The legacy of COVID-19 policies

Shownotes

Five years ago, so-called containment measures began worldwide due to a coronavirus that was declared new and initially classified as very deadly. General school closures, curfews, lockdowns, assembly bans and even vaccination amndates were decided against the recommendations of existing national pandemic plans.

These so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions(NPIs) were intended to slow the spread of the virus and at the same time represented a significant encroachment on the civil liberties of citizens.

I take stock of the proportionality and effectiveness of these measures in a conversation with one of the world's most cited scientists. John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and top epidemiologist at Stanford University, was a guest in Berlin and took the time to talk to me about pandemic policy. (15th of March 2025)

We not only shed light on the questions of how dangerous SARS-Cov2 really was or how it could happen that the social debate space was so poisoned. We also talk about the effectiveness of mod-RNA injections and the significance of leaked RKI-minutes, which revealed the strong influence of politics on science.

Asked about the origin of the virus in the preliminary discussion, Ioannidis replied: "Regarding the origin of the virus, I have always believed that we need transparency in research, so in the critical case we need full transparency on what experiments were done and in what conditions and precautions. In the absence of such transparency, the debate moves out of science and becomes an issue for the secret services, which is a pity for science. I realize that the balance is gradually shifting and that some secrete services claim that it was a lab leak. I cannot judge secret services, this is not my expertise, but I do worry that a narrative "secrete services say it was a lab leak" can be linked easily with a narrative "so, it must have been a horrible virus and therefore all the horrible measures we took were justified". This makes me very uneasy."

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