When the leaked “RKI Files” were unveiled at a July 23rd press conference in Berlin, Aya Velazquez, who served as the conduit for the leak, proudly declared that the documents constituted the complete unredacted minutes of the RKI’s COVID-19 “Crisis Group”. The minutes had previously been released by the German public health authority, the Robert Koch Institute, in redacted form. However, critical German-speaking observers quickly noted that the “Aya” files were not in fact identical with the officially released versions – thus, at the same time, raising questions about the authenticity of the leak. Entire passages from the official versions were missing from the “Aya” versions.
But, somewhat astonishingly, what appears to have gone unnoticed is that not only passages, but indeed the entire record of the minutes of one meeting was missing from the “Aya” leak – and not the minutes of just any meeting, but indeed the minutes of none other than the very first meeting of the Crisis Group included in the official release.
As can be verified here on the dedicated website that was created for the leak, the minutes that Aya Velazquez posted as PDFs in a Zip-folder titled “Minutes_all” (Protokolle_gesamt) begin on January 16th. As can be confirmed here, however, the official minutes begin on January 14th. So, the “Minutes_all” folder does not in fact contain all the minutes.
Where are the missing minutes?
Well, when the discrepancies between the official versions and her versions were first pointed out, Aya Velazquez responded by saying that she had in fact assembled the posted PDFs herself from Word documents that her source provided, sometimes in multiple versions. While Velazquez (the name is a pseudonym) presently describes herself as a journalist, her self-avowed occupation until quite recently (see her article here, for instance) was prostitute. She gained notoriety, while precisely still practicing said profession, as an anti-Covid-measure activist and her notoriety has increased as a commentator on X.
After responding to the critics, she proceeded also to post the Word doc “source files” on the dedicated website for the leak. It should be noted that, as of this writing, these source files are not easily accessible, attempts to open them in Word giving rise to error messages such as the below.
However, per the file name (see above), the earliest minutes contained in the source doc folder are likewise those of January 16th 2020.
So, the source file folder does not contain the missing minutes either. Where are the minutes of the Crisis Group’s January 14th meeting?
Thankfully, a Google search using text from the official version turns them up: namely, in “supplementary material” (Zusatzmaterial), which was likewise posted on the dedicated website – and which, in this author’s experience, can also be very difficult (although not impossible) to access from the site.
The document is very revealing indeed. For what it shows is that the Robert Koch Institute had a direct and highly relevant link to Wuhan right from the start of the COVID-19 crisis, since an RKI staff member was not only from Wuhan but indeed a specialist in respiratory illnesses.
Many observers of the “RKI Files” saga – especially those who do not read German and who have not been able to follow its unfolding in real-time – will be under the impression that the previously published official versions were heavily redacted. This is not true. While first versions of the documents obtained by the journalist Paul Schreyer in response to an FOI request were more heavily redacted, very few redactions, apart from redactions of names, remained in the versions published on the RKI website in late May. Longer redactions, i.e., of textual passages, are few and far between in the official documents.
Apart from the names – and, as so happens, that of one Christian Drosten figures prominently and often – the entire interest of the “Aya” leak was thus to discover what was hidden beneath these last remaining textual redactions.
The January 14th minutes contain one such redaction, as can be seen below from the official release.
The passage runs: “…and regularly reads the texts published in China in Mandarin and shares the information”. The file included in the “supplementary material” – but for some reason not included by Aya Velazquez in the ostensibly “complete” minutes – reveals what was under this redaction, as can be seen below.
The full sentence reads (my emphasis): “A [female] colleague in FG36 comes from Wuhan and regularly reads the texts published in China in Mandarin and shares the information.” FG36 is the institute’s “Respiratory Infections” Unit.
Why was this information redacted in the official release? Note that the redacted passage does not contain the staff member’s name.
Is it because this incredible coincidence might have called attention to the many and intimate German links to the virology scene in Wuhan, which I have documented, among other places, in my ‘The Greatest Story Never Told‘? These links, as I have shown, include a decade-long publicly-funded research partnership and a full-fledged German-Chinese lab right in the city. Is it because the coincidence, given these links, is not in fact a coincidence?
Why, above all, was this document not included in Aya Velazquez’s “complete” unredacted minutes? Does this suggest a certain deference – whether on the part of source or recipient of the leak – to the wishes of the RKI not to call attention to the Berlin-Wuhan axis?
The fact that the leak did not include the minutes of three meetings that are also missing from the official release already raised some eyebrows among German-speaking observers and could likewise be construed as a sign of deference. (As discussed in the postscript below, the minutes of one of those meetings did turn up later, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, in the “supplementary material”.)
The below group photo from a 2015 “Sino-German Symposium on Infectious Diseases” in Berlin provides a graphic illustration of the closeness of the ties between German and Chinese virology circles.
