“Those who are bothered by this must be unmasked”
Source: Paul Schreyer, Multipolar, 19 Aug 2024
Wolfgang Wodarg on coronavirus media coverage, the role of his former SPD parliamentary colleague Karl Lauterbach – and why a reappraisal “must take place across the entire population, in every area”. Wodarg also reveals previously unknown details about the death of SPD politician and lockdown critic Thomas Oppermann in October 2020: “It looks to me as if he was poisoned. “PAUL SCHREYER, 19 August 2024, 4 Comments, PDF
Multipolar: Mr Wodarg, let’s first take a brief look back at the beginning of the coronavirus era. You were one of the first, probably the first in Germany to issue a warning. In February 2020, you wrote an article entitled “Isolate the alarmists” in which you called on people to remain level-headed and take a close look at the data. You offered the article to various newspapers, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Tagesspiegel. They didn’t want to publish it. It then appeared in your local newspaper, the Flensburger Tageblatt, several weeks before the first lockdown. We took it on for Multipolar at the beginning of March. The main message was: “We are not currently measuring the incidence of coronavirus cases, but the activity of the specialists looking for them.” This was a criticism of the PCR tests. You had another appearance on ZDF on 10 March, i.e. afterwards. There was a critical TV programme entitled “Between panic and pandemic”, where you were able to present your arguments in front of the camera. ZDF came under pressure after this programme and published a statement of justification. At the time, however, the editorial team backed you and wrote that it was “part of the clarification that there are scientists, doctors and experts in the German healthcare system who have a different assessment of the spread of the coronavirus and possible countermeasures.” But from that point onwards, you were no longer invited to appear in the major media, right?
Wodarg: Yes, that’s right. There was later an interview with ZDF editor-in-chief Bettina Schausten, where she was asked why she no longer invites people like me ..
Multipolar: That was in the summer of 2020 and Schausten referred to you as an “individual opinion”. She explained at the time that the broadcaster also had the editorial freedom not to broadcast this individual opinion.
Wodarg: She drew a strangely irrational line. I had the impression that there were definitely conflicts within the editorial team, but that they obviously used a firm hand to ensure that the line was then adhered to.
Multipolar: Looking back, you can understand what happened back then. On 16 March, which was a Monday – and incidentally also the day on which the RKI announced internally: “It is to be scaled up this week” – Karl Lauterbach posted a tweet saying that you were talking “sheer nonsense” about Covid-19 and spreading “irresponsible fake news”. The first coronavirus lockdown was also decided on this very day, 16 March. The following day, on 17 March, John Ioannidis, one of the world’s most renowned epidemiologists, published his famous article “A fiasco in the making?”, in which he questioned the figures that governments around the world were relying on. That was exactly in line with your argument. And on 18 March, Lauterbach followed this up by uploading a short YouTube video with the SPD logo under the title “Wodarg tells sheer nonsense”. In it, he explained that it was a “matter of conscience” for him, Lauterbach, to criticise you. According to Lauterbach, there is a “high mortality rate” of 0.5 to 2 per cent. And that is why your video – which was seen by several million people at the time – should not be disseminated any further, because there was “already enough fake news”. That was the starting signal for marginalisation. On 19 and 20 March, half a dozen major German media outlets suddenly and practically simultaneously published fact checks on your statements. These fact checks were very similar, whether in WELT, MDR, Bayerischer Rundfunk, SWR or Stern. On 20 March, SPIEGEL ran the headline: “The dangerous misinformation of Wolfgang Wodarg”. If you study the fact checks, you notice that not a single one attacks your core argument, namely the lack of evidence from the monitoring mechanisms. Let’s try to recall this again: What was that about?
Wodarg: I did nothing more than what I have always done in previous years. I looked at the figures from the Robert Koch Institute (laughs). Just like the scientists have painstakingly worked out internally. They have had these sentinel facilities for a long time, they have monitoring instruments: 600 medical practices, for example, paediatricians, family doctors, internists, who are surveyed on a weekly basis and report how many respiratory diseases they have in their practice. This is a very useful tool, which I had already set up myself as a public health officer for my region. I think a lot of these continuous observations, because if you’re talking about a change, i.e. something new, you need to know what it was like before, you have to be able to compare it. And the Robert Koch Institute then copied this monitoring tool from Flensburg (laughs), perfected it and I often looked at it because I thought: “Oh, that’s nice, you can see whether there’s a stronger flu wave this year or a weaker one.” I then used and saw the same thing for swine flu in 2009: There was nothing going on. Even when the most alarmist reports came from Mr Stöhr in 2005…
Multipolar: Klaus Stöhr was coordinator of the WHO’s Global Influenza Programme from 2004 to 2006 and moved to the pharmaceutical company Novartis in 2007.
