A few weeks ago, I wrote about attempts by Karl Lauterbach to delay the work of an expert committee with a mandate from the Bundestag to evaluate the effectiveness of lockdowns and other containment measures in Germany. Christian Drosten went so far as to resign from the committee, and gave a rambling radio interview in which he complained that the evaluative body hadn’t been granted enough time and that it had been staffed with the wrong people.
The whole controversy struck me as strange. Surely this was going to be some milquetoast whitewash of the lockdowns, and so you had to wonder why Drosten and Lauterbach were even bothering.
Well, I was wrong: The committee aren’t preparing a whitewash at all. They are poised, instead, to issue a mostly honest report admitting that there is no evidence that German containment has achieved anything. The Süddeutsche Zeitung has obtained a draft of their report, which is set to be released towards the end of this month. Their crack Corona reporter, renowned hypochondriac schoolmarm and go-to eugyppius villain Christina Berndt, is not pleased.
There are important scraps of information to be gleaned from Berndt’s anathema:
The chapter on the Corona measures is poorly crafted, the selection and commentary of the scientific literature is one-sided, the negative consequences of the measures are overemphasised, important aspects are simply omitted; only a preconceived negative opinion of the Corona measures will find confirmation here, various virological and epidemiological experts told the SZ.
According to the chapter’s authors, there is in the end little evidence for the benefit of many measures, from contact restrictions to 3G rules – with the exception of wearing masks indoors.
From the beginning of this year, as country after country dropped all containment measures, politicians like Markus Söder began hawking a political compromise –vestigial mask mandates to appease the hystericists, and otherwise no restrictions. This is the vision that ultimately won out, and it just can’t be a coincidence that this is exactly what the expert committee ended up supporting.
The chapter is being drafted under the leadership of virologist Hendrik Streeck from the University of Bonn, who was originally supposed to share this task with Christian Drosten from the Charité in Berlin. But Drosten left the committee because, in his view, a sound scientific evaluation wasn’t possible in the allotted time and with the personnel available to the committee …
Streeck has had a more balanced view of containment and the risk posed by SARS-2 from the very beginning. Drosten obviously dropped out, calculating that it would be better to discredit the report from the outside, than lend the authority of his name to its contents.
[M]any important details in the draft report are surprising. It opens with the statement that Germany did not do well during the pandemic. For example, it claims that life expectancy in Germany for 2021 has fallen “by about half a year compared to the pre-Covid year 2019,” while people in Sweden, which critics of the measures regard as a positive example, are living longer. The comparison of 2021 with 2019 seems strange, though, because Sweden experienced massive deaths in 2020, and then imposed stricter measures later.
The selection of studies moreover seems arbitrary. For example, relevant studies that give a good rating to Germany’s handling of the pandemic during the first wave are not mentioned, such as a high-ranking paper by Max Planck researcher Viola Priesemann published in the journal Science. …
Here we learn that the report is a not-so-subtle rebuke of the Merkel government specifically: It rates Germany’s pandemic performance poorly, snubs Merkel-adjacent modellers like the forever-wrong Viola Priesemann, and compares German outcomes unfavourably to Sweden, which took the opposite path of minimal mitigation.
