Unredacted RKI protocols lay bare the entire Covid farce yet again

The Robert Koch Institut in Berlin, where scientists do what politicians tell them to, and lie to the public accordingly.

The Robert Koch Institut is the German equivalent of the American Centres for Disease Control; they are our primary public health authority, and as such they were central to the management of the Covid pandemic in Germany.

The heretofore secret protocols of their “Covid Crisis Team” are now available unredacted and nearly in their entirety. In what follows, I assemble some samples for you. See if you can divine some common themes:

On 25 March 2020, our Crisis Team resolved to include in their dashboard and weekly reports the “epidemiological curve” illustrating new Covid infections according to “reporting date and onset of illness.” Somewhat nervously, they added that “You can see that the curve is slowly levelling off, but we should avoid drawing attention to this in our external communications, to encourage compliance with measures.” The German lockdowns were imposed as the first wave was already slowing down, and our public health authorities knew this.

On 29 July 2020, the RKI came to discuss a draft paper written by our virological-prophet-in-chief Christian Drosten, which provided “Recommendations for the autumn.” The article, they note, is “confidential,” especially because Drosten “decided in the meantime not to publish it.” This was because “his paper considered untargeted testing not to be useful, and this contradicts government policy.” Even a child could have seen that our mass testing regime was entirely pointless and provided useless data, and the scientists who were the public face of it knew this too. They didn’t say anything.

On 23 October 2020, with the second wave looming, the Covid Crisis Team prepared a general assessment on the advisability of making everybody wear FFP2 respirators. They complained that using such masks “requires training” and that “there is a lot of misuse” even “by medical staff, and masks must be individually fitted.” They worried furthermore that properly fitted FFP2 masks might make people feel too secure and undermine the pandemic “solidarity principle” by removing the manipulative emphasis on “the protection of others.” They also noted that FFP2 “masks increase respiratory resistance” and that “medical consultation may be necessary in the case of underlying diseases.” In conclusion they said that “the harms of FFP2 masks may outweigh benefits” and wondered whether they should provide an announcement telling Germans that FFP2 masks are ill-advised. Despite this assessment by government epidemiologists, the first FFP2 mask mandates were imposed several months later.

On 19 May 2021, the RKI noted that “Even if STIKO [the German vaccine advisory body] does not recommend vaccination for children, [Health Minister Jens] Spahn is still planning a child vaccination programme.” Two days later they said that “Paediatric associations are reluctant to vaccinate children,” but also that “Politicians are already preparing vaccination campaigns to vaccinate the relevant age groups by the end of the school holidays.” On 14 July 2021, they had a whole brainstorming session about how to market the vaccines to kids, even though these medical interventions were still not recommended for them. They dreamed of an “influencer vaccination challenge on YouTube” and about “developing material for younger target groups” on social media. They wondered if “Many aspects of the topic could” not “be approached with more humour.” It might be fun to make amusing social media content for children about vaccine side-effects: “For example, elhotzo talked about his vaccine reaction.” (El Hotzo, in case you missed it, is Sebastian Hotz, the toxic social media personality who recently caused a minor scandal by expressing his regret on Twitter that Donald Trump’s would-be assassin failed to kill him.) And finally, at the end of the year on 15 December 2021, they noted laconically that “The Health Ministry [under Karl Lauterbach] is currently considering a booster vaccination for children, although there is no recommendation and in some cases no authorisation.” The entire child vaccination campaign was a product of politicians and never had any basis in science, and everybody knew it too.

On 10 September 2021, our official government Covidians were working on some horror called a “contact tracing management paper,” to provide advice to state health authorities on this futile and entirely pointless ritual. There came from on high “a ministerial instruction” that proposed alterations to the RKI testing procedures outlined in that document. This change apparently made no sense, because it “caused confusion on the part of state authorities.” This left the RKI wondering what they should do:

It is unusual for the Health Ministry to exert such influence on RKI documents. The minister’s authority to issue directives for RKI scientific documents is currently being legally scrutinised .... The current assessment of the RKI management is that the recommendations are issued by the RKI in the role of a federal authority and that a ministerial instruction to supplement this recommendation must be complied with, as the BMG technically supervises the RKI and the RKI, as an institute, cannot appeal to scientific freedom. In this respect, the scientific independence of the RKI from the political arm is limited.

On 5 November 2021, after the vaccines had failed to do anything to stop the usual winter wave, the RKI noted that “The media are talking about a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” They said that “This is not correct from a scientific point of view,” because “the entire population is contributing.” They decided it would be better not to say anything about this. First of all, unjustly blaming the unvaccinated “Serves as an appeal to all those who have not been vaccinated to get vaccinated.” And what is more, Health Minister Jens Spahn “talks of the [pandemic of the unvaccinated] at every press conference, presumably deliberately, so it can’t be corrected.”

In that same meeting, the RKI also observed that “one should be very careful with the statement that vaccinations protect against any (even asymptomatic) infection,” because “as the time between vaccinations increases,” infections become ever more likely.

This is all the more true because a continuous adaptation of the virus to the immune selection pressure in the population can be assumed, which could also reduce the protective effect of the vaccination against infection in the future.

They decided that they should keep silent about all of this as well and continue to promise that vaccination stops infection, because telling the truth would “cause great confusion.”

