Who Ordered the 2020 Lockdown?
According to Multipolar Magazine, Germany's RKI head points to Bundeswehr Gen. Holtherm who, in turn, is deeply embedded with NATO/US military 'pandemic preparedness'
Today, we shall discuss the fall-out of the recent Lower Saxon Administrative Court decision to both read the RKI Files and use it court; as you may know, the so-called ‘sectoral vaccine mandate’ for healthcare workers was declared unconstitutional and sent (back) to Germany’s supreme Constitutional Court for yet another review:
We’ll now follow-up to this development, in particular because Paul Schreyer of Multipolar Magazine—the key force behind getting the RKI Files into the public domain in the first place—is now venturing into an altogether further direction:
Much like
has alleged numerous times by now, it would appear that the Robert Koch Institute’s lone decision to scale up the presumed threat level of Sars-Cov-2 in mid-March 2020 was based on an order. Paul Schreyer now surmises that this order was given—by Bundeswehr General Hans-Ulrich Holtherm, then in charge of a rather obscure Dept. of Health Security (Abteilung für Gesundheitssicherheit) in die Federal Health Ministry. Founded suddenly and unexpected in late 2019—what a coincidence—this assignment came at the tail end of participation in virtually every NATO/EU military deployment over the past thirty years.And this is now where Paul Schreyer will take over and explain this further. As always, translation and emphases mine, as are [snarky commentary] and the bottom lines.
RKI Risk Assessment: Who Instructed Wieler?
By Paul Schreyer, Multipolar Magazine, 13 Sept. 2024 [source]
The German government admits that the RKI technical level was ‘not involved’ in the upgrading of the risk assessment in March 2020. The heads of the RKI, Lothar Wieler, and his deputy Lars Schaade made the decision alone. Schaade now explained in court that the risk assessment had a ‘normative character’ and therefore belonged to the area of political ‘management’. It remains unclear by whom Wieler and Schaade were instructed at the time. (With an Update.)
The upgrade of the risk assessment announced by the President of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) on 17 March 2020 was the basis for all lockdown measures and many court rulings on lawsuits filed by those affected. The gist of these sentences: the risk assessment of the RKI—as the competent authority designated by the Infection Protection Act—is not questioned by the court. If the RKI comes to the conclusion, upon scientific examination that the risk is high, then this is decisive and the corresponding politically decided measures are therefore also justified.
In response to enquiries, the RKI repeatedly emphasised how thoroughly the risk assessment had been carried out and referred to its own public guideline. It states that the risk assessment was ‘formulated by the RKI crisis team’ and always described ‘the current situation for the population as a whole’—in other words, it was not a forecast of impending dangers in the future. This ‘current situation’ is measured against the three criteria of transferability (case numbers), severity profile (proportion of severe, clinically critical and fatal disease progressions), and resource strains on the healthcare system. The RKI assesses these three criteria ‘with measurable parameters’. In other words, the experts at the RKI studied all the relevant figures and then issued a fact-based recommendation for a risk assessment, which the crisis team, a committee of around 20 participants, then formulated and published. At least that’s the theory.
However, in a response from the Federal Government to a parliamentary enquiry [parlamentarische Anfrage] from Kay-Uwe Ziegler (AfD), Sabine Dittmar, Parliamentary State Secretary to the Minister of Health, has now stated the following:
The decision to upgrade the RKI’s risk assessment to ‘high’ was taken on Sunday 15 March 2020 by the then President of the RKI and the then Vice-President; no other RKI employees were involved.
So far, only the RKI minutes from Monday, 16 March 2020, were known about this decision, which held this:
A new risk assessment was prepared over the weekend. Threat level will be scaled up this week. The risk assessment will be published as soon as Mr Schaade gives the signal.
Journalists such as Markus Grill, chief reporter for the investigative departments of NDR and WDR, deduced from this after the publication of the RKI Files that it was ‘simply wrong’ that the upgrade was due to political pressure, as the passage showed that the decision had been made internally. The Tagesschau [main state broadcaster ARD’s newscast] analysed it in the same way at the time, saying that the RKI had ‘therefore already carried out a new risk assessment, but this has not yet been published’. It continued:
The claim that this decision was not based on professional judgement is therefore misleading. All that was missing was the consent of a specific person [Lars Schaade] to publish this risk assessment.
Argumentation Collapses
This argument collapses as a result of the Federal Government’s response quoted above. RKI scientific-technical staffers were not involved, Wieler and Schaade decided alone, on a Sunday. It is fitting that the RKI’s lawyers had already stated to the Berlin Administrative Court in September 2023 as part of the Multipolar lawsuit that the RKI ‘has no further documents dealing with the change in the risk assessment on 17 March 2020 from “moderate” to “high”.’ This announcement had already suggested that it was a lone decision at the top.
