Note to readers: Germany is not my bailiwick. Unlike my father, a retired teacher of German and French, I do not speak any of Goethe’s language. But given the abject paucity of coverage in the English speaking media of this blossoming scandal, which has implications and lessons for us all, I felt duty-bound to at least echo some of the more important findings. But to do so I have had to rely on machine translations of articles as well as a little familial help. Added input from German-speaking and/or German-based readers is most welcome.
The newly published RKI files contain “countless explosive details that were intended to be kept secret from the public.”
Let’s begin with a little trip down memory lane. Cast your minds back to the summer and autumn of 2021. The COVID-19 vaccines had been rolled out and administered to hundreds of millions of people across Europe and North America. Yet the waves of COVID-19 infections kept coming. This, we were told, was the exclusive responsibility of those who were unwilling to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated. We were in “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Joe Biden made this claim multiple times. Indeed, he said the words “pandemic of the unvaccinated” so often that in September of 2021 The Atlantic (of all places) published an article urging him to stop. Justin Trudeau also said the words as did Angela Merkel’s outgoing Health Minister Jens Spahn, weeks before unleashing one of Europe’s first — and thankfully last — lockdowns of the unvaccinated. The Merkel government also came perliously close to making the COVID jab mandatory.
Almost three years on, leaked documents from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), a German federal government agency and research institute responsible for disease control and prevention, have revealed, among many other controversial things, that the Angela Merkel government’s “pandemic of the unvaccinated” claim was a politically motivated fabrication with little, if any, scientific evidence backing it up. Included in the minutes of a meeting of the crisis team at the RKI on November 5, 2021 was the following text (machine translated):
“The media is talking about a pandemic of the unvaccinated. From a technical point of view, this is not correct. The entire population is contributing. Should this be addressed in communication?”
The answer was apparently no. The RKI’s public health experts were perfectly aware that the virus was being spread by both the vaccinated and unvaccinated but stayed silent while the German government stepped up its blame and shame game.
A Political “Bomb Shell”
The RKI has been at the center of a brewing scandal since March this year, when the independent media outlet Multipolar magazin released the so-called RKI files after a years-long FOIA dispute with the RKI and German authorities. When a court ruled that the RKI must publish the minutes of the meetings of its crisis team, the institute obliged, but only partially. It published the minutes of meetings between Jan 1, 2020 and April 30, 2021, and much of it was heavily redacted.
Then, on Tuesday, a team led by Berlin-based freelance journalist Aya Velázquez (apparently a pseudonym) released a data dump of all the minutes of the RKI crisis team’s meetings from 2020 to 2023 — all of it unredacted. The information had been given to Velázquez by a staff member at the RKI “for reasons of conscience,” Velázquez said in a message on “X.” Those apparently included a personal disagreement with how the institute had “prematurely complied with certain political instructions,” betraying “scientific principles” to some extent.
Some of the contents of this massive data drop should hit an already volatile political scene like a “bomb shell”, reported Berliner Zeitung on Tuesday. According to the regional newspaper Schwäbische Zeitung, the newly published files contain “countless explosive details that were intended to be kept hidden from the public.”
They include the revelation (or for regular NC readers, confirmation) that the Merkel government had knowingly bent the truth with its oft-touted claim that Germany was suffering from a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” in the late autumn of 2021. By that time, of course, regular NC readers were up to speed with the fact that the rolling waves of COVID-19 following the roll out of the vaccines were very much a collective effort.
If anything, the messaging from governments across the West that the vaccines conferred protection from infection and transmission of the virus created a false sense of security among the jabbed cohorts, which almost certainly magnified the spread. By June, data emerging from Israel, which had injected most of its population in January and February with the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccines, was showing that not only were the vaccines leaky against the Delta variant, but the limited protection they did confer waned after only a few months.