Wodarg: He already said in 2005 that bird flu was something really dangerous that threatened us all. Even back then, I went to the WHO and grumbled and said: “Hey, are you crazy, where is the evidence for this, where are your figures?”, and they had nothing (laughs). Well, I kept seeing that the WHO was sounding the wrong alarm. And then in 2009, with swine flu, I was also able to initiate a committee of enquiry at the Council of Europe, which then “cut to the chase” and showed that there were a lot of conflicts of interest at the WHO. Even among the experts that the WHO brought in. For me, this was a scenario in which the WHO always played the wrong game, where it caused panic, where there were always vested interests behind it, for example those of Mr Rumsfeld, who wanted to sell his Tamiflu all over the world. He was the US Secretary of Defence when this started. Before that, he was head of the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. Even later, with swine flu, there were over a hundred contracts worldwide that had been concluded as a precautionary measure, where the companies were just waiting for a pandemic for them to come into force. The WHO was practically in the driver’s seat. Mrs Chan, the head of the WHO at the time, had to declare a pandemic so that the companies could get rid of their stuff. That was all still very familiar to me in 2020. When I heard that something was going on in Wuhan again, that they were scaring people there again, and I saw these ridiculous pictures of huge disinfection cannons trying to disinfect the dirt in the streets of Wuhan, I thought it can’t be true (laughs). It looked like a ballet, like a performance. I also looked at the data from the CCDC – that’s the CDC in China, which is also called the CDC…
Multipolar: The counterpart to the German RKI.
Wodarg: Then I saw that only in Wuhan were a lot of cases registered. I then checked what “cases” are and saw that the WHO defines “a case” as a positive PCR test. That means a positive PCR test was a Covid-19 case for them. And that is sheer nonsense, because the PCR test says nothing more than that a few molecules can be multiplied and made detectable. Of course, that alone says nothing about an infection, about contagiousness and existing cases of illness. Knowing this, I made my judgement and also saw that there were only a few places in China with an increased number of cases. It was all over in China by the beginning of March. By the time we raised the alarm, China had already given the all-clear. There were hardly any cases left in China, only imported cases from outside via airports.
Multipolar: The suspicion was that China had stopped testing at that time.
Wodarg: What you could really see was how many cases were being admitted to hospitals, how many were visiting doctors’ surgeries.
When I tried to reassure them, they said: “But Mr Wodarg, haven’t you seen the pictures from northern Italy, they’re dying like flies there, you can’t just play it down!” I then contacted the Italian health service. And they told me that no more people had died than usual. The average age of those who died was over eighty. You’re lucky if you live to be that old. They had sent old people to intensive care in fear of an epidemic. In Italy, it is very common for families to bring in cheap carers from Eastern Europe to help. However, many of them fled home when the lockdown came. Suddenly there were no longer enough carers, so families sent their elderly to hospitals in their distress. In the hospitals, they were tested straight away and often tested positive. Many elderly people were mistreated and ventilated there or died in emergency accommodation without adequate care with completely different ailments.
Multipolar: The lockdown created an emergency situation.
Wodarg: A horror story was created to scare us. We found this out quite easily by talking to insiders from the Italian health authority. Something similar happened in New York in April 2020, where there were these young doctors who said: “This isn’t pneumonia, we’ve never seen anything like it.” Only in the hospitals in New York there was a sudden high excess mortality, and only in April. And it was over after about a month. We didn’t see anything like that in San Francisco, nor in other cities in the USA, except strangely enough in New York – there are no pandemics like that. Then I found this story about hydroxychloroquine – HCQ. It had multiple times been recommended publicly to overdose HCQ and when I noticed how people with roots from tropical countries in particular were dying, I also warned about the 6-phosphate dehydrogenase nail, favism, as a possible cause of fatal HCQ applications. I tried to explain how this excess mortality came about in some parts of the world, in New York, Madrid or northern Italy. It can only be explained by incorrect treatment, by the consequences of this irrational approach to a population in fear. Patients were presented who actually had other normal illnesses. It later became clear that there was no excess mortality in Germany over the whole of 2020. There was another increase in the autumn. As a result of the scandalous mistreatment of people in old people’s homes, where staff were tested and sent away, where healthy, able-bodied staff were sent home and the remaining carers who were already overstretched, were left alone with the old people, where relatives were not allowed to help, where an incredible amount of misery happened and where excess mortality among old people were observed from 1 October 2020! Old people were left to die of thirst, decay and death, needlessly admitted to hospitals out of desperation, where they were treated incorrectly as Covid-19 cases. All these things are verifiable, people were really harmed and killed at the time and it was always presented as Covid-19. That didn’t happen in other countries.