When questioned about this a few days ago as a witness before the Osnabrück Administrative Court [look at the top-linked posting], Schaade explained that the risk assessment had a ‘normative character’ and therefore belonged to the area of political ‘management’. Lawyer and former judge Franziska Meyer-Hesselbarth was on site as a trial observer and reported:
The Osnabrück Administrative Court asked Lars Schaade, referring to passages in the minutes, whether these assessments [on risk assessment] were based on political influence. Schaade had already repeatedly used the terms ‘management size’ [Management-Größe, i.e., this decision was too big to be left to underlings] and ‘management paper’ during his questioning, with the term ‘management’ apparently being synonymous with political or ministerial directives and wishes. With regard to the risk classifications of the RKI on the danger posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the witness Schaade also said that these belonged to the ‘management area’, in other words: to the area of non-scientific work of the RKI, which was subject to political influence. This was the moment when almost everyone in the audience had to take a deep breath because they could hardly believe their ears. But still: Lars Schaade had just collapsed the basis of the courts’ justification for the far-reaching pandemic restrictions with just a few words.
Who Ordered the Upgrade of the Risk Assessment?
It remains unclear by whom Wieler and Schaade were instructed on Sunday, 15 March 2020. Wieler’s direct superior was General Hans-Ulrich Holtherm, who had been appointed head of the new Dept. of Health Security [Abteilung für Gesundheitssicherheit: don’t you find it a bit strange that these outfits all seem to bear similar names, such as the UK Health Security Agency?] in the Federal Ministry of Health two weeks earlier—which had been created at the end of 2019—and who headed the federal government’s coronavirus crisis team. In an interview, Holtherm confirmed that Wieler was subordinate to him at the time: ‘Prof. Wieler correctly explained that the RKI is assigned to me as a subordinate authority within the framework of technical supervision.’
Heiko Rottmann-Großner, sub-department head at the Ministry of Health, was also repeatedly involved in the ministerial supervision of the RKI during the coronavirus period and later. In 2023, Rottmann-Großner also accompanied Wieler as a supervisor during the latter’s testimony before the Brandenburg State Parliament [Landtag] Coronavirus Investigation Committee.
Multipolar had already published extensive research on Rottmann-Großner’s role several years ago. One year before coronavirus, in February 2019, the ministry official had taken part in a private, international pandemic exercise and had personally met influential international players from the Gates Foundation, the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, the Wellcome Trust, the World Economic Forum, and other institutions [call me surprised *not*]. A year later, in February 2020, he was the first to recommend the lockdown measures to the German government at an internal meeting of state secretaries: the German government should prepare for ‘curfews of indefinite duration’ as well as to ‘paralyse the economy’. It is still unclear who gave him these recommendations for action, which were not part of the 2017 national pandemic plan, at the time.
Courts and parliamentary investigative bodies should now determine who instructed Lothar Wieler in March 2020 in connection with the upgrading of the risk assessment.
Addendum, 13 Sept. 2024: Lars Schaade wrote the following on 23 Feb. 2020 in a now leaked email to Lothar Wieler and other high-ranking RKI colleagues:
Mr. Rottmann has asked for an updated risk assessment due to the situation in Italy.
On 2 March 2020, the minutes read:
There was criticism from the Federal Health Ministry that the risk was initially classified too low by the RKI.
Bottom Lines
I think we can now deduce the following pathway to ‘the Pandemic™’: there were extensive ‘preparedness’ (sic) exercises, planning meetings, and breathless ‘studies™’ before Covid was declared a ‘PHEIC™’ by the WHO.
These involved a ton of ‘experts™’ and ‘busybodies’ from gov’t agencies, military staffers, foundations, and NGOs. For these people, and irrespective of the topic, this situation is awesome because it enables massive grift.
Gotta meet in Geneva at the WHO—can you believe it, me this irrelevant staffer far away from any ‘very important issue™’ (which is, of course, national security and the like)—and I’ll be meeting tons of VIPs there.
I’ve seen scaled-down versions of this kind of behaviour while working at the Austrian Foreign Ministry. Most public officials staffing gov’t agencies have neither any special talent nor any kind of drive. They accommodate to the situation they find themselves in, and they try to rise through the ranks.
What sets you apart and makes the political appointees of the minister notice you is—exactly this kind of ‘stuff’: they all recognise money fountains when they see, e.g., ‘pandemic preparedness meetings’ where some consultants or billionaires drone on about one thing or the other (obfuscating their own investments into, say, drug development); there’s canapés, receptions, and lots of ‘informal’ dinners and the like, all paid for by both the staffers’ gov’t and/or ‘donors’. As an aside, NATO and the EU work in the same ways.
