Threatening letters sent to Dutch pandemic scientists

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte expressed outrage on Friday after scientists advising the government on managing the Covid-19 pandemic received threats.

Multiple experts on the OMT scientific committee found threatening letters had been left in their letterboxes at home, Dutch media said.

Committee member Andreas Voss told the site he had been called a “horrible monkey” and told to “go back to Germany” in a note addressed to him, according to news website Nu.nl.

Another OMT expert, Diederik Gommers, said that one of his colleagues was under police protection after “serious threats”.

“We are all enormously shocked. These people do a good and important job, and they do it with their souls and their conscience,” Rutte told a weekly press conference.

“People can disagree with our political choices or disagree with the advice (on coronavirus… It’s fine to discuss the merits,” said Rutte.

“But we will never accept intimidation and threats. They are completely unacceptable.”

Other members of the committee told Nu.nl they had been so unsettled by the threats that they are now reluctant to speak to the media about Covid-19.

A spokesman for the RIVM public health body, where the committee is based, declined to comment when contacted by AFP.

Groups opposed to infection control restrictions have demonstrated across the Netherlands since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak.

But no link has been established between the protesters and the threats against the expert committee, and none of the members has spoken about the possible source of the threats.

In October, the Dutch anti-terrorism chief published a document warning of potential violence resulting from a “combination of extremist ideology, possible psycho-social and psychological problems and measures related to Covid-19”.