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Thursday 15 October 2020
Until now, little is known about physicist Michael Meyer-Hermann, but he is already playing a major role in the corona pandemic. Because Chancellor Merkel relies on her experience when it comes to assessing the situation. And that gives one or another country manager pause.
This time it was not the virologist Christian Drosten whom Chancellor Angela Merkel consulted as an advisor for the future policy of the German crown. No, researcher Michael Meyer-Hermann of the Braunschweig Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, previously unknown to the general public, advised Merkel and the Prime Ministers in their hour-long debates. The modeling created by Meyer-Hermann is of great concern.
At the beginning of the more than eight-hour consultations with the Prime Minister, Merkel had Meyer-Hermann present a simulation of the phase in which Germany is in the crown pandemic, that is, in the area of exponential growth. “I think it was quite plausible and also useful,” Merkel said. Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder adopted a statement Meyer-Hermann is said to have made at his conference: According to this, it is not five to twelve, but already twelve.
While the name of Christian Drosten or the name of the president of the Robert Koch Institute, Lothar Wieler, are now known to the general public, Meyer-Hermann has so far only appeared in public occasionally. As on Wednesday at the Chancellery, he warned of the dangers of the corona pandemic in recent months and spoke out in favor of consistent restrictions. In the spring, Meyer-Hermann published a study with the Ifo Institute in Munich in which he rejected an excessive easing of the restrictions at the time, out of concern about long-term economic disadvantages.
Comprehensive scholar
Meyer-Hermann, born in 1967, is a highly educated scientist. He studied physics, mathematics, and philosophy in Frankfurt am Main and Paris, and at age 30 he did his doctorate in theoretical physics. In Dresden, Frankfurt am Main and Oxford, UK, he worked in neurobiology and immunology; Following the chairs in Jena and Braunschweig, Meyer-Herrmann has headed the department of system immunology at the Helmholtz Center in Braunschweig since 2010.
The Helmholtz Meyer-Hermann Institute describes him as a “frontier worker in science.” In pure science, therefore, the reference to real people’s problems was lost, which is why the scientist, who was married to the artist Anna Laclaque, devoted himself to predicting the course of the corona pandemic using mathematical models. .
The models try to map the developments after exactly the day. Merkel did not say what exactly Meyer-Hermann predicted for which of the next few days, but the chancellor made no secret of leaving the meeting worried. The exponential increase in the number of infections determined by Meyer-Hermann must be stopped: “Otherwise, it will not end well,” Merkel said.
