hardly anyone prepared for the next wave during the virus-free period.

The question now is whether another summer will pass in which nothing happens, whether people will again have to suffer restrictions or die because no one wants to learn from mistakes – all while new variants may already be emerging that could evade immune defences.

Our great errors are that we locked down too late and too softly in Fall 2020, that we’ve neglected the needs of children, and that we haven’t convinced enough people to accept vaccination. You might think there’s at least a ray of sunshine in that second point, and it’s true that the folly of extended school closures is now acknowledged even in major newspapers. But in the Spiegel piece, it’s festooned with so many caveats, lies and half-truths that it’s hardly a victory. That our vaccine authorities haven’t recommended vaccination for 5–11 year-olds is also among our sins against the youth, according to Hackenbroch and von Bredow, who still can’t bring themselves to admit that the virus just is not a significant risk for any healthy young person anywhere.

Otherwise, there’s a lot of howlers here: