The preview photo for my recent article on Christian Drosten and his links to viral research in Wuhan, and even Montana, comes from a remarkable June 2021 interview in the Swiss online magazine Republik. The full pic of Drosten in full protective gear and vaguely resembling the Michelin man can be seen below.
The interview is titled “Herr Drosten, Where Did This Virus Come From?” But it is less remarkable for what Drosten has to say on this topic than as a document of its times. For even though it was published not even three years ago, how times have changed!
Consider, for instance, Drosten’s response to the question of achieving so-called herd immunity through a combination of vaccination and infection. Drosten rejects the notion out of hand: in effect, pushing not just for 70% or 80% vaccination rates but for 100%.
“Everyone who does not get vaccinated, will get infected with SARS-2,” he says, thus clearly implying that those who do get vaccinated will not get infected or at least not as a rule. Those were the days when they still called them “breakthrough infections”, after all.
By just six months later, however, in January 2022, Drosten was claiming that everyone would have to get infected in order to achieve durable immunity – as if that had been the plan all along! In one of his regular “Corona Update” podcasts on German public radio, he would even “explain”:
The ideal immunisation is to have a full immunisation – with three doses – and then, on the basis of this immunisation, to get infected with the real virus for a first time and also a second and a third time.
Say what? In any case, Drosten appears to have taken his own advice, since, as reported on the Daily Sceptic here, in an interview last October he would note that he had “had three doses and been infected twice”.
Drosten would, of course, repeatedly insist that “hybrid” vaccine-induced and natural immunity is somehow superior to mere natural immunity or that vaccination was still worthwhile, since, he claimed, it reduced the severity of disease thus allowing people to get infected “safely”. But this was not the original claim, and, as the below screenshot from the European Medicines Agency summary document on the BioNTech-Pfizer “Comirnaty” vaccine reminds us, it is not what COVID-19 vaccines were authorised to do.
In short, when, in June 2021, Christian Drosten suggested that people who are vaccinated against COVID-19 would not get infected, he was wrong – and not just wrong, but wildly so. In the same interview, incidentally, he also claimed that COVID-19 vaccination prevents transmission of the disease: something which is now virtually universally recognised not to be the case and, furthermore, was not even claimed in the studies on which authorisation was based! (See, for instance, “Limitations and Remaining Questions” here.)
How can Germany’s Covid oracle be so wrong and continue to be treated as an oracle? How can he still be regarded as an authority on Covid not only in Germany, but indeed around the world? How can he be permitted to lecture others on spreading misinformation when objectively, by the standards of what we know today, he was himself spreading misinformation in June 2021 – and those who already suspected that vaccination was ineffective and said so were right.
Why does Christian Drosten benefit from such an odd sort of moving of the goalposts in reverse? If in the original version of the metaphor, the goalposts are moved further away, making it harder for the kicker to reach them, in the version of the metaphor applicable to Drosten – and the agenda of mass COVID-19 vaccination he championed – they are moved closer and closer to the kicker, so that somehow, some way his feeble kick is just enough to get the ball over the bar, thus converting error into wisdom.
In the same interview, Drosten also pushed for vaccinating children, by the way, insisting that there was not likely to be any risk and that getting Covid could have serious consequences for them. “From the perspective of a parent, my child would be vaccinated,” he said, “No question.” His use of the subjunctive is rather odd, since, though not much is known about Drosten’s private life, he is in fact reported to have a young son.
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack. Translations from the German by the author.
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Always worth restating that infections peaked after the vaccine roll-out 3 times greater than the pre-vaccine roll-out peak.
Don’t we also need to see number of tests performed though, to make sense of this?
Here’s the testing data. Tests conducted in Jan 22 40% higher than Jan 21. But ‘cases’ 3 times higher.
Thanks. It certainly points to the “vaccines” not “working” as vaccines have been generally understood to work in the past, though in the past people didn’t “test” themselves for random infections at random using a hypersensitive test.
Nothing new there – Paul Ehrlich has been wrong in every environmental prediction he’s made over half a century, and is still regarded as an oracle.
As I’ve said before, for a scandal, conspiracy, cockup etc to be exposed and for there to be a proper reckoning, it has to be in someone’s interest to do the exposing and the reckoning – some person or group or groups powerful enough to be listened to. In the case of “covid”, in most countries there was no real opposition to the scam – in fact it was enthusiastically embraced by political parties on all sides, and by most/all institutions, the media etc. So it’s not really in anyone’s interest to disturb the hornet’s nest – not the least of the issues is that the general public were largely complicit, and they really don’t want to hear it was all in vain. Some generations need to pass before there is a proper reckoning.
“Comirnaty is a vaccine for preventing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)…”
You could argue that this was in fact a true statement, if you believe the jab prevented severe disease, since COVID-19 was initially used to describe a very specific and nasty illness caused by the virus in some unlucky people, but became used to describe anyone with a positive test – you’d still “had COVID” if you were asymptomatic, for example, so by that logic the jab had still failed and in fact could never “work”.
However we know that’s not at all what they meant, of course.
What they meant, compared with what they wanted people to believe in, have often been contradictory – perhaps through being economical with the truth. E.g. not explaining changes in definitions about the capability of certain products.
The author asks, “Why is he still treated as an oracle”? Because he’s a useful idiot.
This guy, as we know, was a key ‘actor’ in the scam with his ‘test’ which formed the basis for almost every aspect of it.
Remember Hancock’s cry to the nation’Test! Test! Test!’
Don’t you just wish that suit had continued to inflate and then sent him off up into the sky like a giant blimp, just as Marge in the Harry Potter books, only I would not want anyone to have bought him down, just left him up there buzzing around the air like a huge farting balloon
He deserves the same fate as Violet Beauregarde
Christian “Der Numpty” Drosten
Neil Ferguson has made a living out of being consistently wrong, and still gets consulted.
Is it possible that you can be so utterly wrong you become right? Two wrongs don’t make a right, but maybe if you clock up hundreds it does!
“Neil Ferguson has made a living out of being consistently wrong, and still gets consulted.”
Possibly because he tells people things they want to hear.
Of course, but the guy has zero credibility, he’s a joke and should be ridiculed, but when the next big “thing” comes along, he’ll be there with his useless, outdated “secret” algorithm to produce models of death, doom and destruction.
A true grifter! Handsomely sponsored by the Gates foundation et al.