Jaap van Dissel, fierce opponent of the face mask requirement, is accountable to the inquiry committee

The man who introduced the Netherlands to the concept of ‘herd immunity’ and fiercely opposed a face mask requirement for months, returns to the spotlight two years after his retirement from the RIVM. Jaap van Dissel, as chairman of the Outbreak Management Team (OMT), the cabinet’s most important advisor in combating corona, will be interrogated this Friday by the parliamentary corona inquiry committee. Van Dissel, who was unprecedentedly powerful as OMT chairman and was in constant close contact with then Prime Minister Mark Rutte and corona minister Hugo de Jonge, is the first key player in crisis management who must be held accountable. He will also be interrogated a second time later in the investigation.

Van Dissel was director of the RIVM’s Center for Infectious Disease Control when the Netherlands was confronted with the advancing coronavirus in early 2020. He would quickly and unwillingly, as he regularly emphasized in interviews, become a well-known Dutchman and stood next to Rutte and De Jonge at press conferences. Van Dissel received in 2021 awarded the Academy Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) for “the boundless energy and admirable calm” with which he advised politicians in the crisis. At the same time, as a powerful advisor, he was also under fire, because grumpiness about the corona measures was projected onto him, up to and including serious (death) threats.

There was also plenty of sensible criticism among politicians and scientists about how Van Dissel and his RIVM communicated about the virus at the beginning of the pandemic. In the week that the first corona deaths occur in Bergamo, Italy, and villages go into lockdown, RIVM writes on Twitter that “the virus does indeed look a bit like the regular flu.” If infection rates increase in the Netherlands, Van Dissel turns in NRC against more massive testing because this would provide a “false sense of security”. He is not very worried about carnival – in retrospect the major driver of the first wave in the Netherlands – he tells RTL, because “you usually celebrate that in a fairly small group.”

Zoom in

Zoom in

Zoom in

Jaap van Dissel was present at all important meetings at the beginning of the corona crisis.

Photos ANP

In mid-March, when the Netherlands takes the first corona measures, Van Dissel introduces the term ‘group immunity’. He predicts in NRC that half of the Dutch will get the virus and that “spreading out” those infections, instead of trying to contain them completely, is a sensible strategy. This was quickly questioned by other experts. At a presentation in the Catshuis on March 15, herd immunity was explicitly mentioned as one of the goals of the ‘controlled rampage’ strategy. Prime Minister Rutte also uses the term his historic first Torentjes speech on March 16which Van Dissel co-wrote. When unrest arises about herd immunity, Rutte and Van Dissel hasten to say that this is not an explicit goal of the corona policy.

Right hand and crutch

In those first weeks, Van Dissel becomes the right-hand man and pillar of support of Rutte and corona ministers Bruno Bruins and Hugo de Jonge. As OMT chairman, he attended virtually every advisory and decision-making meeting of the cabinet and other governments at that time, and Rutte calls his advice “sacred”. The Dutch Safety Board will conclude later, in 2022, in his first report on the corona crisis that Van Dissel’s presence in almost all crisis teams led to “a strong focus on infectious disease control” in decision-making, which hindered “the careful weighing and consideration of interests in other policy areas”.

Zoom in

The most striking thing in the first months was Van Dissel’s almost obsessive personal struggle against the usefulness and use of the face mask, initially even in healthcare. In the first weeks, this occurred mainly in elderly care major shortages of protective equipmentbut the RIVM guidelines were also remarkably cautious. The RIVM rejected the preventive wearing of a face mask in healthcare for months, because, according to Van Dissel, this could be at the expense of keeping distance. The Netherlands was also one of the few countries where it was advised that “very fleeting contact” within one and a half meters with a corona patient could be safely done without a face mask.

Van Dissel certainly did not believe in the use of face masks in society. In February 2020, he called the idea that a face mask can protect you as a citizen “the biggest misconception to date”. The OMT chairman continues to say that it has not been scientifically proven that non-medical face masks provide sufficient protection and can even have an adverse effect. In an interview with NRC in May says Van Dissel: “We have a one and a half meter society. Then a face mask has no added value. Now you again. And then the question is whether it does not have a negative effect. That you still go outside half sick.”

The Netherlands will eventually gradually introduce a face mask requirement, first in public transport and only from December 2020 in public indoor spaces. When experiments with a mandatory face mask requirement in large cities are presented at a summer press conference, Van Dissel continues to repeat that the face mask has “an extremely small effect”. He later came under very strong criticism from the Dutch Safety Board. The OVV states that these types of comments from Van Dissel “undermined public confidence in government policy.”

Give a gift





Part





Email the editor