Why were Germany’s Covid files redacted?

There are two kinds of long Covid. One is a medical syndrome, the other manifests as a healthy obsession – an urge to shed light on what happened during the pandemic crisis.

Too many questions remain unanswered: why did Sweden come out of the pandemic better than other countries without having endured a lockdown? Why were masks imposed when scientific studies repeatedly demonstrated that they were unnecessary? Why was discrimination introduced between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated when it was clear that vaccines were incapable of blocking the transmission of the infection? And why, since the lockdowns, has there been such a high excess-death rate in Europe?

Such questions have motivated Multi-polar, a small German online magazine, to fight for the disclosure of Robert Koch Institute (RKI) documents. RKI is the prestigious German equivalent of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This institute is meant to provide the scientific basis for the public health (and lockdown) decisions of the German government. It also has extensive influence on smaller neighbouring countries, such as Austria, where RKI’s suggestions are regarded as the gold standard for health policy.

Multipolar has sought to investigate on which scientific grounds fundamental liberties were curtailed, schools closed, lockdowns established and vaccines imposed. It is especially surprising that this legitimate curiosity has until recently not been shared by the wider German media. As a result of an ongoing legal battle, Multipolar finally succeeded (at least partially) in its aims.

In the spring of last year it received the 2,500 pages of the RKI’s Covid protocols, from early in 2020 to April 2021. But the files were heavily redacted – as if they contained state secrets concerning high diplomacy or military matters. So Multipolar has filed a second legal action to enforce disclosure of the redacted parts, which amount to about one-third of the files.