Christian Drosten, the malevolent virologist at the Berlin Charité who rose to international prominence in 2020 as the judicial virus astrologer of the Merkel government and who acted for years as the public face of hygiene restrictions in the Federal Republic, is one of the great villains of the pandemic. . From lockdowns to mass testing to school closures, there is literally no hateful Covid policy that Drosten hasn’t left his fingerprints on. Ever since the West came to its senses, our imperceptible pandemic has been kicked off Twitter and handed over its state media podcast, but it’s always lurking somewhere in the foamy toilet water, likely to resurface at any moment with a another nasty sermon about the absurd and the oppressive. things we have to do because Science.
Drosten left his lab for the last time to instruct the world on the need to reorganize society around the threat of viral pathogens on October 16. The occasion was a World Health Summit panel discussion on “Prevention, Preparedness and Response to a Future Pandemic”; his fellow speakers included a Swiss pharmaceutical lobbyistthe co-chair of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Boardsome Indian woman from a Dutch NGO and fellow block villain Karl Lauterbach.
These are the people who seek to run our lives now. While the third worlders on the panel mainly babbled about vaccinating the poor and the pharmaceutical lobby sang hymns to private sector innovation, our German guests distinguished themselves with much more ominous pronouncements.
Asked how we should prepare for the NEXT PANDEMIC, Drosten gave a rambling speech in which he described “three top priority issues,” each very bad in their own way.
First of all, Drosten wants to start mass testing of animal viruses, because “all the respiratory viruses we know historically came from cattle.” He claims that “we have MERS knocking on the door of an important livestock species in the Middle East”, although all evidence suggests that MERS has been knocking on that door for generations, if not centuries, without ever being able to open it. But you can imagine how great it will be: once Drosten’s livestock surveillance programs are up and running, we can start panicking not only about human viruses, but also about cow and chicken viruses. We can track them in real time, they can make headlines and scare people, and lead to heavy-handed government intervention. Perhaps we will even have preventive confinements or vaccination campaigns to prevent these dreaded cattle viruses from spilling over; the possibilities are limitless. And most importantly, as Drosten explains, these programs will be “very expensive” — putting far more money into the coffers of virologists like Drosten, which is really the only reason he’s making these demands.
Secondly, Drosten wants to greatly expand and improve the surveillance of human viruses. This also means more money for shiny new lab equipment so we can track “herpes viruses, measles, respiratory viruses in normal clinical practice and in normal public health surveillance.” Right now, most countries have flu surveillance programs that tabulate a handful of respiratory viruses each year, but if pandemics like Drosten take hold, we’ll have regular updates on dozens and dozens of viruses. We’ll be sequencing them all, tracking regional outbreaks, developing new vaccines against viruses you’ve barely heard of and never mattered before.
In third place, Drosten is very, very concerned about “communication and misinformation.” That’s what you’d expect for the wrinkly, vain professor who trashed the pandemic regularly on Twitter for anonymous anime accounts and lashing out with strange anger against things like Barrington’s Great Declaration. The problem for our peerless virus propagandist is that “political decision-making” about whether to arrest citizens indefinitely or impose hours-long mask regimes on schoolchildren in the middle of summer “is influenced and distorted by disinformation and propaganda”. You can’t have “anyone with an academic degree talking” about these issues “in the middle of a pandemic.” What we really need, according to Drosten, are panels of scientific truth to decide what is what and exert unilateral influence on policy:
We have to turn to the institutions of science to make a selection to create panels of experts, who are really experts and … who are … qualified to summarize the state of knowledge, and this can only happen in through the institutions of science. These institutions must offer this function to society, and these institutions of science are actually made up of scientists, first-rate scientists…
It cannot be emphasized enough that Drosten, who surely considers himself a “top scientist” candidate to serve on these truth panels, is a laboratory virologist. He is not an immunologist, nor an epidemiologist, let alone an expert in economics, public health, society, human psychology, or anything else. While this tired twit was given a platform to teach the rest of us how to respond to viruses, he has no more experience justifying the recipes he’s been promoting for years than any of us have to oppose them .
