People who discussed this sort of thing last spring were dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”. What do you call them when what they were saying turns out to be fact?

Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from Die Welt:

Ministry of the Interior hired scientists to justify corona measures

An extensive correspondence, which Welt am Sonntag has obtained, shows: In the first high phase of the pandemic, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer’s office influenced researchers. They thereupon provided results for a dramatic “secret paper” of the ministry.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior engaged scientists from several research institutes and universities for political purposes in the first wave of the corona pandemic in March 2020. It commissioned the researchers from the Robert Koch Institute and other institutions to create a calculation model on the basis of which the Ministry of the Interior, Horst Seehofer (CSU), wanted to justify tough corona measures.

This emerges from more than 200 pages of internal correspondence between the management level of the Ministry of the Interior and the researchers, which Welt am Sonntag has received. A group of lawyers fought for the e-mails in a legal dispute with the Robert Koch Institute that lasted several months.

In an exchange of e-mails, the State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, Markus Kerber, asks the researchers who have been contacted to develop a model on the basis of which “preventive and repressive measures” can be planned.

According to the correspondence, the scientists worked in close coordination with the ministry over the space of just four days to develop content for a paper that had been declared secret, which was then distributed via various media over the following days.

A “worst-case scenario” was calculated according to which more than a million people in Germany might die of the coronavirus if social life were to continue as it was before the pandemic.