Multipolar: Let’s go back to the beginning, to mid-March 2020. It’s clear that Karl Lauterbach was the driving force behind your marginalisation. As described, it started immediately after Lauterbach’s tweet and YouTube video. A day later, all the media adopted this tune. You know Karl Lauterbach personally and you were both health politicians in the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag. What was your impression of Lauterbach as a person before the coronavirus?
Wodarg: I was on the Health Committee long before him. He was brought in by the former health minister Ulla Schmidt as the professor with the bow tie who always came and lectured us with his statistics. He was one of the protagonists who wanted to maintain competition between health insurance funds by collecting a lot of data and equalising the risk structure of the funds, which is just a trick to collect health data. He was the one who propagated all these deregulation mechanisms, the DRGs – i.e. the flat rates per case – and the morbidity-orientated risk structure compensation. It was always said that the money should follow the service. But whether a service was necessary (laughs) and who defines what a service is was not discussed. That was the time when Mr Lauterbach was still on the supervisory board of the Rhön hospital group.

Karl Lauterbach in 2013 | Image: picture alliance / dpa | Kay Nietfeld
I once had him in my constituency and we organised an event there together during the election campaign, long before the coronavirus. I also went with him to the Damp Clinic on the Baltic Sea, which now belongs to Helios, he really wanted to go there. I thought it was a good idea because I wanted to make sure that Helios was involved in emergency care. They had a lot of surgical facilities and good anaesthetists and everything you need. But the ambulances couldn’t drive to this clinic because only planned operations took place there. This is much more lucrative and maintaining an emergency service costs a lot of money. They were opposed to this. The head of Helios was there and we all had a nice chat. When I then asked: “Why can’t you do anything to improve emergency care?”, the Helios boss said: “No, Mr Wodarg, you have to understand that we have to generate double-digit returns, otherwise we’ll close the place down.” Lauterbach was also there and nodded sympathetically. (laughs) He didn’t help in any way. He told me back then when he came to visit me in the constituency: “Wolfgang, I’ll come to your constituency and we can do something about that, but not about health.” He didn’t want to do that under any circumstances, he didn’t want to take part in any event on health issues with me. He always talked about education.
Multipolar: Why didn’t he want to talk to you publicly about health?
Wodarg: He was afraid of the conflicts he would then be exposed to. I was experienced in these issues and had my own firm ideas, which he also knew.
Multipolar: You worked for Transparency International and dealt with systemic corruption in the healthcare sector.
Wodarg: That was afterwards. I had a lot of difficulties within the SPD parliamentary group during my time as a member of parliament because I was an opponent of health insurance competition.
Multipolar: We published a joint paper on this over ten years ago.
Wodarg: I was also against the DRGs – the flat rates per case – and knew that they simply lead to cases being produced and that this is just something to improve the hospitals’ returns. He knew that he was facing strong opposition from me on these two issues. But these were his main hobbyhorses. And that’s probably why he didn’t want to discuss them with me. I was always in favour of regional budgets, of solutions like the Scandinavians, our neighbours in Schleswig-Holstein, have shown us. They have regional budgets in the health sector and can decide regionally how to utilise these funds. There are clearer responsibilities there that everyone can address and where everyone knows who they can turn to if something goes wrong.
Multipolar: Why are regional budgets better?
Wodarg: In Germany, we have over 90 solidarity funds that compete against each other. There are around 40 health insurance funds active in each region and they all make their own contracts, for example with doctors, clinics or pharmaceutical companies, in competition with each other. That’s complete nonsense. If the purchasers are in competition – you can only find something like that at an auction – then prices will rise. I’ve always been of the opinion that the health insurance funds should join together at a national level to form a consortium and make the contracts together.
