W.hen the new Expert Council of the Federal Government meets for the first time this Tuesday, it will immediately be about fighting the pandemic before and after Christmas and the threat of the Omikron wave in Germany. In Great Britain, the number of infections is already doubling every two to three days because people who have been vaccinated three times also become infected.
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) had announced that the fight against pandemics would be based more on scientific expertise. The Expert Council should therefore advise every week. In contrast to the previous policy advice to the Chancellery by some scientists, including not only the head of the Charité Virological Institute, Christian Drosten, belonged, but also the head of the system immunology department at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Braunschweig, Michael Meyer-Hermann, the composition of the Expert Council suggests controversial debates.
An antipode of Drosten
The head of the Virological Institute of the University Clinic Bonn, Hendrik Streeck, was an antipode of Drosten, especially in the first phase of the pandemic, which repeatedly criticized the hard lockdowns. He advocated gentle government intervention and a swift return to normal, and had several controversies Lauterbach. The virologist Melanie Brinkmann, also at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Braunschweig, and her colleague Meyer-Hermann have always spoken out in favor of tough government interventions.
Brinkmann even wanted a no-covid strategy based on the Australian model – similar to the physicist and modeler at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen Viola Priesemann. She is also a member of the Expert Council.
The President of the is one of the well-known faces of the Expert Council who belong to it because of their function Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Lothar Wieler, the chairman of the Standing Vaccination Commission (STIKO), Thomas Mertens, and the chairwoman of the German Ethics Council, the medical ethicist Alena Buyx, as well as the intensive care physician and head of the intensive care register of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI), Christian Karagiannidis.
Specialists in child and adolescent medicine who are involved in relevant studies, for example on infection processes in day-care centers and schools, are represented much more strongly than before. This includes the director of the Clinic and Polyclinic for Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine at the University of Cologne, Jörg Dötschwho shared with Gerard Krause from the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Braunschweig is working on a meta-study on infection occurrences in schools, which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
The school project of the “Nationwide Research Network Applied Surveillance and Testing” (B-FAST) is coordinated by Dötsch. Specifically, it is about how efficient tests at schools and daycare centers can prevent closings.
The director of the children’s clinic at the Dresden University Hospital, Reinhard Berner, on behalf of the Saxon state government, examined the infection rate in daycare centers, but also in schools and vocational schools, and during the first three waves at least came to the conclusion that neither daycare centers nor schools are infection drivers.