Since June 2025, HateAid holds a status that received almost no press coverage: EU Trusted Flagger under Article 22 of the Digital Services Act. What that means: platforms such as Meta, YouTube and X are legally required to process HateAid’s reports faster and with priority. Not as a courtesy — as a legal obligation.
On 5 May 2026, BioNTech announces: up to 1,860 jobs cut — 22 percent of its workforce. The plants in Idar-Oberstein and Marburg close by end of 2027. The CureVac sites too. COVID vaccine production transfers entirely to Pfizer.
On 18 May 2026, the 79th World Health Assembly (WHA79) opens in Geneva. On the agenda: the PABS annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement — the mechanism that is supposed to determine what countries receive in return for sharing pathogen data that enables vaccine and drug development.
On 22–23 April 2026, the WHO conducted Exercise Polaris II: a two-day pandemic simulation involving 26 countries, 600 health experts, and more than 25 partner organisations. The scenario: a fictional new bacterial strain spreading across 27 countries. Ten days later, the WHO confirmed the first hantavirus cluster aboard the MV Hondius.
On May 4, 2026, the WHO confirms: three people have died following a virus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius. The ship — a polar expedition vessel operated by Dutch company Oceanwide Expeditions — was en route from Ushuaia, Argentina, to Cape Verde. Laboratory confirmed: Andes hantavirus.
In a remark at the US Department of State, Donald Trump dismantled Germany’s sitting Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz on four axes — immigration, energy, Ukraine, Iran. What is structurally interesting about this remark is not Trump. It is the asymmetry between what he is saying and what is being said about the same matters in the German public discourse.
On 28 April 2026, Berlin’s senator for science, health and care, Ina Czyborra (SPD), issued a press release titled “Senate weighs options to improve HPV vaccination coverage”. Core sentence: “HPV can cause cancer — and we have it in our hands to protect ourselves effectively against it.” The plan: information letters to parents of pupils in grades 4 through 10, integrating vaccination into the new U10 child-health check-up, and reminder systems where check-ups are missed.
In spring 2020 the German Federal Ministry of the Interior produced two documents which together document the German application of the tabletop language-regulation architecture. Six years later the two papers meet again — as witness and as questioned, in the great hearing room of the German Bundestag, in the framework of the federal inquiry commission “Aufarbeitung der COVID-19-Pandemie.” What happens there is not accountability. It is a second application of the same mechanism.
On 18 October 2019, in a conference hall at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York, fifteen people gathered around an oval table. The seating chart, viewed from a distance, looks like a list of the world industries that would become central to a pandemic response. Four hours later, the fictional crisis cell had played out a coronavirus outbreak that, over eighteen months, produced 65 million dead and disrupted supply chains, the travel industry, vaccine procurement, and crisis communications across the entire globe.
On 15 May 2018, in the conference hall of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, ten former or sitting US senior politicians and senior public-health officials gathered. 150 invited guests watched. A live stream ran simultaneously on Facebook. The exercise was called Clade X, lasted a single day and ended with a fictional outcome of 900 million dead worldwide over eighteen months. Convener: Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
In October 2017 — two years and three months before the first documented COVID case in Wuhan — the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security published an 89-page document: “The SPARS Pandemic, 2025–2028: A Futuristic Scenario for Public Health Risk Communicators.” It was not a tabletop, not an NSC script like Dark Winter, not a transatlantic political format like Atlantic Storm. It was training material for press offices, PR professionals, risk communicators and agency spokespersons — a pre-written scenario meant to be read, not played.
On 14 January 2005, in a conference room in Washington, ten former or sitting heads of government from North America and Europe — together with a former WHO Director-General and an array of foreign-policy advisers — gathered around a table and played out a coordinated smallpox attack on six major cities simultaneously: Istanbul, Rotterdam, Warsaw, Frankfurt, New York City, Los Angeles. Within four and a half hours of exercise time the reported case count climbed from 51 to 3,320. The exercise was called Atlantic Storm.