Multipolar: Like in Scandinavia?
Wodarg: They don’t have health insurance funds at all, but a tax-financed healthcare system. There is a budget for each region. This is equalised according to economic strength. And there are assemblies and committees that decide what is needed, whether new hospitals, new rescue helicopters or whether to fund preventative measures, for example. They decide on a regional basis in the more than 20 regions of Sweden. This has proved very successful there. The same could have been done in Germany, but there was fierce resistance from the self-governing authorities. The health insurance funds were put into competition with each other according to the principle of “divide and rule”, and that’s how they got their hands on them. Now we can be milked in this way. There is no one left who is responsible for our healthcare system. If you ask the state government, they say: “Nope, the health insurance companies are paying for it.” If you ask a health insurance company, they say: “No, not us, why don’t you ask the other health insurance funds.” Nobody is responsible! There is a systematic lack of responsibility for the quality of care in our country.
Multipolar: You can see where the major lines of conflict lay even before the coronavirus, which only intensified during the coronavirus period. The media played an important role in this because they no longer included voices like yours in their reporting from March 2020. In August 2020, there was therefore a petition to ARD, started by Bastian Barucker, in which the broadcasters called for a panel discussion in which Bhakdi, Homburg and you would be invited alongside Lauterbach, Wieler and Drosten. Over 50,000 citizens signed the petition at the time. Together with supporters, Barucker handed over the signatures to the ARD managers directly in front of the broadcasting centres in several cities. He then organised a round table discussion between critics and ARD executives in November 2020. I took part and reported on it. One of the main arguments put forward by ARD executives at the time was that it could not be left to “each individual to form an opinion as to which scientist is right”, as this would “overtax” the audience. In my view, a remarkable view of humanity. As a result of this petition, WDR programme director Jörg Schönenborn was asked publicly on camera at the beginning of December 2020 whether there should be such a programme. Schönenborn said: “We will not be making a programme”. But in the next sentence: “It is always up to the editorial teams to make such decisions”. So it’s quite a contradiction: in the first sentence he says we won’t do it, and in the second he says it’s up to the local editorial teams to decide. That doesn’t fit together. Schönenborn’s argument was then, again verbatim, it is documented on video: “A talk show is not the right place to discuss scientific facts”.

Jörg Schönenborn | Image: picture alliance/dpa | Bernd von Jutrczenka
Wodarg: We have always been presented with alleged scientific facts to justify what has been done to us. They were cherry-picked facts. (laughs) We were told things and told that they were scientifically based, but the scientific details were not discussed, neither in any programme nor in the other major news media. I think we had a lot of conflicting views. And when you have such conflicting images, when one person says: “There is something” and the other says: “There is nothing”, then the first thing you have to clarify together is: “How can you recognise who is right?” That you discuss this, that you at least agree on the things by which you could then recognise something like that; not even that happened. And for me, that actually shows that there was no will to look for truths or good arguments. Even what Ioannidis said – he is a very renowned epidemiologist – even that was brushed aside and not discussed. It was not taken seriously.
Multipolar: Thanks to the RKI protocols and the leak, we now have this discussion four years later. A few days ago, Wolfgang Kubicki practically called for Lauterbach’s resignation because of this. He pointed out serious contradictions. Now there seems to be some movement and a committee of enquiry is also being discussed. In your opinion, what would be the most important points that such a committee should address?
Wodarg: I fear that this will be an alibi event. I myself was a spokesperson on a commission of enquiry and know how influence is exerted there, including on the publication. In the end, it will reflect what the ruling parties would like to see as a result.
Multipolar: But a committee of enquiry is a different instrument to a commission of enquiry. It is commissioned directly by the opposition. Where do you think such a committee should focus its attention?
Wodarg: I think it should look at the work of the government offices. The government has always referred to its offices, the Robert Koch Institute, the Paul Ehrlich Institute and they are now referring to the Friedrich Löffler Institute when it comes to bird flu. They always have their offices and they are subject to instructions, which means that there is not only legal supervision, but also professional supervision, and it is very important to me to distinguish between the two. As a public health officer, the mayor was my superior, he had legal supervision over my work. So if I did something illegal, he could say: “No, you’re not allowed to do that.” But he had no technical supervision. And there were conflicts. He wanted me to say certain things, but I didn’t say them. He couldn’t do anything about that. I could stick to my opinion, even publicly. And he then had to deal with it and had to justify politically why he didn’t comply. But when the Federal Health Office was dismantled, which Seehofer did at the time, specialised supervision was written into the law. This means that the Federal Government, the Minister of Health, has the right to issue technical instructions to these offices. Over the BfArM, which issues marketing authorisations for medicinal products, over the Paul Ehrlich Institute, over all these institutes.
