When the commission of experts commissioned by the federal government publishes its report on the corona measures this Friday, some politicians will be annoyed. The 165-page paper is available to the Tagesspiegel and makes clear doubts about the pandemic policy of the federal and state governments.
For many of the measures, the experts – including hospital managers, virologists and legal experts – found no evidence of a demonstrable benefit. After all, the researchers consider wearing masks to be useful. Above all, however, the 18 men and women on the Expert Council criticize the fact that too little research has been carried out in Germany and the corona policy has been poorly communicated, especially since it was a matter of massive interference with fundamental rights.
As for the question of lockdowns, which will be asked next autumn, the report remains vague: lockdowns make sense in order to slow down a pandemic, but the effect is wearing off: “The longer a lockdown lasts and the fewer people are willing Supporting the measure, the smaller the effect and the more serious the unintended consequences.”
The sense of 2G/3G rules, which linked attending events to vaccination or testing during the pandemic, is only seen to a limited extent. The effect is high in the first few weeks, but then the protective effect of the vaccinations decreases.
The experts assess the effect of school closures as ambiguous. However, the interdisciplinary group of experts called for a better evaluation of the effect of corona protection measures, especially on children.
The experts make it clear that canceled operations, delayed diagnoses and the threat of loneliness in lockdown can have dangerous consequences.
A focus of criticism are research gaps in Germany. For example, “coordinated accompanying research was largely omitted during the corona pandemic in Germany,” write the experts, and there were no concepts “to make the upcoming decisions in the pandemic on the basis of better data and analyzes based on them”. The health insurance companies offered “their enormous databases” for such purposes.
Strict federalism and the extensive General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are also cited as difficult and ultimately research-inhibiting: “Federalism and the resulting different state data protection laws and state hospital laws as well as different interpretations of the GDPR make data management and research in Germany very difficult.”
The expert council includes the head of the Berlin Charité, Heyo Kroemer, and Jutta Allmendinger, the head of the Berlin Science Center for Social Research. (With
