A special commission of the German Bundestag is gathering experts’ assessments of how the COVID-19 pandemic was handled.
Numerous problems emerged during the pandemic: some measures were perceived by the public as incomprehensible, while there were also cases of public funds being misused or ending up in the hands of questionable individuals.
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Specialists from German science and the media gave testimony at the hearing. Parliamentary groups had the opportunity to nominate experts they wanted to represent their views.
Tilman Betsch, a professor of social, organizational and economic psychology at the University of Erfurt in the state of Thuringia, opened the discussion. He recalled former U.S. President Donald Trump and said he felt relieved to live in a country where the head of state did not recommend using disinfectant as medicine, but paid attention to scientists.
“When my car breaks down, I go to a mechanic. When I get sick, I consult a doctor,” Betsch said. But, in his view, the boundary between the roles of scientists and politicians in Germany became so blurred that it was no longer clear who made the final decision. He said this lack of clarity allowed politicians to pass responsibility on to science.
Betsch said pandemic management came close to chaos because not enough attention was paid to the consequences for children’s social development, education and the economy.
For future crises, he recommended setting clear goals, communicating them and explaining decisions, as well as revising objectives when circumstances require it. Science, he said, should be based on facts, not assumptions. “Science should not have moral or normative influence,” Betsch concluded.
Journalist and media scholar Michael Meyen focused on media coverage. He claimed that the media had become a propaganda mechanism for coronavirus vaccination and had “spread fear and questioned the legitimacy of doubts and protests.”
His views made Meyen a controversial figure during the pandemic, and the controversy surrounding him continues today. Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he had taught for 24 years, accused him of supporting anti-vaccine movements and retired him early in March 2026.
In his written statement, Meyen criticized newsrooms that, he said, broadcast data without examining it critically. He cited reports on intensive care capacity, the spread of information and the scientific basis for the recommended distance between people.
Marcus Maurer, a communications expert at the University of Mainz, said news about the pandemic was often presented without the necessary context.
“Every day we heard the number of people who had died from coronavirus, but we rarely saw figures for comparison. How many people die from the flu? How many from lung cancer? Only then could we understand the situation in realistic terms,” he said.
Maurer noted that German newsrooms were suddenly confronted with a complex subject and did not always have the time or knowledge they needed. As a result, the media relied more than usual on information from politicians and the scientific community.
He concluded that the media generally showed excessive caution and often supported the strictest restrictions.
However, Maurer disagrees with the claim that the media went easy on the government of former Chancellor Angela Merkel. “On the contrary, all the responsible actors were harshly criticized. The longer the pandemic lasted, the stronger the criticism became, because it seemed they were unable to find solutions,” he said.
He described this as a paradox: the media supported the measures while criticizing the government at the same time.
Sociologist Peter Weingart, a former professor at Bielefeld University, considers the lockdown and strict measures reasonable. But, he said, it was a mistake not to involve specialists from outside medicine in decision-making from the outset.
Weingart said concerns about school closures could have been addressed more effectively if education and social science experts had been consulted earlier.
Korinna Henning, a journalist with public broadcaster NDR, acknowledged that the media also made mistakes. In an effort to find new topics, they invited doctors and people presented as experts onto their programs, even though they did not always have specialized knowledge of COVID-19. “Put simply: not every virologist is an expert on coronavirus,” she said.
Henning stressed that the pandemic also brought important lessons about cooperation between science and the media. When measures this drastic are implemented, it is not enough simply to give experts a platform in front of the cameras. “We needed to keep explaining how scientific knowledge is produced,” she said.
She added that the public also needed to understand the difference between confirmed facts and hypotheses that might later be proven or disproven.
The fear and uncertainty that spread on social media did not surprise Henning. In her view, journalists and everyone else who communicates with the public have a duty to ground debates in professional knowledge, correct misinformation and give citizens enough information to make informed decisions.
The experts called before the parliamentary commission agreed on one point: communication between politics, science and the media should have been better. Rather than dividing society into “believers” and “nonbelievers,” there should have been more dialogue and transparency.
Maurer recalled that some people had legitimate reasons not to get vaccinated and that they “should not be insulted for it.” At the same time, he called for politicians who, in his view, tried in good faith to guide society through a difficult crisis not to be labeled “coronavirus dictators.” He expressed optimism: “If we have learned anything from this experience, then next time we will do much better.”
