Germany forced to publish 'explosive' Covid files

The minutes of crisis meetings at Germany's public health agency have been released. They are more interesting for what they don't tell us than for what we now know.

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Photo by Arturo Rey on Unsplash

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Now to the article…

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Remember the coronavirus and those minor infringements of constitutional rights that took place a couple of years back?

It seems like the kind of thing that we might want to talk about so that we don’t end up tearing chunks out of each other next time around.

But, it turns out that Germany has no interest in digging over old mistakes. Unlike in Britain and Sweden, this country hasn’t yet hold a Covid inquiry.

Fair enough. Our leaders have enough on their hands trying to come up with a whole new energy system in the wake of Russia’s war.

It is nonetheless remarkable that neither the Bundestag nor the media has made an concerted effort to understand the reasoning behind the decisions taken from March 2020 onwards.

Thus, it was left to an obscure online magazine called Multipolar to deliver us some answers.

Unlike any of the mainstream media, Multipolar went to the effort of making a freedom of information request to see the minutes of meetings held by the government’s own disease control agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI).

The minutes, which cover meetings held by the RKI’s Covid team during the first 14 months of the pandemic, show that the scientists occasionally gave their superiors at the health ministry advice that went ignored.

In October 2020, the Robert Koch Institute advised against giving FFP2 masks to the general public. They feared that people would put them on wrong, meaning that they would be more or less useless. A couple of months later, Bavaria became the first state to make the FFP2 mask mandatory in public, something that later became law nationwide.

The RKI also didn’t think that banning the unvaccinated from taking part in public life was a good idea. At a meeting held in March 2021, the minutes noted that creating privileges for the vaccinated “can’t be substantiated with evidence.”

The RKI was aware fairly early on that lockdowns had costs that could outweigh the benefits. At a meeting in December 2020, the scientists noted that lockdowns in Africa had “in part had worse consequences than the virus.”

But the most intriguing thing about the files is undoubtedly what they don’t show us.

Over half of the total minutes have been redacted! Entire meetings on sensitive topics such as school closures and vaccines have been blacked out.

The government closed all schools in December 2020. In the build up the RKI held two meetings in the topic of “outbreaks in schools.” It would be good to know what they said. After all, the school closures were sold to us at the time as a painful but necessary measure to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed. But, the minutes of both meetings are entirely blacked out.

The RKI provided a 1,000 page explanation for why it redacted so much text. But some of the explanations raise more questions than answers.

For instance, meetings on the topic of vaccines were redacted in order to protect the participants from being subjected to “hate and fear mongering”. That’s hardly the type of justification that is going to quash rumours about what they could have said!

Reaction to what has been dubbed the “RKI Files” has been mixed. ZDF, the country’s smaller public broadcaster, described them as “explosive”; major state broadcaster, ARD, brushed them off as “a non-scandal.”

Curious is the fact that every major media outlet has felt the need to report on them, despite never making the effort to get hold of them themselves.

For the first time, the German government is now facing pressure to hold a public inquiry.

Justice Minister Marco Buschmann, signalled his support, saying that “if a government interferes with people's constitutional rights in such a massive way then we have to examine those measures afterwards.”

Buschmann added that “many of the decisions taken at the time should have been made in parliament and not in closed-door meetings between state leaders.”

Altogether less willing to cooperate has been health minister Karl Lauterbach.

Lauterbach was the country’s most famous proponent of lockdowns, most notoriously saying that the police should snoop on people’s homes to make sure they were following the rules.

A doctor by training, Lauterbach always insisted that he was following the science. Since the pandemic has ended though, he has been less than transparent about what his own scientists have to say.

In an attempt to silence claims that he wasn’t interested in looking into what went wrong, he tasked the RKI with running an analysis on how effective Germany’s Covid measures had been.

Last summer, he announced that the RKI had concluded that Germany’s policies had “saved lots of lives.” But he refused to publish the data behind their findings.

Other scientists questioned why he tasked the RKI with carrying out evaluation rather than asking an indepedent institute to do so.

“Why the RKI, of all institutes, was tasked with evaluating the measures it was responsible for recommending is beyond me," virologist Alexander Keule told Die Welt.

Persistent attempts by the Bundestag to get hold of the entire RKI report were ignored by Lauterbach - until this week.

It seems that the widespread criticism of the redactions in the RKI meeting minutes has led Olaf Scholz to lose patience with him.

Apparently under pressure from the chancellery, Lauterbach announced that he would release both the full data for the RKI’s lockdown analysis and a “largely un-redacted” version of the RKI’s Covid minutes.

Some sort of transparency is now being achieved. That is a welcome development.

At the same time, the focus on what the RKI did, or didn’t say at the time shows that the debate is still too focused on the opinions of a narrow set of experts.

The RKI is a disease control agency - and no doubt a very good one. But if there is anything we’ve learned over the past four years it is that subordinating every aspect of public life to the goal of disease control is not a great idea.

Germany should instead be asking itself why its constitution is so wooly that it allowed a government to suspend people’s rights for months on end.

Any evaluation of the years 2020-2022 will only have been a success if it ends in setting a much higher constitutional bar for when our leaders can peer behind our curtains, dictate our movement and carry out experiments on the education of our children.