The profession was silent during the pandemic

>> Anyone interested in a political portrait of the later Merkel years will find it in a somewhat remote and initially inconspicuous place, namely here: https://www.gesis.org/angebot/daten-finden-und-abrufen/ausgewaehlte-nationale-daten/bundespresseamt.
Surveys commissioned by the Federal Press Office (part of the Federal Chancellery) are archived at this URL. Regarding COVID-19, they demonstrate the exceptionally strong thirst for knowledge of the German government under Angela Merkel. Since the 12th calendar week of 2020, the FORSA polling institute has provided a total of 43 weekly reports on coronavirus issues, including all kinds of attitude-based questions, as well as studies on information behavior during the pandemic, on Generation Z's attitudes toward COVID-19, and corresponding annual reviews. Only a fraction of the commissioned surveys are available at the above address. In addition, starting in March 2020, Infratest/Dimap, for example, provided mostly daily briefings on attitudes and personality-related perceptions surrounding COVID-19 based on a specially created online coronavirus panel (COMPASS: Corona Online Opinion Panel Survey Special). Naturally, approval ratings for the various government coronavirus measures and the popularity ratings of the staff involved were always included in the reports.
Merkel, the natural scientist and physicist, whose talk of an “exponential curve” was enough to awe the capital’s journalists (incidentally: if two people get infected with Corona in 2020, four in 2021, and eight in 2022, we are also dealing with an exponential curve), shows her obsessive “mirror, mirror on the wall” side here.1 This takes on a very special character when one simultaneously considers what the federal government was not interested in during the pandemic, “this greatest challenge for solidarity since the Second World War” (A. Merkel). The federal government did not want to know whether anyone had died from or with Corona. Nor did it want to know how many intensive care beds were actually available in the German healthcare system. Although it had declared serious lockdown measures
decisions with the acute threat of overloading the health care system, it believed it could afford to obtain the relevant and – as it soon turned out – unreliable data from interested parties.2
The German government under Chancellor Merkel was not interested in whether children were actually driving the pandemic—and it was certainly not interested in the psychological, physical, and social consequences of widespread school closures. Nor did it consider it necessary to use a well-established instrument such as the representative National Cohort Health Panel, for example, to determine what proportion of those who experienced the disease asymptomatically or how long immunity lasts after infection.
She also apparently didn't want to know more about where sick people were becoming infected, how this might be related to income, education, migration background, housing conditions, employment, etc., and how, given such information, one could respond intelligently to the pandemic, especially its very different regional manifestations. Instead, the federal government preferred to rely on abstract r-values and unreliable reporting rates incorrectly labeled "incidence," or on computer simulations of moderate prognostic value. The physicist, who holds a doctorate in physics, also felt she could do without a real evaluation of the lockdowns—she instead liked the "flatten the curve" illusions of feasibility that they could fuel. The government also became interested – if at all – far too late in figuring out how to effectively protect the truly vulnerable, the elderly, since the unimaginative, hammer-and-punishment lockdown method was precisely incapable of doing so, after the massive death toll in nursing homes in the fall/winter of 2020/21. The Chancellor, on the other hand, was keenly interested in the political approval ratings for her blind flight through the pandemic and was happy to spend a lot of other people's money on it.
The list of failures and mismanagement is painfully long. Given the avoidable suffering of those affected, it is only small consolation that the CDU/CSU was voted out of office in September 2021, partly due to its bungling handling of the pandemic. Former head of the Federal Chancellery, Helge Braun, ran for party chairman after losing the federal election, claiming to be able to point to the successful pandemic management under his leadership. 12.5 percent of CDU members voting in December 2021 found this convincing—a surprisingly high number.
All of this remained largely uncommented by political science. The profession remained silent during the pandemic, even though intervention studies actually fall within its particular area of expertise. However, an examination of the handling of the pandemic would now raise a number of exciting research questions: How can one explain, from an administrative science perspective, the largely nonexistent independent scientific advice from the Robert Koch Institute? Why did German federalism, in the form of the Conference of Minister Presidents, immediately abandon itself? And how and why were the health ministries sidelined by the state chancelleries and the Federal Chancellery? And who, and for what reasons, actually made the motley crew of computer simulators, laboratory virologists, and mobility researchers responsible for providing scientific advice to the federal government?