Devi Sridhar in her column in the Guardian a few weeks ago wrote in support of vaccine passports and FFP2 grade masks by claiming that they are the reasons “Germany is managing to control its Covid epidemic and bring down the numbers of cases and deaths“.
In Frankfurt, Germany, you can’t simply grab a burger inside a restaurant, go to an indoor pool or have a drink in an indoor bar. Before doing so, you have to present either certification of full vaccination, or a negative test result from the last 24 hours.
She further explains,
When in shops and on public transport, masks are required – and not cloth masks. Only surgical or FFP2 medical grade masks are permitted.
And from these interventions she concludes,
It’s not surprising, then, that Germany is managing to control its Covid epidemic and bring down the numbers of cases and deaths.
But just how right was Devi in her conclusions?
At the time she made the claims in her Guardian column, the 22nd October 2021, “cases” in Germany had already begun shooting northwards. Immediately after, and since, her column was published, “cases” have continued heading upwards in an almost straight line.
On the 22nd October, Germany had an average daily case count of 16.4 per 100k. As of the 15th November, they have an average of 47.2 per 100k. Almost 3 times that of the day Devi wrote her column.
But could she have known cases were shooting upwards? If she didn’t know, she was being lazy and didn’t check her facts before submitting her piece for publication, considering cases began rising 8 days prior to her article going live.
Devi submitted two articles to the Guardian in October. One was published on the 12th and the other discussed article on the 22nd. Cases began to rise in Germany on the 14th. Had she researched her article, she would have noticed in the data that cases were rising.
So what about deaths, was she right when she claimed that ‘Germany is managing to control its Covid epidemic and bring down the numbers of deaths‘? No, she got that very wrong, too.
Deaths began rising in Germany on the 14th August. They levelled out slightly between 27th September and 18th October before sharply rising again.
When Devi’s article was published on the 22nd October, Germany had an average of 0.082 deaths per 100k, people. As of the 15th November, that average is now 0.215 per 100k, an increase of almost 2.5 times of that on the 22nd October.
Had Devi even taken a cursory glance at the data as she was writing her piece, she would easily have spotted that both deaths and cases were on a sharp upward trajectory. So it’s safe to conclude that she either looked at the data and ignored it and wrote her article based upon lies to support her agenda of supporting the roll-out of Vaccine Passports.
Or she didn’t check the data and wrote her article based upon lies to support her aims of supporting the roll-out of Vaccine Passports. Either scenario is as frightening as the other, and again points to Devi Sridhar being agenda-driven rather than data-driven.
She has since called for Scotland to expand its “vaccination passes” rollout, which points to a concerted campaign on her part to see these Digital IDs implemented in England too hence the Guardian column, and implemented at any cost even if that means ignoring the fact they haven’t worked anywhere else they’ve been introduced. Even if that means either ignoring case data or lying about it in Germany.
In the Times newspaper on the 14th November, they recorded Sridhar as calling for the expansion of Scotland’s current “Vaccine Passport”.
This could be looking at things like vaccination passes and making sure that people are double vaccinated, or asking for a negative PCR test, or even asking if you have recovered from Covid in the last 90 days to access these settings [indoors settings].
Devi Sridhar, 14th November 2021
As we’ve pointed out previously in a detailed study into Devi Sridhar’s claims, she is more often wrong than right and when she gets things wrong she simply ignores the claim or deletes it if she wrote it in a tweet. She doesn’t acknowledge her wrongdoings on COVID-19, even when the BBC are forced to remove dangerous and misleading claims she made on their Newsround programme that’s directed at school kids.
This all points to Devi not being about the truth and facts but being all about the narrative and agenda.