It's Never Wrong to be Wrong When You're Christian Drosten

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.