Berlin, December 3, 2025 – Key questions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic response remained unanswered today as virologist Christian Drosten faced questioning from the Corona Study Commission in the German Bundestag. Members of the commission expressed concern over what they characterized as evasive, incomplete, and inaccurate responses from Drosten regarding critical data and decision-making processes during the pandemic.
The hearing focused on the methodology used to track COVID-19 deaths and the availability of data related to vaccine monitoring. Concerns center on the accuracy of reported figures and potential suppression of pharmacovigilance data that could shed light on the long-term effects of both the virus and the vaccines deployed to combat it. This scrutiny arrives as public debate continues regarding the handling of the pandemic and the lasting impacts of related policies.
Specifically, Drosten stated that the distinction between dying “of” and “with” COVID-19 originated in the media, a claim disputed by commission members. They presented evidence demonstrating the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) introduced the phrasing as a statistical classification as early as spring 2020, subsequently adopted by numerous official sources.
Kay-Uwe Ziegler, chairman of the AfD parliamentary group within the Corona study commission, stated, “To date, there is no data on how many people have actually died from Covid-19. The number of 188,000 corona deaths that has been communicated again and again is not scientifically reliable and is thus grossly misleading. We ask the legitimate question of how many people died due to corona. It is not possible to make a statement on this with the known data.”
Ziegler further criticized the continued withholding of data from the RKI and the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI), including information from the PEI’s SafeVac app, despite repeated requests for access and evaluation – even five years after the height of the pandemic.He attributed this data retention to a fear of potentially unfavorable findings.
“We demand that all data relevant to pharmacovigilance and vaccination monitoring be released from the RKI and PEI in order to finally be able to evaluate them,” Ziegler said. “We also demand the establishment of a Corona investigation committee so that statements from experts also have legal and political consequences.”
