Failed evaluation: The phantom pains of the corona

It was an excursion into the empirical quarry of pandemic research, and it ended like a nasty picnic with politics has to end on such a basis: with frustration, bad words and the depressing realization that whoever accepts such invitations will have a bad stomach ache and leaves the pit badly annoyed.

The group of experts who were supposed to evaluate the Corona measures were so annoyed that shortly after the failure of their evaluation experiment, they branded the criticism as media-driven "excitement economy" and complained: "The well-established mechanism of an open debate is being cancelled."

The little hammer with which the much too small, far too badly equipped and technically completely overwhelmed, politically occupied - and harried - group of experts had gone into the quarry of scientific knowledge and ignorance is not aimed at the organizers of the hopeless evaluation trip, but against a helpless and now also speechless public.

"It doesn't work that way" is what the sociologist Jutta Allmendinger, the virologist Hendrik Streeck and the economist Christoph M. Schmidt have in their apology for evaluation in

overwritten.

According to scientific judgement, that would have been the correct answer to the invitation from parliament and the (previous) government to systematically evaluate the evidence for the corona measures in the country.

It was impossible because the scientific circle itself could not work on an evidence-based basis.

Even with the "birth of the commission, there were mistakes", that's not what the media say, that came from Streeck in the night talk with Markus Lanz.

However, the birth defects were not corrected.

There was also no collective outcry or dismissal from the experts, which would have been appropriate here - and is only documented by the exit of virologist Christian Drosten.

Instead, a vague "responsibility of science" is now brought forward, which at best can be interpreted as a moral (self-)obligation to serve politics unconditionally.

For independent scientists, assuming responsibility, as young academics experience early on in their careers, does not mean accepting every invitation – at least not if the question that the project is intended to answer cannot be brought to a conclusion, either theoretically or practically .

No one can force them to submit to constant attempts at political instrumentalization.