Charite

Christian Drosten coordinated a publicly funded research consortium whose own application speaks verbatim of a ‘gain-of-function approach.’ In the same spring of 2020 he co-signed the letter that publicly branded the debate over a lab origin a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Both have been documented for years. Placed side by side, they amount to a conflict of interest that to this day is never named as one in Germany. A precise assessment — with every caveat that belongs to it.

The PCR paper by Corman et al. (Euro Surveillance, January 2020) was produced within an EU research network documented since 2009. The EU’s CORDIS database shows: Erasmus MC Rotterdam appears in all five relevant EU projects. Drosten’s move from Bonn to the Charité in 2017 is directly reflected in the CORDIS project list. Eight of the twenty-four co-authors come from Erasmus MC, six from the Charité.