RKI minutes were recently published – some of them blacked out. For greater transparency, Health Minister Lauterbach now wants to remove many of the redactions. The AfD doesn’t go far enough.
Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) had announced that he wanted to deal with the corona pandemic transparently. This now also applies to the recently published protocols from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) from this time. “Yesterday I arranged for the protocols to be largely redacted,” he said Deutschlandfunk. “Maximum transparency” must be achieved.
An online magazine had legally forced the publication of the RKI Corona crisis team’s internal documents from January 2020 to April 2021. However, many redactions were made in these. Lauterbach announced that he would like to have it checked again to see whether and which redactions are necessary. The RKI must ask permission from everyone named in the minutes or those represented with interests as to whether they can be redacted. “This will take a while, maybe four weeks,” said the SPD politician.
Nothing should indicate deliberate concealment
At the same time, he was confident that a “significantly more redacted version” could then be presented. Lauterbach emphasized: “We don’t want to give the slightest impression that the Robert Koch Institute is deliberately hiding anything.”
The SPD politician, who only became Minister of Health more than a year and a half after the start of the pandemic, also spoke out in favor of a political review of the Corona measures by the Bundestag. This is “necessary” because the impression should not arise that others want to keep something secret. However, Parliament itself must decide on the specific form of processing. As a member of the government, he did not want to make any suggestions on this, said Lauterbach.
AfD calls for complete de-blackening
The AfD, however, demanded that all protocols be completely blackened. “If Lauterbach is actually seriously interested in a full investigation, all protocols of the RKI Corona crisis team must be redacted, not just the documents by April 2021,” explained Martin Sichert, health policy spokesman for the AfD parliamentary group.
“The public has a right to know what really happened in 2020 to 2022.” The public interest weighs “much greater than any possible data protection at this point”.
Leading representatives of the traffic light government had already spoken out in favor of a critical examination of the Corona policy.