REGION B – EUROPE

NEW WORLD ORDER

(Germany)

Christian Drosten

(European Commission COVID-19 Advisory Panel)

The Official Story

CHRISTIAN DROSTEN
(European Commission’s advisory panel on COVID-19)

Christian Heinrich Maria Drosten (born 1972) is a German virologist whose research focus is on novel viruses (emergent viruses). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Drosten came to national prominence as an expert on the implications and actions required to combat the illness in Germany.

COVID-19 pandemic

On 23 January 2020, Drosten, along with other virologists in Europe and Hong Kong, published a workflow of a real-time PCR (RT-PCR) diagnostic test, which was accepted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and which sent test kits to affected regions.

On 19 February 2020, Drosten, along with 26 other scientists, published the Lancet letter in support of scientists and medical professionals in China fighting the outbreak and condemning theories suggesting that the virus does not have a natural origin, which it referred to as “conspiracy theories.”

On 17 March 2020, Drosten was appointed to the European Commission’s advisory panel on COVID-19, co-chaired by EC President Ursula von der Leyen and ECHSF Stella Kyriakides. On 23 March 2020, The Guardian described Drosten as “the [German] country’s real face of the coronavirus crisis”, and also noted that the Süddeutsche Zeitung had described Drosten as “the nation’s corona-explainer-in-chief”. He was a counterpart to Lothar Wieler, head of the State’s Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, in consulting to German federal and state authorities.

Research

In 2003, Drosten was one of the co-discoverers of SARS-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV). Together with Stephan Günther [de], a few days after identification and before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, he succeeded in developing a diagnostic test for the newly identified virus. Drosten immediately made his findings on SARS available to the scientific community on the internet, even before his article appeared in New England Journal of Medicine in May 2003. Among others, this was honoured by the journal Nature.

From 2012, the research group led by Drosten also researched the Middle East respiratory syndrome-coronavirus (MERS-CoV).

In mid-January 2020, the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 yielded to his method. The virus first came to light on 30 December 2019, because Li Wenliang (the Chinese ophthalmologist whistleblower who later died of the virus) forced the Chinese government to broadcast its existence the next day. In early January 2020, the research group led by Drosten, together with Marion Koopmans’ group, a RIVM group including Chantal Reusken [de], Maria Zambon and others, developed a test that was made available worldwide through the WHO. The whole research was published in the journal Eurosurveillance.

In April 2020, the Drosten research group published “a detailed virological analysis of nine cases of COVID-19 that provides proof of active virus replication in tissues of the upper respiratory tract” in Nature.

During the early months of the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, Drosten advised politicians and authorities and was invited as an expert in the media, among others in the podcast Das Coronavirus-Update mit Christian Drosten [de] (English: The coronavirus update with Christian Drosten), initially published daily during the week since 26 February 2020, in Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), the frequency of the podcast having been gradually reduced from April 2020 until becoming weekly from 15 June 2020. Drosten now shares his spot on the Podcast with fellow virologist Sandra Ciesek with either being interviewed by a science journalist of the NDR every two weeks to keep the weekly schedule of the podcast while allowing Drosten more time to focus on his research work.

Source: Wikipedia