By autumn, places with near-universal levels of vaccine uptake, such as Gibraltar and Country Waterford, Ireland, were witnessing fresh waves of infection. This should have been enough to put paid to government claims, often amplified by an obsequious media, that the unvaccinated were exclusively to blame for the spread of the virus. But in Germany, as in other countries, the allegations found fertile ground, as notes Berliner Zeitung:
In the autumn and winter of 2021, the narrative of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” was on everyone’s lips. For example, just three days later, the then head of the World Medical Association, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, even escalated the narrative to a “tyranny of the unvaccinated” on ARD’s Anne Will program, and a year later announced in an interview that he would stick to this formulation. This seemed to break all the dams, because if such a high-ranking medical official was allowed to assess it that way on public television without being contradicted, then other doctors, politicians, journalists and the neighbor next door no longer had to hold back from angrily blaming the unvaccinated for the continuation of measures and the pandemic.
This narrative that the unvaccinated are to blame for the pandemic persisted for a very long time in Germany, and some still believe it today. With the release of the unredacted and complete RKI files, this belief must be invalidated. There is now a highly official document about (the pandemic) that anyone can download, read through and search for further contradictions, in which the authorities clearly state that this pandemic of the unvaccinated never happened.
This was known to public health officials at the RKI yet they stayed silent on the matter. It was also known to many doctors on the front lines. On November 18, an article in WDR quoted Prof. Mascha Binder of University Hospital Halle:
A few weeks ago we had a ratio of 90 (unvaccinated) to 10 (vaccinated). So, significantly more unvaccinated people had become ill and had therefore been admitted to hospitals. We now have a ratio of around 50:50.
Of course, this is not an expression of the fact that the vaccine is not effective. But we simply see that the immune response decreases in those vaccinated and six months after vaccination simply reaches a level where re-infections are possible; these breakthrough infections are becoming more and more common.
Coincidentally (or not), the previous month had been packed with super spreader events such as Oktoberfest and the return of fully attended football matches. Government messaging assured vaccinated Germans that they were safe to resume normal activities and begin socialising in closed spaces again. When the number of COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and fatalities began surging, the government pinned the blame on the unvaccinated, and then further restricted their freedom of movement and access to public spaces.
Lapdog Journalism
In its preparation of the 3-G and 2-G rules (restricting participation in public life to the vaccinated, recently tested and recently recovered – then only the vaccinated and recently recovered) the opinions of scientists at the RKI were also ignored, the new leaked documents reveal. Here a few more damning excerpts from the RKI files (emphasis my own):
- “Draft text by Christian Drosten: Recommendation for the fall, presentation of ideas and assessment. Context: The article is confidential. Mr. Drosten has since decided not to publish the paper because untargeted testing is not considered sensible in the text and this contradicts government action.” (RKI protocols, July 29, 2020)
- “We know from outbreaks in nursing homes (exposure is the same for everyone) that the effect of vaccination is being somewhat overegged. Difficult topic, should not be included in the vaccination report.” (RKI protocols, October 26, 2022).
- “Vaccination of children: Even if vaccination of children is not recommended by STIKO (Germany’s standing committee on vaccination), BM Spahn is still planning a vaccination program.” (RKI protocols, May 19, 2021)
How is Germany’s legacy media, which played such a key role in amplifying the government’s blaming and shaming of the unvaccinated, responding to the RKI files scandal. According to a seething article published today (July 26) by Berliner Zeitung, some journalists and media organisations, rather than combing through the 4,000 pages of unredacted RKI files for more stories to expose, “are throwing themselves in front of politicians to protect them”:
Why do these people do this? Why do they curry favor with politicians and spread narratives that help them get out of trouble? Even though their job is exactly the opposite? Namely, to act as the fourth estate and to control and critically question the decision-makers in politics, instead of acting like a PR department for those in power?
To its credit, Germany’s most widely read tabloid newspaper, Bild, ripped into the actions of both the Merkel and Scholz governments as well as the docile acquiescence of the public health officials at RKI. A few choice cuts:
On the “pandemic of the vaccinated” claim:
“The federal government ‘s claim that people who do not get vaccinated are a danger to others was unfounded and false. According to the scientists at the RKI, the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ proclaimed by the then Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) never happened. The unvaccinated were no more and no less responsible for the spread of the virus than the vaccinated.”
