bHealth Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) wants to ensure more transparency in the recently published protocols of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) from the Corona period. “Yesterday I arranged for the protocols to be largely redacted,” he said on Deutschlandfunk on Thursday. “Maximum transparency” must be achieved. An online magazine had legally forced the publication of the internal documents, but many of them were redacted.

Lauterbach announced that the content would be checked again to determine whether redactions were necessary. The RKI must ask permission from everyone named in the minutes or those represented with interests as to whether they can be redacted. “This will take a while, maybe four weeks,” said the SPD politician.

Avoid the impression that something is being kept secret

At the same time, he was confident that a “significantly more redacted version” could then be presented. Lauterbach emphasized: “We don’t want to give the slightest impression that the Robert Koch Institute is deliberately hiding anything here.”

The SPD politician, who only became Minister of Health more than a year and a half after the start of the pandemic, also spoke out in favor of a political review of the Corona measures by the Bundestag. This is “necessary” because the impression should not arise that others want to keep something secret.

However, Parliament itself must decide on the specific form of processing. As a member of the government, he did not want to make any suggestions on this, said Lauterbach.