On 7 January 2022, it came time to discuss testing procedures for travellers entering Germany. The RKI recommended “antigen testing before entry of all those aged 6 and over” as well as additional “testing of the unvaccinated after entry.” They said that the Health Ministry would “probably want three-month exceptions for boostered people,” because “the vaccinated must receive privileges of some kind, and this must be included in the entry regulations.” None of the repressions visited upon the unvaccinated had any epidemiological purpose; they were simple state harassment and coercion to further a pointless social engineering goal.

On 25 February 2022, the milder Omicron wave was in full force, and the RKI wanted to downgrade their overall risk assessment from “very high” to “high.” The Health Ministry under Karl Lauterbach intervened and forbade them from making this adjustment. This left RKI in a quandary – they had no good reasons to rate the risk as “very high,” but they were under orders to do so. One meeting participant suggested they adopt the “very high” rating but leave “the text of the revised risk assessment unchanged.” Others worried that would cause an inconsistency between the rating and the text justifying the rating. Another person asked what it would mean to adjust the text to reflect a “very high” assessment, as that was not the RKI’s assessment, and the risk assessment was supposed to reflect the Institute’s “professional judgement.” The RKI Director Lothar Wieler at this point basically shrugged and said that they weren’t allowed to assess the risk as “high.” Others proposed removing the risk assessment entirely (but this would “escalate” tensions with the Ministry) or simply “not revising the risk assessment and no longer referring to it” (but this would “reflect negatively” on the RKI). They decided in the end for the first option – leaving the rating at “very high” with the text they had composed for “merely high.” They additionally resolved that it would be better “not to tweet about” the updated assessment, presumably lest too many people read it and wonder what was going on.

On 12 October 2022, they remarked in passing, in the course of a broader discussion on hygiene regulations for care homes, that “There is no evidence that vaccination changes anything with respect to virus shedding” – at once destroying the entire rationale for the mass vaccination programme.

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The RKI Covid protocols, through April 2021, were first released heavily redacted form in March of this year; 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 leak earlier this week; it runs to 3,865 pages, extends through 7 June 2023, and includes 10 GB of supplementary material. It is the source of many new revelations, some of which I have surveyed for you above.¹

It goes without saying that there is a near-total media blackout regarding this historic release; when they are not telling us that these documents contain nothing of interest, the press are passing along the RKI condemnation of the leak:

The Robert Koch Institute has criticised the publication of unredacted minutes of the RKI crisis team on the Covid pandemic. The RKI expressly condemns the unlawful publication of personal data and trade and business secrets of third parties in these data sets and, in particular, any infringement of third-party rights,” the institute stated. The RKI had neither checked nor verified the data records, it said.

Perhaps if the Covidians had not spent years house-arresting and force-vaccinating millions of people, with the willing collaboration of the medical bureaucrats in the Robert Koch Institut, I could find it within myself to give the slightest fuck about “third-party rights” and privacy. But, they did, and I don’t.

Now I want to say a somewhat more complicated thing. Make no mistake – I am very happy that the RKI protocols have been released. They are an enormous discredit to the public health establishment, and internet researchers will continue to unearth nuggets from this massive document trove for months if not years to come. At the same time, these protocols aren’t quite the key to the pandemic, and the reason shines forth between every line of these documents: The RKI is not where the most important decisions were made, it is are merely where everybody was supposed to believe they were being made.

The scientists and bureaucrats of the Covid Crisis Team, in these minutes, often betray an outsider perspective little different from our own. You can see this most clearly from the material on child vaccination, a subject to which I devoted two close investigations last year (here, and here). I can find nothing in what the Covid Crisis Team says about the bizarre Health Ministry push to vaccinate children that was not already in the media. On 19 May 2021, for example, when they say that Health Minister Jens “Spahn is … planning a child vaccination programme” although “STIKO … does not recommend vaccination for children,” they are more than a week behind press reports on Spahn’s plan. Our own epidemiologists, in other words, can shed no more light on where the child vaccination craze came from than any random internet researcher with moderately good search engine skills. This brings us to the first lesson of the RKI protocols, which also happens to be a central doctrine of the plague chronicle: Politics does not, and cannot, follow science. Rather, science follows politics, and scientists were no more central to decision-making during the pandemic than they were at any other time.

During the pandemic, scientists were called upon to provide an illusory Science that politics could pretend to follow. This is the second great revelation of the RKI protocols, and it is why they are so embarrassing for the pandemicists. This is, again, something that we already knew, although of course it is profoundly helpful to have it documented beyond dispute in these records. The RKI Covid Crisis Team did not decide on lockdowns or vaccination strategy or anything else; that was a job for politicians in the Health Ministry, and for even more powerful politicians beyond them going all the way up the Chancellor’s office. Christian Drosten had to pretend to advise the politicians, while withholding his own papers when they deviated from government policy. The RKI knew that the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” was nonsense but they kept quiet about it, and Drosten surely knew it was nonsense too when he told state media on 18 November that Covid is above all a “disease of the unvaccinated.” The role of RKI epidemiologists and virus prophets like Drosten was merely to provide a pandemic fiction that would justify whatever it was the politicians already wanted to do. Along the way, they did untold and unforgivable damage to our society and to many millions of innocent people.

1. The material is far too extensive for me to have examined on my own in just a few days. My summary rests on highlights collected in various press articles and across social media, including above all this piece in the Schwäbische Zeitung.