It’s a huge temptation, and it’s not a bridge too far, I’d argue, to make an outsized impression on the proverbial federal employee—let’s call him ‘Mr. Smith’—who’s everyday life is quite boring. But once or twice a year, Mr. Smith gets to ‘brief the minister’ about all the *very important stuff* he participated in over the last year attending all those meetings in Geneva, New York, or the like.
(I’ve once participated in this charade: I mentioned my time as a staffer in the Austrian MFA; I could tell you about mid-day receptions in NATO embassies, ‘work shops’ at this or that federal academy of whatever, and the like. I’ve also attended a reception at the Austrian Embassy to the UN in NYC while I was a visiting professor at an Ivy League college back in 2018; like every other gov’t, every September, when the UN General Assembly meets, literally everyone who can justify going is attending: it’s a couple of days in NY, bring your spouse, but the rest is on the taxpayer. In my case, the Austrian gov’t came with the president, the chancellor, and the foreign minister—plus their entourage, some God knows how many people.)
Back to General Holtherm, though. He’s quite one of these career ‘specialists’. As his German Wikipedia profile informs us, he participated in virtually every ‘international deployment’ of the Bundeswehr since the mid-1990s, from Iraq (as part of UNSCOM) via the Balkans (IFOR) to Afghanistan and Uzbekistan (ISAF) to Djibouti (‘Enduring Freedom’) and a bunch of other EU missions. Back in 2011, as the portal Wehrmedizin und Wehrpharmazie 2011/3 (Combat Medicine) holds, he participated in a ‘NATO Disease Surveillance Seminar’, which has, well, interesting origins:
Under the Prague Capabilities Commitment, member states agreed to improve their capabilities in more than 400 specific areas covering eight current mission-critical areas [I doubt there is anything that’s not covered]. NBC [nuclear, biologicial, and chemical] defence was identified as one of these mission-critical areas where capability gaps existed. In addition to the NBC Event Teams and Deployable Analytical Laboratories (both later merged into the Combined Joint CBRN Defence Task Force), the lack of a Disease Surveillance System was identified.
In accordance with the decision of the Chiefs of Military Medical Services in NATO (COMEDS) in Vilnius/LTU 2008, a multi-national Deployment Health Surveillance Capability (DHSC) was set up in Munich in January 2010 at the Bundeswehr Medical Service (SanAmtBw). The DHSC was functionally integrated into the Centre of Excellence for Military Medicine (MILMED COE). As a central analysis facility, the DHSC analyses directly transmitted and processed data from deployed medical services. Based on clinical symptoms, this data then allows centralised monitoring of deployed NATO forces and early detection of infectious disease outbreaks in near real time. The monitoring tool used is the French ASTER system (Alerte et surveillance en temps réel, or real-time monitoring and alerting system). The director of the DHSC is Chief Medical Officer Dr Hans-Ulrich Holtherm…
The purpose of this year’s event was to offer NATO member states and participating partners a platform for discussing scientific aspects of disease surveillance, to provide impetus for further research and—if possible—to develop practical ideas for multinational operations.
[look who was there] Experts from NATO, Ukraine and other partner nations (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Finland, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, the Russian Federation, Switzerland), as well as from scientific institutes and international organisations (e.g. Turkish Military Medicine Academy, NATO Deployment Health Surveillance Capability, JCBRND Centre of Excellence, U.S. Defence Threat Reduction Agency, International Committee of the Red Cross, OPCW, World Health Organisation and others) contributed to the success of the seminar. The workshop was chaired by representatives of the CP Co-Chairs, Ms. Laura Gross, USA Department of Defence, and Col. Kadir Dikmensoy, Turkish General Staff. Lieutenant General Jürgen Bornemann, General Director/International Military Staff, honoured the seminar with his presence while on a visit to Ukraine.
Representatives from commercial companies also attended the workshop to share their capabilities in support of NBC defence operations. It also provided a platform for the companies to discuss future projects to improve NBC defence capabilities. Col. Dr. Hans-Ulrich Holtherm presented NATO’s Deployment Health Capability, while Col. Dr. Lothar Zöller spoke on the differentiation between natural and deliberately caused outbreaks of infectious diseases.
Now, how about that?
Look at the list of countries and companies that attended.
All it takes is one agit-prop moment—such as the doctored images from Bergamo, Italy—and these people all spring into action ‘as if guided by an invisible hand’. Because they all ‘practiced’ and ‘trained’ together for precisely this kind of ‘moment’.
There’s no need for a big, huge conspiracy (I wouldn’t rule out one), but the far simpler answer is this: there’s a generation of post-Cold War civil and military officials, as well as academic leaders, who’ve all been brought up within this biowarfare/‘health security™’ paradigm.
If your only tool is a proverbial hammer (germ warfare), all your solutions look like nails (or syringes).
The one wonderful advantage of military involvement in this charade, though, is this: there’s always a superior officer, and I suspect that, over time, we’ll learn who gave these orders.