Christian Drosten, Chair of the Virology Department at Berlin’s Charité University Hospital and designer of the “gold standard” SARS-CoV-2 PCR test, can be seen in the lower left-hand corner standing next to none other the Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s world-renowned bat coronavirus specialist. The buck-toothed Chinese man with the glasses in the lower right is the then Director of the WIV, Chen Xinwen. The woman with the long hair to Shi’s right appears to be Wang Yanyi, the current Director of the WIV. (For more on the picture and symposium attendees, see here.)
The former President of the Robert Koch Institute, Reinhard Burger, was also in attendance. He is the white-haired man with a blue shirt near the middle of the group.
The picture was taken at the Kaiserin Friedrich Foundation at 7 Robert Koch Square, just around the corner from the building that houses Drosten’s Virology Department on the Charité University Hospital campus. The Robert Koch Institute is about a 15-minute drive from the campus.
The RKI staff member from Wuhan, incidentally, is presumably Wei Cai, who completed a doctorate in Medicine at the Charité University Hospital in September 2021. See her dissertation here and the extract from the title page below.
Postscript: Mail from Aya Velazquez and related issues
In my original version of the above article, I wrote that the minutes of three meetings that are missing from both the official release of the redacted “RKI files” and Aya Velazquez’s supposedly complete leaked minutes – namely, those of January 6th and 8th and May 9th 2020 – “are not even to be found in the ‘supplementary material’” that accompanied the leak. Shortly after publication, I received e-mail from Aya Velazquez describing my article as a “hit piece” and specifically decrying this, as she put it, “falsehood,” which she has demanded I correct. Gladly, and consider it done, as can be seen above. The minutes of one of the missing meetings, that of May 9th, are in the “supplementary material”.
The language chosen by Aya Velazquez, as well as one of her colleagues in an X exchange with me, seems to suggest that I was lying about the May 9th minutes. But the reason I did not find them when consulting the folder is simple and obvious. The “supplementary material” folder does not comprise some anarchic mass of files, but rather is neatly arranged into years and dated sub-folders, each of which contains the minutes for that day plus “supplementary material” related to them.
As can be seen from the image below, the 2020-05-09 folder is indeed missing.
As I now know from her messages, shortly after critics had called attention to the missing minutes, Aya Velazquez somewhat triumphantly announced that the May 9th minutes had been found: namely, in a different folder – that of May 14th – and, according to her email correspondence with me, found by her team’s own data analyst. (In fact, the entire May 9th folder is present as a sub-folder in the May 14th folder.) But what were the minutes doing there?
As noted above, the fact that precisely those three sets of minutes that were withheld in the official release also appeared to have been ‘withheld’ from the leak raised some eyebrows among German-speaking critics: namely, because it seemed to suggest that the rogue former RKI-employee who is supposed to have been the source of the leak was perhaps not so rogue after all. (See here for one example.) But for anyone uncharitable enough to harbour such suspicions in the first place, they will surely not have been dissipated by a member of Aya Velazquez’s own team then fortuitously turning up the minutes in an improbable location shortly after these suspicions were raised.
Aya Velazquez herself dismisses the oddity of the May 9th file being hidden in a different folder as insignificant. “What was it doing there,” she wrote in a tweet, “presumably nothing at all”, and she suggested that its location was merely the result of “sloppiness” or an “oversight”.
Be that as it may, my article is not about that file or the other two still missing files in any case. These are only mentioned in passing. The “hidden RKI-file” of the title is rather that of January 14th 2020. These minutes are indeed in the official redacted release and they are also in the supplementary material, but they were not included in Aya Velazquez’s supposedly complete “minutes-all” leak-folder. The very description of the contents as complete thus represents a “falsehood”, to use Velazquez’s terminology, and there is no obvious, innocent explanation for it.
Why were these minutes not included? I asked Velazquez and she responded, somewhat obliquely, that “I published everything that the WB [whistleblower] gave me, and he gave me everything he found in the RKI archive”. But if the former is true, the latter obviously cannot be. For the January 14th minutes form part of the official release, and they are also visible, plain as day, in the “supplementary material”, as can be seen below. They are the very first minutes in the folder, as they are the very first minutes in the official redacted release.
Moreover, as touched upon above, Velazquez has said that she personally assembled the minutes included in the “minutes-all” folder, comparing various versions provided by her source as Word docs against the contents of the official release and choosing the most similar – a Herculean task, incidentally. But how then could she not have noticed that the January 14th minutes were missing?
In any case, the most important question raised by these minutes, now that they have been found, is a completely different and substantive one: who is Wei Cai? Did the RKI’s native informant from Wuhan have links to the German-Chinese partnership that gave rise to a full-fledged German-Chinese virology lab located almost at the epicentre of what is at least officially regarded as the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in the city? A look at her publications makes clear that she does. But I will leave that topic for another occasion.
I would have thought that Aya Velazquez would be interested in this matter too. After all, barely six months ago, she “urgently recommended” my “explosive” research on the German-Chinese partnership and lab to the German public. But I gather from the tenor of her messages to me that she no longer regards the topic as worthy of consideration.
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack.
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I far preferred the Glen Miller Band.
Or the Steve Miller band,
The square root of FA of course.
