Just as pandemic press conferences have replaced sports as compulsory daily viewing, athletes have been nudged off our screens by health professionals – Ireland’s chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan, Dr Anthony Fauci in the US or Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell.
In Germany a true-life medical drama is unfolding, more compelling than Casualty and Grey’s Anatomy combined: a War of the Roses rivalry between two virile virologists with leading man looks.
The first is Christian Drosten, go-to adviser to chancellor Angela Merkel, whose laboratory developed the first test for Sars-CoV-2 last January and gave Germany a head start in the pandemic.
The 48-year-old grew up on a pig farm in northern Germany, studied medicine in Frankfurt, and by 35 was heading the University of Bonn’s institute of virology.
Prof Drosten first attracted attention in 2003 when he identified and developed a diagnostic test for severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) which, before it was contained, killed 10 per cent of the almost 8,000 people infected in nearly 30 countries.
After a decade in Bonn, Drosten moved his institute, including its coronavirus laboratory, to Berlin’s Charité university hospital in 2017, up the road from the chancellery.
Drosten owes much of his new cult status to a coronavirus podcast, answering listener questions with expert knowledge with man-in-the-street language. His podcast originated with his frustration with superficial media reports (like this) that focused on his “sensual lips”, tousled hair and passing resemblance to Jeff Goldblum circa The Fly.
In January, overcoming his own surprise at the new virus and its transmission rate, he warned the German media it was “missing the boat” on the new virus – and the scale of the looming threat.
Drosten wears his prominence lightly, saying it’s a fluke that the pandemic is in his coronavirus research field. “If this were influenza, for instance, I would not be doing this,” he says.
His celebrity peaked last month when he topped a Bild tabloid poll as the readers’ most trusted Covid-19 expert. Breathing down his neck, however, was blond ambition from Bonn, Prof Christian Streeck.
Household name
The 42-year-old grew up among scientists but abandoned his music-composer dreams for a career as a HIV specialist in Harvard. He had barely settled in Bonn’s university clinic last October, part of the team to replace Christian Drosten, when Covid-19 struck.
Streeck became a household name, and Bild’s “heart-throb among virologists”, for researching a mass outbreak of Covid-19 after a carnival season party in a town an hour from his clinic.
However, the scientist soiled his bib somewhat among colleagues on two fronts: he hired a PR agency to manage an avalanche of media queries and he presented preliminary results alongside the local state leader whose government co-financed the study.
Streeck has shrugged off the criticism, and says his project, with a robust data set based on tests and interviews with 400 people, indicates Germany’s level of Covid-19 infection could be 10 times the official rate given the large number of asymptomatic cases.
He says he hired the PR agency to field media queries and give him cover for his scientific work.
“As things stand I have 39,000 unread emails,” he told Sunday’s Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper. “It was simply not feasible to do this without professional support.”
Methodology
Sparking the War of the Covids, Drosten criticised his Bonn colleague for publishing results without a methodology and before the study was peer reviewed. “That has nothing to do with good scientific practice,” said Drosten, “and it destroy a lot of people’s trust in the science.”
Streeck in Bonn insists he remains on friendly terms with Drosten in Berlin and, like him, is not interested in celebrity. Without the pandemic, though, it’s unlikely Streeck would have attracted 4,400 likes for a picture he posted on Twitter of a new labrador puppy he and his husband adopted last month.
Sealing their celebrity scientist status, a German television show presented a mash-up of its favourite Drosten/Streeck clips. The musical accompaniment: “Who let the Docs out?”
