Health scientist Rolf Rosenbrock says that many opportunities to contain the corona pandemic have remained unused because the government has not used established public health methods.

He is a member of the evaluation committee that presented a report on corona measures on Friday and is chairman of the Joint Association.

We talk to him about the extent to which the effectiveness of restrictions can be examined at all - and about the Federal Center for Health Education, which was hardly visible during the pandemic.

The assessments of the report differ widely.

The Green politician Dahmen attaches little importance to him, the FDP politician Kubicki believes that the report shows that the measures are largely disproportionate and undemocratic and has demanded that RKI boss Lothar Wieler be dismissed.

No, the report does not provide either of these.

My advice to anyone expressing an opinion an hour after a 150-page report is available is to read the document first before calling it important or unimportant.

Reading the Executive Summary is not enough.

And even if there is no conclusive data on the impact of lockdowns, it does not mean that the majority of the Commission in spring 2020 would not have advocated a lockdown.

We often emphasize that every pathogen is different and every pathogen affects different population groups differently.

There are no general recipes and that is why pandemic policy is always experimental in nature.

This should have been communicated much better to the population: In these cases, to protect and to fulfill the oath of office, politicians must avert damage to the people,

How well was your committee able to examine the effect and effectiveness of the corona measures?

It was a naïve wish of politicians, because it is not simply a calculation that gives a result such as "not effective at all", "moderately effective" or "very effective".

The effectiveness of measures depends to a large extent on completely different factors - such as the social climate, trust in politics and science, or the communication used to explain the measures to the population.

Such factors were not the subject of the assignment - that was a limitation from the outset, which we did not take seriously, however, when we said: The effectiveness and impact of measures depend to a large extent on risk communication.

This aims at public understanding of the existence, size and characteristics of a risk - and the measures

None of that was part of the brief, but we took the liberty to go well beyond that.

However, time was far too short - we should have examined whether the interaction between the institutions, the interaction between science and politics, also at the federal, federal and municipal levels, was correct in order to combat such a pandemic.

Such a structural analysis would have been urgently needed, but it was not part of our assignment.