Top health official admits in court that 'independent' pandemic expert advice was steered by politicians, that virus risk assessments were political & that vaccine mandates had no scientific rationale

The President of the Robert Koch Institut (the German CDC) destroyed much of the public mythology of the pandemic response in testimony before an Osnabrück administrative judge earlier this week.

Lars Schaade, President of the Robert Koch Institut.

You may remember the so-called “RKI protocols.”

These record the meetings of the “Covid Crisis Team” that was formed within the Robert Koch Institut (RKI) to advise our politicians on the pandemic response. Part of these minutes – through April 2021 – were first released in heavily redacted form in March 2024; following a public outcry, the Health Ministry agreed to remove all but the most essential redactions, and finally delivered on this promise in May. Thereafter, a former RKI employee leaked all documents available to him in completely unredacted form to the independent journalist Aya Velázquez. She published this enormous leak in July.

The RKI protocols are important for one reason above all: They show that the allegedly independent Scientific of the RKI provided was in fact heavily influenced by German politicians. While our elected leaders claimed to be Following the Science, they were eagerly adjusting the Science behind the scenes wherever necessary to make it into the kind of thing that they already wanted to Follow. We could surmise that this was happening at the time, of course, but the protocols provide hard, undeniable proof of this dynamic. That is why they matter.

The protocols, having undermined a central pillar of pandemic mythology, are now beginning to have legal consequences. Specifically, an administrative court in Osnabrück has said that they call the constitutionality of 2022 vaccine mandates for medical staff and care home facilities into question. The Osnabrück judges have referred the case to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. The constitutional judges ruled two years ago that the vaccine mandates were legal, but they did not have access to the RKI protocols at the time and their ruling leaned heavily on the ostensible independence of RKI assessments.

The case itself is only part of the story. In the course of the Osnabrück proceedings, RKI President Lars Schaade testified and said many astounding things. He admitted in open court that his institute does not provide scientifically independent advice, even though that is what they claim to do. He said that pandemic risk assessments were political rather than scientific; specifically, he said that they were “normative” – that is that they were intended to produce certain behaviours in the public, and not to communicate any concrete, observable facts. Finally, he said that the RKI not only never had any evidence that vaccine mandates do anything to stop transmission, but also that they never even attempted to monitor vaccine effectiveness in stopping transmission.

This is an important story, so I’m going to cover it as thoroughly as possible in four parts. First of all, we’ll go over once again how the RKI protocols undermine the myth of a pandemic Science allegedly independent of politics. Then, I’ll briefly summarise the details of the litigation in Osnabrück, which involves a nursing assistant who was suspended for refusing vaccination in November 2022. Next, I’ll translate Schaade’s incredible testimony, before finally considering a small conspiracy theory relating to the RKI protocols and the real reason they were leaked in the first place.