pandemic
Drosten stops: Last regular episode “Coronavirus Update”
Christian Drosten, Director of the Institute for Virology at the Charité Berlin, comments on the current corona situation at a federal press conference. Photo: Kay Nietfeld/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
A podcast as a measure to combat the pandemic: The virologist Christian Drosten has also become known nationwide in the past two years. It’s over now, at least for now.
More than two years after the start of the podcast “The Corona Virus Update” on NDR-Info, the virologists Sandra Ciesek and Christian Drosten can be heard in a regular episode for the last time.
According to the NDR announcement, the scientists from the University Hospital Frankfurt am Main and from the Charité in Berlin will speak to science editors again on Tuesday about the pandemic. The two experts were last alternating guests in the format. More than 100 episodes have been released so far. The number of views amounts to around 135 million, as the NDR announced on request. Special episodes are also planned for the podcast.
More time for research
The podcast team does not want the exit of Drosten and Ciesek to be understood as a sign of the end of the pandemic. For the time being, there is not much more to say – science has played its part, now it is the turn of politics, it was said. A few months ago, Drosten wanted to stop, but then the omicron variant was surprisingly discovered in South Africa, which caused the most recent record waves of infection.
“I confess I was the one who said: I can’t do it anymore,” said Drosten recently in an interview with the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”. He needs time for research and for the management of his institute. If major problems arise, he wants to speak up in interviews. Or on Twitter: over 900,000 people follow him there. In the last episode, in which Drosten was the only guest, it was also said that the editors wanted to ask him about serious developments in the future.
With the episode title “We can slow down the spread”, “The Corona Virus Update” began at the end of February 2020 – at a time of great uncertainty. At the time, Drosten also gave advice on how to behave in everyday life, such as staying outside a lot, not suspecting an infected person around every corner and drinking beer from a bottle better than from insufficiently rinsed glasses. Informing so that people can help contain the pandemic – he repeatedly stated that as his goal.
Multiple awards
Especially in the first phase, the podcast also reflected the rapidly changing knowledge, for example when it came to the usefulness of masks or school operations. Some of the episodes, which could easily be two hours long, dealt with complex scientific issues. For regular listeners, terms such as ACE2 receptors, ELISA tests and IgG antibodies should therefore no longer be foreign words. The podcast has received many awards.
Drosten and Ciesek devoted themselves to the classification of studies and media reports and commented on the infection process. Even if Drosten in particular was often perceived in public as a warning, in many cases he also gave the all-clear – for example when research results that had been reproduced in an abridged or distorted manner had led to uncertainty among listeners. The downside of the large public presence: For some critics of the measures, Drosten became an enemy.
A good portion of self-mockery was demonstrated by Drosten a few months ago when he appeared in a satirical review of the year for ZDF – it was about a fictional end of the pandemic in 2022. The fact that he was a virologist was no longer of interest to anyone since my pandemic was over, he says he in the video in which he is presented with the overlay “Was once important”. “I invented the pandemic, everyone knows that by now,” he said. His motive: “It was all about the podcast. I just wanted to do a successful podcast. But now nobody wants to hear it since March.”