While the rest of the dubious pandemic preparedness panel quietly let Drosten’s disinformation anxiety pass, Lauterbach quickly picked up on the subject, explaining the deeply dangerous “pandemic of misinformation, which is now widespread…so we are…”. even in a more difficult position than we were in before the pandemic.” This is true, of course. Through their sheer excess and insanity, the Lauterbachs and Drostens have sparked an entire grassroots resistance movement everywhere of the world, where there was none before. What work these monumental idiots have done, and how persistently without any introspection, even now.
Like all his colleagues, Drosten experienced an extreme conversion to virus hysteria in March 2020. He used to have very different opinions on all the things he talks about today, so all you need to do to refute after 2020 Drosten is to consult the pre-2020 version of the man. In 2014, for example, openly doubted that the great threat of MERS knocking on our doors was much to worry about. Only after the wealth of new funding opportunities opened up by Covid did he start shouting (in November 2020) that MERS is “a candidate for the next pandemic virus” and (in May 2023) “that to [MERS] a variant will form…that can lead to a global pandemic.” These are all deeply interested appeals. Since 2017, Drosten has been directly involved in government-funded MERS research, which includes gain-of-function elements. Like the other top scientists likely to serve on his scientific truth panel, Drosten is merely steering politics in directions that enhance his personal prestige, power, and funding opportunities.
At first, of course, Drosten didn’t think Covid was a big deal either. In a press conference on March 2, 2020, the state media did everything in their power to remove the memory, said this about SARS-2 mortality:
We have many mild cases. This disease is a mild disease, it is mainly a cold, a cold that affects the lower respiratory tract, and in principle it is not a problem for the individual. So if I do get a cold, not only will I survive, but I usually won’t suffer much from it. The question is, then, what are we really concerned about here? And we care about society, not individuals. All right?
Two weeks after these statements, Drosten and RKI director Lothar Wieler were banging on the door of the interior ministry to demand indefinite blockades. What attracted Drosten to the forms of mass containment was not any new data, but the political possibility of mass containment, which the Italian response opened up after March 10, as well as the specifically technocratic confinements proposed by Neil Ferguson, who undertook to grant Corona. astrologers play an outsized and lasting role in the years of failed virus suppression campaigns that are doomed to fail.
There is another curious moment from Drosten’s World Health Summit pontifications worth mentioning here. In support of his strenuous pleas for ever more virus surveillance, he argues that more testing could have spared the Third World its devastating lockdowns. The problem, he says, is that places like Africa weren’t doing millions of PCR tests every day, so we simply did not know the “age profile of mortality” and “couldn’t foresee that … strong social distancing and contact measures were somewhat less necessary in many countries, for example in Africa because of the age profile.”
This is a totally infuriating lie. The a very underwhelming Diamond Princess shoot in February it provided very clear data on the minimal risk Covid posed to young people before anyone was locked down and also Drosten himself knew it. In that same press conference on March 2, 2020, he says that “if I get infected today, I, as a person, may have a [mortality] risk of 0.5% on average”, but he clarifies that “at my age I do not have this risk personally, it is the elderly who have it”. Drosten, despite his rather extravagant claims of ignorance, knew exactly what was going on. He and others like him chose to lie about the risk of scaring people into locking themselves in their homes, putting ridiculous plastic diapers over their faces, and accepting an indefinite vaccination regimen that had no clear advantage, until all according to their own statistics for any healthy person. under 50 years old.
The truth is that Drosten is not only a self-interested liar and bad actor, but also an eccentric mediocrity who was never equipped for the fame to which the pandemic raised him. This is a man who he pontificated at length about his fear of draft beer, because of the evil germs lurking in the pub’s glasses. This is a man who, in the middle of the vaccination campaign, declared that “If you believe you can train your immune system through an infection, you have to believe you can train your digestive system through steak..” This is a man who claimed German literary giant Friedrich Schiller he would have happily donned a mask to stop Coronaand proposed deepening Kant’s categorical imperative with a new “pandemic imperative,” according to which everyone should behave as if they’ve just tested positive for Covid and everyone they encounter is old, vulnerable and likely to die from virus
Drosten is an oppressive and vile hygiene clown, and his enduring presence in public discourse is the veritable Long Covid.
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