Enlarge image
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier awards scientist Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim the Federal Cross of Merit, October 1, 2020
Photo: Michael Sohn / picture alliance / dpa / POOL AP
When the virologist Christian Drosten and the chemist and science journalist Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim received the Federal Cross of Merit in autumn, Federal President Steinmeier said in his award speech that "science and politics have to feel each other step by step" and "have to master major learning processes" .
Everything is correct, but unfortunately at the moment you have the feeling that science is progressing step by step in a fairly stable manner and that politics is rolling backwards somewhere in the background.
There are very many serious scientists who are dealing with the corona pandemic and who are constantly explaining which measures would make sense now: a hard lockdown, more protective measures in companies and public transport, better concepts and equipment for schools and kindergartens.
What we get instead: even more discussions and rules on how to restrict private contacts even further.
Margarete Stokowski
Photo:
Rosanna Graf
Born in 1986, was born in Poland and grew up in Berlin.
She studied philosophy and social sciences and has been working as a freelance writer since 2009.
Her feminist bestseller "Bottom Rum Free" was published in 2016 by Rowohlt Verlag.
This was followed in 2018 by »The Last Days of Patriarchy«, a collection of columns from SPIEGEL and »taz«.
Of course, science is not primarily there to advise politics.
But politics is there to protect people from unnecessary suffering in accordance with current knowledge of the situation - and current knowledge of the situation does not exist without science.
What is the point in giving awards to scientists if you ignore what they are saying at the same time?
Don't get it wrong: I would give Christian Drosten, Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, Sandra Ciesek, Viola Priesemann, Melanie Brinkmann and all the other scientists who have been trying to explain the pandemic to us for over a year, all the prizes in the world.
But the greatest honor for scientists is still recognizing their work, and the current government, by and large, is doing the opposite.
What is the point in giving awards to scientists if you ignore what they are saying at the same time?
It doesn't do much well if we can all now explain what a vector vaccine or PIMS syndrome is, if at the same time you have the feeling that some responsible politicians have not even understood what exponential growth is.
Understanding alone doesn't necessarily help.
A few months ago there was a lot of enthusiasm on social media for a video clip in which Angela Merkel calculated how the number of cases would rise with exponential growth: from »300 to 600, 600 to 1,200, 1,200 to 2,400«.
It is so great to have a physicist as Chancellor who can explain it so nicely.
You learn what exponential growth is in math around the 10th grade, you don't have to have studied anything.
Above all, however, it is of no use to have a female physicist as Chancellor if the policy of the federal government leads to complete horror among more and more scientists.
The virologist Melanie Brinkmann said a month ago in view of the easing of high incidence values: "What is being presented to us is an intellectual insult to everyone and not a perspective." Virologist Sandra Ciesek tweeted two days ago: "If we as doctors clearly act against the evidence , that has massive consequences.
If politicians do this, does it matter? "
And Christian Drosten spoke in his last podcast episode about the denial of science in public discourse and on a political level.
"At the moment we are all wondering how politics acts or not acts now," he said, "how certain things are presented as new solutions that can hardly be recognized as solutions even with common sense." One more thing The editorial staff of the WDR program Quarks became clearer.
“In all honesty, we're fed up.
In fact, really «, it says in a video there.
"From our point of view, it is almost unbearable how politicians in Germany ignore the warnings and findings from science."
Germany likes to present itself as a highly attractive location for science. "Many political decisions today are made on the basis of scientific knowledge," says the website of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Yeah yeah
Unfortunately not too many.
The quoted sentence comes from the publication of a policy paper on science communication that the ministry published shortly before the pandemic.
"On the one hand, we are observing a strong interest on the part of many citizens in active participation in science, on the other hand, there are also increasing tendencies towards isolation from scientific knowledge," the paper says.
Ditto, I feel the same way, but not only among citizens, but also in politics.
For example, when CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak argues against a two to three-week hard lockdown by saying that this would not solve the problem of the pandemic either - and then perfidiously declaring that children would suffer from lockdowns, as if children weren't exactly because of them The government’s previous pandemic policy is already suffering permanently.
"We have a new pandemic," says Angela Merkel.
The political mistakes are the same as in the last one.
There are different branches of science, but they are similar in certain basic methodological features.
An essential characteristic of science, for example, is that it tries to find causal relationships and regularities in the phenomena of the respective subject area.
So: if A happens, one can start from B.
That doesn't always work, but the predictions of serious scientists regarding a third wave of pandemics with more contagious virus mutations have come true with brutal precision.
"We have a new pandemic," said Angela Merkel to Anne Will regarding the mutants - yes, well, even if you call it a "new" pandemic: the political mistakes are the same as in the last one, because the means to combat the current one Wave would be the same as in the two waves before.
Science is not an intellectual decoration of strong business locations.
It is the ongoing production of new knowledge that can and should be used.
Denial of science was known to both private individuals and politicians before Corona, be it with regard to climate change or gender issues, but what we are now experiencing in current German Corona politics is a deadly mixture of a) ignoring scientific knowledge, b) the inviolability of certain economic sectors and c) the unwillingness to recognize previous mistakes and change course accordingly.
Not only numerous scientists would be in favor of such a change of course, but also large parts of the population, because not even a third of the people in Germany are currently in favor of easing.
The political proposals currently being presented by the federal and state governments do not show any rethinking: the “model projects” may sound scientific in their name, but are basically just loosening up under a new label.
Laschet's "bridge lockdown" plans have not yet been spelled out.
"Unconventional thinkers" demos continue to run through the streets as state-protected sources of infection.
"It must not become the general tone to show other prime ministers their infection numbers or deaths," Laschet said a few days ago.
But, honestly, that's exactly what you should do as long as people are still dying every day because politicians refuse to listen to science to a sufficient extent.
