On 5 March 2023, then German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach declared the COVID-19 pandemic over at a press conference. What was already becoming apparent at the time has grown increasingly clear in the years since.
Alongside the long-term psychological and physical consequences, there has been an almost complete collapse of trust in the state and its political elites, in science and in medical institutions. This is the result of lies, arbitrary policymaking and a totalitarian refusal to engage with criticism. The public was lied to, deceived and manipulated.
The case of Anthony Fauci is now making headlines in the United States. From 1984 to 2022, Fauci headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). During the pandemic, he became the face of American public health policy.
As part of a Senate investigation, Rand Paul, who is leading the inquiry, released 1,141 pages of Fauci’s private records. They reveal the extent to which people were misled, not only in Germany but also in the United States.
In the spring of 2021, Fauci publicly argued that vaccinated people represented an epidemiological dead end for the virus. Not even the vaccine manufacturers publicly claimed that their products conferred sterilizing immunity. Nevertheless, US vaccine mandates were based on Fauci’s assertion.
The Vaccine Narrative
In Germany, the same narrative underpinned the 2G rules, which restricted access to certain venues and services to people who had been vaccinated or had recovered from COVID-19, and later the debate over a general vaccine mandate.
The full extent of the deception becomes clear from Fauci’s records. He wrote that he, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and others had dissuaded Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky from publicly stating that the vaccines were wholly ineffective at preventing infection and transmission.
Such a statement would have contradicted the recommendation for another booster vaccination issued only days earlier. Fauci also wrote that disclosing this information would have undermined the Justice Department’s efforts to enforce vaccine mandates.
What has emerged so far reveals only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the lies told by governments around the world. Such narratives provided the basis for the defamation and exclusion of critics of vaccination and other pandemic measures.
In Germany, much of the evidence is now on the table following journalist Aya Velazquez’s publication of the leaked COVID files. Yet hardly anyone appears interested. Germany’s COVID inquiry commission merely creates the impression that the country is seriously examining its pandemic response.
The body lacks the powers required for a genuine investigation, allowing those responsible at the time to retain control over the pandemic narrative.
An Edifice of Lies
From the outset, the handling of the pandemic rested on an extraordinary edifice of lies. At the beginning of 2020, the then health minister claimed that Germany was well prepared for the new virus. Within weeks, that claim proved untenable.
On 14 March 2020, the Federal Ministry of Health posted on Twitter that reports that the federal government would soon announce sweeping restrictions on public life were untrue. It urged people to help stop them from spreading.
Less than a week later, the first lockdown began, bringing public life almost entirely to a halt. Yet the public and media outcry that such a reversal might have been expected to provoke never materialized.
How Critics Were Silenced
Although the measures initially enjoyed broad public acceptance amid widespread uncertainty, they later provoked substantial and sometimes fierce criticism.
Anyone who voiced doubts publicly or even raised them among friends was mercilessly denounced. Schwurbler, a dismissive term for supposed cranks, Querdenker, the label given to anti-lockdown protesters, and conspiracy theorists were only some of the milder descriptions the mainstream reserved for critical thinkers.
Those who publicly criticized the measures also risked losing their jobs or seeing their commissions dry up. One particularly memorable episode was the campaign by a group of artists who satirized the restrictions under the hashtag #allesdichtmachen.
After the videos were released, public broadcasters warned participants that they could lose roles, productions and commissions. Some of the artists withdrew their contributions under intense public pressure.
A culture of intimidation and veiled threats prevailed, of a kind normally associated with totalitarian states. The language the state used to address its citizens remains shocking to this day.
One particularly memorable example was a paper produced by the Federal Ministry of the Interior that justified deliberately frightening the population. At the same time, the government addressed adult citizens like children in a patronizing tone. Neither the law nor the constitution appeared to play any meaningful role under the COVID regime.
A Coup in All but Name
During the pandemic, Germany was governed by the Minister-Presidents’ Conference, a loose consultative body with no decision-making powers of its own.
Yet between 2020 and 2022, all the major decisions were made there, from lockdowns, school closures and mask mandates to bans on public gatherings and vaccine mandates. Parliament, the German Bundestag, barely featured. When called upon to approve a measure, it bowed before the all-powerful Chancellor Angela Merkel.
In essence, the COVID regime differed little from a coup.
More than three years after the pandemic ended, its dramatic consequences are becoming clear. Loneliness, social isolation and fear of infection were deliberately fostered during the crisis. They cannot simply be switched off.
