“The child fell into the well”

by time news

BerlinThe video rushes through the social media as an “angry speech” and “incendiary speech”. “The child fell into the well,” says RKI boss Lothar Wieler – visibly frustrated. Of the 52,000 reported new corona infections, 400 would die in the next few weeks. “Nobody can change that with the best medical care,” says Wieler. The drop-dead rate has been 0.8 percent in the past few weeks.

Seldom has Lothar Wieler been seen so desperately as in this video, which was made on Wednesday evening during an online discussion with the Saxon Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer (CDU). You can feel his frustration with politics: “We will really have a very bad Christmas if we don’t take countermeasures now.”

An up and down based on the statements

For almost two years, Lothar Wieler has been sitting regularly in front of the press, reporting the numbers of infected and deceased. The situation is sometimes “worrying”, sometimes “very serious”, sometimes “slightly relaxed”. The ups and downs of the pandemic can be read from Wieler’s statements, mostly combined with recommendations to the citizens: “Please everyone help, keep your distance, observe the hygiene rules” – “Please limit your contacts to the bare minimum. “

The tone has hardly changed over time. Not even the appearance: the blue suit, usually worn with the white polka dot tie. The hair seems to have turned a little grayer, but that can also be a wrong impression. But a lot must have changed inside Wieler since he first appeared in front of the press with a corona briefing on February 27, 2020.

“We are dealing with a virus that we have only known for a very short time and about which we receive new information almost every day,” said Wieler that Thursday in the RKI building on the north bank in Berlin-Wedding. When asked by the Berliner Zeitung about the worst scenario, Wieler said: That would be an epidemic, roughly comparable to the flu wave 2017/2018 with 25,100 deaths.

A person who polarizes

At the time, Lothar Wieler could not imagine which victims this pandemic would really claim. Nor how his own role would change. Up until that day, hardly anyone knew the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) – the central federal institution in the field of disease monitoring and prevention. Lothar Wieler was also only known to experts. The microbiologist and veterinarian, born in Königswinter, North Rhine-Westphalia, in 1961, was a professor at the Free University (FU) Berlin and managing director at the Institute for Microbiology and Animal Diseases before he became President of the RKI in 2015.

Almost from one day to the next, he became known throughout Germany. His person polarizes society in a way that, as a scientist, he could hardly have imagined. If it is claimed in public that he wants lockdown instead of freedom, “then the threats, including death threats, increase massively,” said Wieler recently. If someone harms him, “that would be bitter for me and my family,” said Wieler, who is married and has two grown daughters. “But the risk doesn’t stop me from doing my duty.”

Because of his calm, matter-of-fact, precise manner, many see him as an oasis of calm in the pandemic. An old research colleague said he was the “ideal cast”. Wieler took “the apocalyptic sting of the pandemic with his stoic lecture,” wrote Der Spiegel.

Criticism of RKI and Lothar Wieler

At the same time, the RKI and Wieler themselves had to take a lot of criticism – most recently at the beginning of October, because the institute stated the number of vaccinated people in Germany was too low. Others criticized the fact that the RKI figures contradict each other and that the seven-day incidence remains the leading indicator for the pandemic, although it hardly provides any information about the real number of seriously ill people and the mortality rate from infections. According to the RKI, however, the incidences are an important measure for the development of the pandemic. You can read from it what is going on a short time later in the intensive care units.

Lothar Wieler himself said that the institute had reached its limits in the pandemic “in terms of both personnel and finances”. Wieler was “too close to the line of the federal government,” criticized an FDP politician. A Green politician claimed that he was partly responsible for the long school closings. In November 2020, despite high incidences, Wieler advised against expanding the measures by closing schools and daycare centers. The infection process in schools can be controlled, he said.

He also rejected the demands of the Liberals to set up the RKI independently of the Ministry of Health. “If the RKI were completely detached like a Max Planck Institute, then we would not have the leverage at all to provide such intensive professional advice on health policy projects,” he said.

Nonetheless, his angry speech met with a lot of encouragement. On Twitter, #DankeWieler is one of the Germany-wide trends. Just one day after the publication, the number of new infections rose to over 65,371. Behind the official reports there is a double to three times higher number of unreported cases, says Wieler in his video. With its cool, reserved tone, this fourth wave is long gone. “Everyone, man and mouse, who can vaccinate should kindly vaccinate now,” he urges. “Otherwise we won’t get this crisis under control.”

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