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Berlin – Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach defends himself against an attack by FDP Vice-President Wolfgang Kubicki on his person in connection with the so-called RKI protocols. “I strongly warn against distorting the past with speculation, insinuations and conspiracy theories,” the SPD politician said in an interview with the newspapers of the Funke Media Group.

He responded to questions about whether his ministry had prevented a downgrade of the corona risk at the beginning of 2022, partly because the introduction of compulsory corona vaccination was being prepared at that time. Kubicki had made this connection in a post on his website.

Lauterbach warned against “baseless speculation”. In February 2022, we were in a phase in which hundreds of people were still dying of corona every day. “In such a situation, you cannot downgrade the risk,” said the minister.

When asked whether he had portrayed the pandemic as more dangerous than it actually was, Lauterbach answered “no”. He described the situation as it appeared in the light of the data and studies.

After a journalist published unredacted documents about the meetings of the Corona crisis team at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) – the institute itself has not yet published the complete minutes – Bundestag Vice President Kubicki demanded personal consequences from Lauterbach.

He accused the health minister of having an “irresponsible relationship to the truth” and referred, among other things, to a statement made by Lauterbach in March that the RKI had worked independently of political instructions. Lauterbach said he would not comment on Kubicki’s statement.

According to the FDP vice-chairman, the documents prove political influence. The RKI artificially kept the public pandemic pressure high at the urging of the BMG, wrote the FDP politician. sparkIn the interview, Lauterbach is confronted with passages from the documents that Kubicki had cited in this context, for example the rejection of the risk downgrade by the ministry.

First with several blackened out parts, now completely without: Excerpts from the protocols of the Corona crisis team at the RKI have been causing a stir for months. This is also due to the fact that the pandemic period in Germany has not yet been dealt with. Even more than a year after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the global Corona health emergency to be over, there is still no […]

“We should not construct an artificial contradiction between science and politics,” Lauterbach said. Science provides facts, and the evaluation then takes place in an exchange between the specialist levels of the RKI and the ministry.

“In the end, the political responsibility always rests with the Federal Ministry of Health.” He defended the Corona policy in principle. Overall, there was good reason to be cautious. “Fewer people have died in Germany than in most of our neighboring countries, even though we have a very old population.”

According to the health minister, the main mistake in the pandemic was that children were not adequately protected from the consequences of school closures and lockdowns. The government also did not communicate “optimally” with the population. In addition, the way politics and science worked together was often opaque at the beginning.

The RKI itself recently posted a notice on its website for those affected by the leak: If the protection of one’s own personal data has been violated by the “illegal publication of the RKI crisis team protocols and other documents”, one can contact the RKI’s official data protection officer and the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information. The RKI has already reported the incident to them.

The RKI further writes about the leak: “The publication includes all minutes and agendas of the RKI’s COVID-19 crisis team, along with accompanying documents on the respective meetings of the RKI crisis team, such as email histories. The published files contain, among other things, a large number of personal data that concern a large number of people, including RKI employees and a large number of external third parties.”

In an initial statement in July, the institute wrote that it had neither examined nor verified the documents.

Journalist Aya Velázquez, who works under a pseudonym and published the unredacted protocols, wrote on X yesterday that she was expecting a civil lawsuit. And she was open to redacting personal data such as private cell phone numbers in the data set upon request. “So far, however, only one person has contacted us about this – and we responded immediately.” © dpa/ggr/aerzteblatt.de