For young people, peer groups are especially important. Yet children and adolescents were separated from their friends and classmates for months. School closures caused not only social isolation but also an educational disaster.
The 2021–22 school year was, in effect, largely lost. When schools were open, masked children sat in freezing classrooms that were left unheated and had to be ventilated regularly.
What purpose did these measures serve? None.
Children as Scapegoats
It was already known at the time that children were neither the principal carriers nor the main drivers of infection. Trust in the state as the guarantor of education and in schools as educational institutions has declined sharply, not only among children but also among parents.
Compulsory schooling, from which the state had never previously been willing to deviate and which it is now once again determined to uphold, became politically negotiable for two years. The consequences for children have been dramatic.
This was later compounded by social and institutional pressure to be vaccinated, even though it was never established whether, or to what extent, vaccination was beneficial or safe for children.
One statement particularly characteristic of the period came from Thomas Mertens, chairman of Germany’s Standing Committee on Vaccination (STIKO), who said that he would prefer not to have his own children vaccinated. A short time later, under intense pressure, children were more or less compelled to be vaccinated. The result has been a sharp decline in vaccine uptake.
Depression rates in Germany have risen by more than 10% since the pandemic. The increase among adolescents has been particularly pronounced, accompanied by a sharp rise in suicidal behavior.
The lies and manipulation of the federal and state governments have also caused public confidence in the state to fall dramatically. One example is the COVID aid provided to businesses.
During the lockdowns, numerous companies were forced to suspend operations. The state distributed aid indiscriminately, only to demand that some of it be repaid later, contrary to its original assurances. What had been presented as swift, straightforward assistance became a bureaucratic monster. Here too, confidence in state support has been badly damaged.
Germany’s gross domestic product fell by 9.7% in the second quarter of 2020 compared with the first. It was the sharpest decline since quarterly records began in 1970.
The overall economic cost of the pandemic in Germany is almost impossible to quantify. Cautious estimates put the total at up to €500bn ($578bn).
Where Did COVID Come From?
The dispute over the origin of the virus illustrates how science was constrained by political considerations. Anthony Fauci was aware of the lab-leak theory and of evidence suggesting that the virus may have been artificially engineered.
In both Germany and the United States, this hypothesis was long dismissed as a conspiracy theory and aggressively challenged by governments that were well aware of the evidence behind it.
Did uncertainty among political leaders about how a virus that had escaped from biological weapons research might behave outside a laboratory help drive their panicked and erratic response to the pandemic?
For all the attention devoted to the virus itself, its lasting effects remain poorly understood. Thousands of people suffer from symptoms that are simply grouped together under the labels post-COVID or long COVID.
Confidence in a healthcare system that responds to these widely differing conditions with near apathy has effectively collapsed. Adverse effects from vaccination are either denied or simply dismissed as post-COVID symptoms.
Diagnoses of fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), have risen sharply. Yet the condition is itself often classified as post-COVID and either poorly treated or not treated at all.
A model-based estimate by the ME/CFS Research Foundation and Risklayer found that, by the end of 2024, 650,183 people in Germany had ME/CFS and more than 1.5 million had either ME/CFS or long COVID.
The consequences can range from limitations in everyday life to a complete inability to work. The study estimated the societal cost of Long COVID and ME/CFS at €63.1bn ($72.9bn) in 2024, equivalent to around 1.5% of the country’s gross domestic product.
Research on the scale required has yet to materialize, while the illness receives little media attention. Patients diagnosed with ME/CFS feel abandoned by both the state and the medical profession.
Trust in Ruins
These examples offer only a partial picture of the pandemic and its aftermath.
Ineffective masks, pointless curbs on public life, limits on social contact, curfews, business and school closures and a scandalous vaccination campaign involving experimental vaccines were accompanied by repeated lies, the vilification of critics whose arguments later often proved correct and, at times, absurd rules such as bans on sitting on park benches.
The consequences have been dramatic. The pandemic ultimately caused a profound loss of confidence in the state and in the independence of science.
The result is a deep social divide that persists to this day, accompanied by lasting tensions and mistrust even among former friends. There is also widespread doubt about the state’s ability to respond effectively to future crises, because part of the population will simply refuse to comply when the next emergency comes.
The possible consequences – potentially even civil war in the midst of a genuine or politically engineered crisis – are almost impossible to imagine.
All this follows from a refusal to confront events rationally, communicate transparently, tell the truth and, ultimately, subject every necessary measure to broad public debate.