#RKIFiles: Whistleblower leaks unredacted minutes of the Corona crisis team
The leak of internal minutes from the RKI's coronavirus crisis team ends a years-long tug-of-war over freedom of information. Lauterbach: "Nothing to hide."
"Follow the Science": Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) with a protective mask.
(Image: Juergen Nowak/Shutterstock.com)
There is new movement in the sluggish reappraisal of political measures during the coronavirus pandemic. On Tuesday, a group of journalists published internal minutes from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) and extensive other material from the years 2020 to 2023. According to the group, this includes all meeting minutes of the RKI crisis team from the time of the pandemic.
The data in the package, which comprises around 10 GB, comes from a person who worked for the RKI, said journalist Aya Velázquez at a press conference in Berlin on Tuesday. She spoke out in favor of an "uncompromising and honest reappraisal" of coronavirus policy in Germany.
"Pandemic of the unvaccinated"
According to initial evaluations, the documents indicate that experts at RKI were critical of the measures taken by politicians during the coronavirus pandemic. For example, RKI experts considered the catchphrase"pandemic of the unvaccinated", which politicians liked to use, to be "technically incorrect". Members of the crisis team also expressed doubts about the effectiveness of compulsory masks or school closures.
The leak ends a years-long tug-of-war between the federal government and a handful of journalists who had demanded access to government documents relating to the pandemic. In May 2021, publicist Paul Schreyer filed a lawsuit for the release of the RKI files on the basis of the Information Act.
The RKI then published the documents in March 2023 with many redactions. The RKI justified the redactions with the protection of the persons concerned as well as operational and political secrets worthy of protection. Only after another lawsuit was filed did the institute begin to publish further unredacted documents – but only until mid-2021.
This meant that the documents from the time of current Federal Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach (SPD), were missing. In March of this year, he promised to continue to work towards removing redactions in the RKI documents. However, Lauterbach did not want to commit to when the rest of the protocols would be released until the crisis unit was dissolved in July 2023.
The whistleblower's documents, which according to Velázquez contain the complete documents up to 2023, now close this gap. Of the more than 4,000 pages, around 1,500 have not yet been published. Among other things, the files should provide further clarity as to whether and to what extent the coronavirus measures of the German government and the authorities were backed by science.
Lauterbach has nothing to hide
The RKI does not want to confirm the completeness of the documents, but criticizes the publication as expected: "Insofar as personal data and trade and business secrets of third parties are unlawfully published in these data sets and, in particular, the rights of third parties are violated, the RKI expressly disapproves of this," the institute announced on Tuesday. The RKI now promises to "publish the remaining protocols as quickly as possible until the end of the crisis team meetings in July 2023".
Lauterbach also echoes this. "The RKI was already planning to publish the RKI files of the coronavirus crisis team with my consent," the minister said on X. Now this has happened without protecting the people involved. "There is still nothing to hide."
(vbr)
