Following the publication of unredacted documents about the meetings of the Corona crisis team at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), some critics of Corona policy see their suspicion that findings were withheld confirmed. It is said a passage in the documents shows that the Berlin virologist Christian Drosten “suppressed medical information” in order to enable lockdowns, among other things. This mainly concerns untargeted PCR tests.
Evaluation
The quotes from the RKI protocols are genuine. A few days after the RKI meeting, however, Drosten published a guest article in the “Zeit” newspaper on exactly this topic. In it, he even talks about strategies for avoiding lockdowns.
Facts
In May, the RKI published the protocols of the Corona crisis team from January 2020 to April 2021 published Only personal data and trade and business secrets of third parties are blacked out there. Is intended The remaining minutes will also be published shortly (May 2021 to July 2023).
A group led by a critic of the federal government’s Corona policy has now posted the completely unredacted documents online and presented them at a press conference on July 23, 2024. presented . The RKI has According to their own statements these records have neither been checked nor verified.
What Drosten is accused of
It is spread from these completely unredacted documents, among other things, there is now a small screenshot of an RKI document dated July 29, 2020. Under the heading “RKI Strategy Questions,” it says about a draft text by Drosten with recommendations for the upcoming autumn: “The article is confidential. Mr. [Herr] Drosten has since decided not to publish the paper because untargeted testing is not considered useful in the text and this contradicts government action.”
During the Corona pandemic, people had been repeatedly conducting so-called PCR tests for months to find out whether they were infected with the Covid-19 pathogen and could potentially infect others.
The passage about Drosten is also in the protocols already published by the RKI to find However, Drosten’s name is blacked out.
What the screenshot from the RKI protocol leaves out
What exactly is to be covered in Drosten’s draft text is also stated in the RKI document – but is cut off in the screenshot distributed online. According to this, Drosten advocated taking a closer look at the origin of a corona infection in contact tracing. Japan is seen as a model for this.
At that time, people in Germany who had been in contact with an infected patient during the period of infection and who could have potentially passed on an infection were informed and isolated (quarantine). At that time, PCR tests were used for detection; rapid antigen tests were not yet available across the board.
The RKI protocol of July 29, 2020 further outlines Drosten’s approach: In order to investigate the origin of the infection, he advocates identifying clusters – that is, special environments in which the virus has been able to spread. Piano lessons, for example, could trigger a cluster, it says. “Generous and rapid quarantine of cluster members without prior testing” is how one measure is described in the RKI protocol.
Drosten published his statements in the “Zeit” newspaper
A blog article now claims to have found “the Drosten article in question”, which “is classified as confidential and was not published because the text contradicted government action”, in the leaked RKI supplementary material.
But Drosten did not consciously suppress his thoughts. There are public contributions from the scientist from that time on that very topic.
The information in a guest article by Drosten in the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” on 5 August 2020 – a few days after the RKI meeting on July 29 – are almost identical to those in the RKI minutes:
- Drosten wrote that the virus entered the population with the first wave and would spread out of the population with the second wave.
- There are different transmission routes: some infected people may only infect one other person, but others may infect many more. In the second case, there is “multiple transmission, a cluster,” says the “Zeit” article. It is precisely these that are driving the pandemic.
- “It helps to look at Japan,” Drosten continued. Instead of testing a lot and indiscriminately, the country focused early on preventing transmission clusters. “The health authorities specifically search the contact history of a detected case for known cluster risks.”
- He explicitly concluded: “The targeted containment of clusters is apparently more important than finding individual cases through broad testing.” The many tests that politicians were preparing at the time would soon be more likely to produce positive results and overwhelm the health authorities. “After all, you can’t test the virus away; you have to react to positive tests.”
Drosten’s ideas on lockdown avoidance also in the NDR podcast
In the NDR’s Corona Update podcast on September 1, 2020, Drosten also looked ahead to the fall and explained the cluster strategy. “If we look at the test numbers, they are very, very high,” he said. “They are pushing the medical laboratories to their limits and we are actually finding very, very few positives.”
Drosten therefore saw Japan’s example as an opportunity to prevent future lockdowns – the exact opposite of what he is now being accused of on social media.
In the NDR podcast at the time, he commented in detail: “Without a lockdown, even without a regional lockdown – we all want to prevent that – how can you summarize a few positive ideas as a strategy to say there is also a way out, there is also another way to deal with the dilemma, without a lockdown?” he asked. And then answered himself: “We know that this disease spreads to a large extent in clusters. And there is a model for action, that is the Japanese retrospective cluster strategy.”
Drosten’s article for “Zeit” also states: “Tracking down the drivers of the epidemic, shortening the quarantine, evaluating the tests more precisely – with this strategy we can prevent another lockdown in a second wave.”
Drosten did not attend the RKI meeting
How the note in the RKI protocol that he would not publish the paper came about was not clear to him, Drosten said in retrospect in July 2024 the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” It is possible that the RKI scribe misunderstood something or that someone reported incorrectly from a conversation with him.
According to his own statements, Drosten was not personally present at the meeting. This is also reflected in the list of participants in the minutes: he is not listed there. He also had no objection to his name being redacted in the document weeks ago, Drosten said in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”.
