On 8 April 2021, a court in Weimar (Germany) held that teachers from two schools are not allowed to force their students to wear masks, cannot force them to be tested, and cannot force them to apply social distancing rules. The original decision is available here (in German only). A summary is available here (in German). In the German media landscape the decision is of course is portrayed as a questionable.
The decision attacks the unreliability of the rapid testing and the PCR testing regime. The court relied on the written opinions from three medical witnesses. One of the experts, Ulrike Kämmerer, is one of the co-authors of a substantial paper that listed the flaws of the Covid-19 PCR test and called for the withdrawal of the Corman-Drosten paper, the paper which kickstarted the PCR test pandemic that has been plaguing us for over a year.
The education department, which had ordered schools in the state to require students to wear masks for all ages, said it would ask for a review of the decision following oral argument. The court registry indicated that there are several other similar court cases in the pipeline.
Below a translation* of the summary conclusion of the 178-page judgment:
The compulsion imposed on school children to wear masks and to keep their distance from each other and from third parties harms the children physically, psychologically, pedagogically and in their psychosocial development, with no more than a marginal benefit at best for the children themselves or third parties.
Schools do not play a significant role in the “pandemic” event.
The PCR tests and rapid tests used are in principle not suitable for detecting an “infection” with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
According to the expert opinions, this is based on the Robert Koch Institute’s [RKI, the German equivalent to the US’s CDC] own calculations. As expert Prof. Dr. Kuhbandner states, the RKI calculates that mass testing with rapid tests, regardless of symptoms, the probability of someone actually being infected when receiving a positive result is only two percent, at an incidence of 50 (test specificity 80%, test sensitivity 98%). This would mean that for every two positive rapid test results, there would be 98 false-positive rapid test results, all of which would then have to be retested using the PCR method.
A (regular) compulsion to mass test asymptomatic children, i.e. healthy people, for which there is no medical indication, cannot be imposed because it is out of proportion to the effect that can be achieved. At the same time, regular compulsory testing puts children under psychological pressure, because their ability to attend school is constantly put to the test.
Based on surveys in Austria, where no masks are worn in elementary schools, but rapid tests are carried out three times a week throughout the country, the expert Prof. Dr. Kuhbandner states:
100,000 elementary school students would have to put up with all the side effects of wearing masks for a week to prevent just one infection per week.
To call this merely disproportionate would be a wholly inadequate description. Rather, it shows that the state legislature regulating this area has become distanced from the facts to an extent that takes on historic proportions.
By mandating such measures the well-being of the children is endangered as described, refer paragraph 1666 BGB [a section of the law which states that the family court can order steps to be taken when the physical or psychological well-being of a child is threatened and the parents are not willing or not capable to counter the threat]. Teachers are therefore not allowed to mandate the measures. They cannot rely on the corresponding state-law ordinances and the general decree cited, as they are unsuitable to achieve the intended effect. But in any case, due to their disproportionality they [the measures] violate the principle proportionality, and are therefore unconstitutional and void.
In addition, children have a legal right to accessible schooling.
*I translated the text using DeepL and then checked and edited the translation manually where necessary.
