Secret Efforts of Political Health Ministry Staff to Influence Expert Pandemic Assessments During Covid

Today, I offer just a short addendum to yesterday’s post on the unredacted RKI protocols, and what they reveal about the farce of the pandemic response.

The press have answered this new leak with a deafening silence, publishing only occasional pieces telling their readers that there is nothing to see here. At first this Zeit article from yesterday (h/t P. Debionne) appeared to be another contribution to the genre; it strives to associate Aya Velázquez, the journalist at the centre of the leak, with “conspiracy theorists,” notes that she is under surveillance by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and suggests that those who find the leak scandalous or discrediting are propagating “nonsense.” It also reassures us that, when read in context, the leak presents anything but a “scandal”:

The protocols document the work of the crisis team at the RKI meticulously. They show how infection statistics, studies and expert opinions from all over the world were collated almost daily in order to derive current, scientific recommendations to guide policy. The picture that emerges is of an authority struggling to find factual arguments in a world were new facts were accumulating almost daily.

They are laying it on a bit thick here, even for Die Zeit, and the reason soon becomes clear. Before long they ask whether the RKI enjoyed any scientific independence during the pandemic. With typical wide-eyed naiveté, they write that “This question is important, because in a pandemic it is crucial to make decisions based on scientific facts rather than on the political agenda,” and because the protocols reveal “the complex interplay between the various players at the RKI and the Health Ministry.”

At this point they bring in a source who has some very damning things to say about this interplay and its complexity:

Yes, there were attempts by the Federal Ministry of Health to exert influence, says someone … who was part of the RKI crisis team at the time, in an interview with ZEIT ONLINE. These attempts occurred especially at the so-called working level, that is the employees below RKI management. The protocols that have now been published represent only a small part of the Institute’s work; they were created to facilitate later evaluations about what was done well and what could be done better in the future… The RKI insider says that they make hardly any mention of the pressure exerted on the employees, which was at times “intense.” Sometimes RKI staff were only able to defend themselves by asking Health Ministry employees to condense their verbal requests into written instructions. Ministry staff, however, almost always shied away from doing so, because “nobody in the Health Ministry wanted this stuff on record” …

Put more baldly: Although the protocols abound with evidence of political interference at the Robert Koch Institut, this is merely the tip of the iceberg, because the Health Ministry preferred to work asymmetrically and off the books. Above all, they sought to bypass management and lean on mid-level staff, thus hiding their actions from the obnoxious keepers of the Covid Crisis Team protocols. The Health Ministry knew they were up to no good and refused to leave any written traces, lest their plotting ever come to light.

I don’t know about you, but this sounds to me like nothing but a lot of politicians and scientists cooperating in an enormously good faith effort to Follow the Science and save lives.

Now, our anonymous RKI informant is probably not offering this information to Die Zeit out of a pure interest in transparency and truth-telling. He is almost certainly engaged in officially-sanctioned damage control. Over and over again, the protocols reveal the enormous vanity of RKI scientists, who never stop worrying about their public image and fight at every moment to preserve the illusion of their scientific independence. Thus our informant goes on to insist that RKI employees defended themselves from political influence and that their own independent scientific recommendations prevailed in consequence.

The protocols, of course, tell a much different story.

This originally appeared on A Plague Chronicle.

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