On the politicisation of science:
(The) decisions were made in the conference of the Prime Ministers of the 16 federal states under the leadership of the then Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) . They all referred to “science”. But apparently they ignored science.
On the total abdication of political responsibility:
Chief advisor Drosten has written a book in which he does not admit to a single mistake. Merkel is working on her biography, which is due to be published in the fall. Spahn walks around the Bundestag as if he had never been in charge of the health ministry. His successor Karl Lauterbach (SPD), who was enthroned in the fall of 2021 after previously triggering unbelievable covid hysteria on Twitter (now X) every day, is still in office.
No one has the courage to take responsibility and honestly review the Corona policy — if only to avoid mistakes in the future. They all have a great deal to hide, as the RKI files show, which were only released by court order or — as is the case now — through a leak.
On the RKI officials’ total lack of a backbone:
The government’s scientific experts KNEW that the harsh criticism of unvaccinated citizens was wrong. But they decided to remain silent.
The Biggest Scandal of All
Perhaps the most scandalous revelation so far is that the RKI’s crisis team had concluded that there was no need for COVID-19 vaccinations for children, but when push came to shove did not publicly oppose the government’s demands for childhood vaccinations. The minutes show that the RKI’s crisis team had even recommended portraying the vaccination of young people as “cool”. By this time, the myriad safety hazards of these vaccines were presumably well known to both the government and public health experts.*
In the case of the AstraZeneca vaccine, the RKI and Germany’s Corona crisis team were well aware at the beginning of January 2021 that it was “less than perfect”. Nevertheless the drug was still administered in Germany for many months — even after serious side effects had become known. According to the television broadcaster RTL West, the leaked documents also reveal that the booster shots were not requested by scientists, but by politicians and the US pharma giant Pfizer.
While this revelation is perhaps unsurprising, it is nonetheless telling and damning. By mid-2021, the Ursula von der Leyen-led EU Commission had negotiated the purchase of up to 4.5 billion COVID-19 vaccines — enough for 10 doses per EU citizen — for which her Commission is now under (a very slow moving) criminal investigation. The majority of those vaccines were manufactured by the German pharmaceutical BioNTech, with the help of hundreds of millions of euros of German taxpayer funds, and distributed all over the world by Pfizer.
By late 2023, Europe’s mountains of surplus vaccine vials had reached such vertiginous heights that the Polish and Hungarian governments were refusing to take delivery of more Pfizer-BioNTech’s mRNA vaccines. Pfizer and BioNTech responded by suing the two countries for damages and lost revenues. Interestingly, BioNTech, the German-based company that produced most of the vaccine doses administered in Germany (and across the West), does not get a single mention in any of the ten or so articles I have read about the blossoming RKI leaked minutes scandal. Pfizer and AstraZeneca, by contrast, make occasional appearances.
In the wake of this scandal, some voices are calling for the traffic light coalition to step down. As Berliner Zeitung notes, anyone who knowingly spreads this kind of false information or (in the case of the current Scholz government) allows it to continue is “demonstrably acting against the interests of the population.” It probably won’t come to that, the newspaper adds. That said, it won’t take much to topple the Scholz government, given its already anaemic levels of public support.
* On numerous occasions throughout 2022, Germany’s Health Minister Karl Lauterbach claimed that the COVID-19 vaccines were “without side effects,” even as the Paul-Ehrlic-Institute (PEI), Germany’s medical regulatory body and research institution for vaccines and biomedicines, was reporting growing numbers of vaccine injuries.
By the summer of 2022, the PEI had lodged 323,684 cases of vaccine side effects resulting from a total of 183 million single vaccine jabs: an average rate of 1.8 cases per 1,000 doses. Severe vaccine side effects were clocking in at an average of around 0.3 per 1,000. By the Spring of 2023, the German government, unlike most of its counterparts in Europe, was at least beginning to acknowledge some of the harms caused by COVID-19 vaccines. It even coined a name for the phenomenon: post-vac syndrom.
