The Zhong Nanshan connection, or: How minor lockdown-promoting academics with no relevant expertise came to shape German pandemic policy at the highest levels

I spent much of the weekend sick with the flu, and I am still recovering. The energy to write my book in the morning and a separate post in the evening will soon return, but it’s not quite there yet. Instead, I offer you another series of book-related thoughts, which is not entirely off-topic, as yesterday’s piece also touched on the sinister and complicated problem of lockdown origins.

Allow me to draw your attention to a small but crucial clue on the early history of Western lockdowns that until now I’ve always overlooked.

It involves Zhong Nanshan, a Chinese pulmonologist who treated some of the first SARS patients as director of the Guangzhou Institute for Respiratory Pulmonary Disease. Zhong came to be venerated as a SARS-era hero in China, and he was also apparently involved in the crucial early containment efforts at Wuhan. At the very least, he was the public face of them.

Now, we know more about the establishment of lockdowns in Germany than in probably any other country, thanks to reporting by Welt and a series of emails which the Interior Ministry was forced to release in 2021. On 17 or 18 March, rising Corona astrologer Christian Drosten and RKI Chief Lothar Wieler met with Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, and urged him to come up with a reason to extend the initial German closures. Seehofer agreed, and got his state secretary Markus Kerber to convene a small group of academics and bureaucrats. Their mission was to brainstorm a pseudoscientific modelling study that would provide the rationale for an indefinite mass containment regime in Germany. Since Niko Härting compelled the Interior Ministry to release the correspondence relating to this paper, we have a direct view into these very early events, and we can say this about the genesis of mass containment in Germany:

1) Drosten and Wieler were clearly inspired by Neil Ferguson’s infamous 16 March modelling study calling for “suppression” rather than “mitigation” in the United Kingdom. “Suppression” was simply Ferguson’s term for a more technocratic version of Chinese-style mass containment.

2) On 19 March, exactly as the pseudoscientific modellers were getting to work, the German Epidemiological Society released a six-page pro-lockdown “position statement,” obviously influenced by the Imperial College paper. The fresh lockdown convert Christian Drosten immediately endorsed this statement on Twitter.

3) Despite Drosten’s enthusiasm, the various economists, statisticians and epidemiologists on Kerber’s modelling team still envisioned a mitigation response. Something had obviously radicalised them; they wrote openly of the need to terrify the German public in order to impose far-reaching restrictions, but they also wrote of things like “managing the spread” – typical mitigationist framing.

4) The only clear-eyed advocates of mass containment in this exchange were a junior professor of international relations named Maximilian Mayer, and a Germanist doctoral student at Lausanne named Otto Kölbl. I’ve written about them before. Both acted as cut-outs for hidden actors in China; Kölbl even later admitted that he’s paid to conduct low-level propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party in the West. Mayer provided the modellers official translations of “secret” documents on the Chinese response, and he claimed to represent something called the “ContainCovid-19 Taskforce.”

5) Almost surely, it was Drosten who put Mayer in touch with the modelling team. Mayer in turn introduced the group to Kölbl. (Kerber, the state secretary managing the whole operation, later said he had no idea of Kölbl’s explicit Chinese ties.) Drosten, in other words, pressured the Interior Ministry to produce the modelling study, and behind the scenes he ensured it would be staffed with Chinese agents who would steer it to the right outcome.

That’s the story, as far we know it, and it’s missing a crucial piece:

How did Drosten get to know about Mayer in the first place? He’s an academic nobody in a totally different field. Mayer and Kölbl, it is true, co-authored a proto-Pueyo containment manifesto on 4 March, bearing the title “Learning from Wuhan – there is no Alternative to the Containment of COVID-19.” Yet as far as I can tell, this clumsy and ponderous document never got much exposure.

Maybe we’ll never know for sure, but I now realise that the answer must have something to do with Zhong Nanshan. Mayer liked to tweet about this Chinese “hero-scientist” back then.

By April even Zhong had to admit that properly containing Covid was impossible; suppressing infections until the vaccines arrived became the new rationale for lockdowns.

Exactly as he was forwarding Chinese information to Kerber’s modellers, Mayer was promoting Zhong’s mass containment doctrines in tweets that tagged familiar bad actors like Angela Rasmussen and Eric Feigl-Ding.

Note the hashtag, #ContainCovid19. Does it have any relationship to the mysterious “ContainCovid-19 Taskforce” which Mayer claimed at exactly this moment to represent in Germany?

In the early morning before sharing that now-delisted Vimeo interview, Mayer cropped up in Drosten’s replies, offering to arrange a public discussion between Drosten and Zhong on Covid-19 countermeasures. Doing so would be “easy,” he said.

“Dear @c_drosten, would you be willing to have a public conversation with Prof. Zhong Nanshan about how China managed to contain #Covid19, and to discuss what Germany and Europe might be able to learn from Asia? It would be easy to invite Zhong.”

It is not crazy to think that Drosten and Zhong knew each other. Drosten had achieved minor notoriety for his role in developing the first PCR protocols for SARS – a role he would mysteriously reprise for SARS-2. This, then, would be the route via which Mayer came to Drosten’s attention. Drosten then pulled strings to get Mayer a seat at the pandemic policy formulation table, all while Mayer flaunted his personal access to Zhong on Twitter and otherwise promoted Zhong’s pandemic prescriptions.

There are other reasons, too, to think that the Chinese first-wave lockdowns were two-faced policies. They involved massive internal restrictions allegedly to suppress a virus, but in another aspect they were directed at the West. Initially, it seems fairly clear they were devised to convince the WHO emergency committee that the virus could be suppressed inside China, and there was no need to declare an international public health emergency. Encouraging the West to lock down would be further vindication for the forces in China responsible for this catastrophic approach. It is merely interesting, in this case, to find the very same Chinese personality working both sides.