The square root of -1 – it’s imaginary
Yeah – but useful. Unlike Miliband Minor (or Major for that matter)
As much as that?
Moribund
There’s no hope for the terminally dim Ed ‘Marxist’ Miliband, he deserves to die hungry and cold like he appears to think that the rest of us should.
The man is a fool.
It would be justice if he suffered as much as his worst-off victims – but he won’t.
He deserves to be kept warm and fed and safe – but his policies will ensure that not everyone will be.
He’s probably aiming to follow Alok Sharma into a highly lucrative role with the Rockefeller Foundation.
There is a serious concern about Ed Miliband’s mental health. So much so there is good case for him to be sectioned. The energy security and financial well being of our country is at stake. Perhaps join Joe Biden in a secure unit.
Okay everyone, join in…”Things, can only get better…”
At least when Miliband has driven the ship up the shore, the oil will still be at the bottom of the sea.
“Government’s Net Zero commitments will cost “hundreds of billions” of pounds. “
I am sure there are better things that the money could be spent on. Like fixing world poverty? Curing cancer?
Cancer cures have been found. Big Pharma don’t want them on the market because current 100 year old treatments rake in so much money.
Charidees like Cancer Research UK are just a racket, income in 2023 £719 million and they have been pulling these amounts for many years. However, they still haven’t found a cure for cancer?
BS.
Donations to charities are just secondary taxation for the gullible.
It only costs hundreds of billions if the requirement is to get a replacement to meet the same demand.
There is already a cure for “world poverty” —-It is called FOSSIL FUELS.
OT:
Some good news for a change: Forced Vaccinations On Our Loved Ones (crowdjustice.com) Mother finally wins in court battle to stop the state forcibly “vaccinating” her son against “covid”
Yes a “win” but what sort of people are they that they would put parents through all this strain and actually suffering.
Line the Next Tuesday’s up.
I’m sure you don’t need to be a parent to feel how despicable these people are, but as a parent I’d be homicidal towards all of them.
Miliband is just an extreme version of the UN and WEF lackey politician that has forced this country in law to reduce emissions to 100% of 1990 levels of CO2 by 2050 with no concern for cost (estimated by the grid to be in the region of 3 trillion) and with no real worry whether the technologies required for this absurdity can do what is proposed or whether new ones could ever be invented. This absurdity is ofcourse known as NET ZERO.
Our Political class are no longer answerable to the people that voted for them. They are just a local administration of the Global Governance via the UN/WEF. The policies they impose on their own citizens are ones desired by that same Supranational Politics that Margaret Thatcher warned about and indicated in her book “Statecraft”. At first Thatcher was onboard with the global warming issue because the Nuclear Energy that she favoured had no CO2 emissions to worry about. But she soon realised that the opportunity for global socialism was the real motivation behind control of CO2, which is the one gas that can be directly tied to Industrial Capitalism and that Climate Change policies were really just the excuse for anti capitalist polices that seek to control the worlds wealth and resources.
Off-T
Sort of…
https://www.thepublica.com/student-in-germany-murdered-by-gang-of-migrants-in-alleged-anti-christian-hate-crime/
Another young lad has lost his life to cultural enrichment. Bastards.
Off Topic….but good to know.—The squirming multi cultural cesspit parasites have no shame
Shit. Somebody just tried to assassinate Trump. It’s the way the signs say ”You’re fired!” then you hear the shots…
https://x.com/FergusPower1/status/1812255109750931734
He’s OK though, thank goodness. Jesus, the Leftards must be really pissed. Trump has more lives than a cat;
https://x.com/GhorbaniiNiyak/status/1812254092850241665
A close-up. Bless him. Brandon and Co need to pay for this. Prepare for all the faux concern from those lying dirtbags. I wonder who the hitman with a dodgy aim is and if they’ve got him yet…Well I reckon we know who’s got that election in the bag now. I just hope the guy can survive that long.
https://x.com/DaveAtherton20/status/1812255100053680542
An alternative headline is “One shot dead and two seriously injured at Trump rally”.
Not if, how soon. There will be a lot of pain and wasted money, but the end is inevitable.
We will all feel a great deal of pain socially and financially, but it will be a price worth paying if it ends this falsehood that renewables are cheap and secure.
All those that voted for Labour should be made to pay a premium for the idiocy.
I think he should answer a questions that senator Kennedy asked ” How much money will it cost? What time period? How many degrees lower do you expect these measures to cause?” These scammers expect this country to self destruct while those countries that will be producing goods that we find too dirty to make, will grow rich through industry. This is financial suicide. It is about time we started arresting these WEF shills for treason.
Apologies it was for 2050, the YT description is “‘You Don’t Know, Do You? You Don’t Know, Do You?’: Kennedy Does Not Let Up On Top Biden Official” “ Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk about the cost of green energy reforms. “
He’s made a good start, IMF by christmas
He’s made a good start. IMF by christmas
That man is an idiot. Hopefully his decisions will cause massive disobedience, disorder and protest. Hopefully that will destroy the communist Labour government.