Multipolar: Also over the RKI.
Wodarg: Yes, of course. Technically the RKI can’t say anything if the minister in charge doesn’t approve. And that is exactly what we have experienced and it has become very clear from the protocols – it is thanks to you that we now know more. Many, many thanks for that. In terms of content, the minutes didn’t bring me much new information. I have always noticed and criticised this contradiction between the scientific work at the institutes and the statements made by the superior health authority, i.e. the ministry. One example: In February 2021, the Paul Ehrlich Institute ..
Multipolar:… immediately after the start of mass mRNA injections …
Wodarg:… it published its own scientific paper warning how dangerous the spikes are! And how toxic they are. And at the same time, they allowed people to be altered in such a way that they themselves form spikes in their cells.
Multipolar: Through the so-called “vaccination”.
Wodarg: I immediately approached the Paul Ehrlich Institute at the time: “Tell me, are you schizophrenic?” I didn’t put it like that, but I said very politely that one thing doesn’t go with the other. The press office simply replied: “Yes, yes, it doesn’t matter, the substance only remains in the muscle where it is injected.” That was the official explanation. And that was a lie. Everyone there knew that. Although they knew better, although they had the results themselves, they scientifically established and published that people were severely damaged by thrombosis, the formation of syncytia, that there was vascular damage. And then they exposed millions of people to it. That is unbelievable to me.
Multipolar: And based on a lie, as you just mentioned. That’s a case for prosecutors.
Wodarg: These contradictions between what the authorities do scientifically on the one hand and what they have to announce to the outside world on the other hand, were nothing new to me. What is new now because of the protocols is the situation for the courts. This is completely new. The courts have always referred to the scientific statements of the RKI. In their judgements against doctors and against all kinds of people who did not participate, who resisted, who protected their patients from these lies, the courts said: “No, that is the scientific statement of the RKI and that is our standard.” It is now obvious: But these were not scientific statements at all. The courts didn’t even bother with scientific statements. I had taken care of that. Many courts did not consider it necessary to take evidence. They simply parroted what the government thought and what the head of the RKI had announced, which is practically the mouthpiece of the government and does not have to reproduce what the scientists at the RKI had worked out. That was obviously a strong contradiction.
Multipolar: That’s what the protocols showed, this contradiction between the technical level at the RKI and the management level around Wieler and Schaade.
Wodarg: Exactly. And if the management level doesn’t say what the minister wants, then it will be replaced. But you can’t replace an entire institute and the scientists who have done their job properly for decades. That’s difficult. I’m curious to see how the courts and the lawyers of those affected will deal with this now. Because these judgements were made due to gross misconduct and gross negligence, negligence on the part of the courts, which did not look at the evidence, even though many experts like myself always published this contradiction, even though it was known. Courts didn’t bother, even though the lawyers of those affected often pointed out that what the RKI said was not true. The courts then said: “No, that’s scientific.” And the protocols have now revealed that it was not scientific, it was a political statement. But a doctor must not let politics dictate what he has to do! That is prohibited for a doctor. Explicitly in the Hippocratic Oath, everywhere in all the rules. These are the experiences from the Nazi era that have been incorporated: doctors must not treat their patients differently on the basis of political orders. If they want to do something good for their patients, they must orientate themselves towards the patient’s well-being and scientific evidence. And they should, they must not harm patients.
These are serious mistakes, and in my opinion the courts should now also take responsibility for them. And the second thing is that we must of course also demand of the medical profession that they do not simply parrot what they hear on the news and what the head of the RKI says, but that they too must look at the scientific evidence when they impose something on patients. And they have expected a lot from patients. There is also a lot to work through. That’s why, for me, coming to terms with the past is not a process that takes place in some institution, somewhere in a room in Berlin. For me, coming to terms with the past is a process that must take place in the entire population, in every city where doctors work, in every area. Where the people who have been mistreated by their doctors have the opportunity to clear things up with them and say: “What do we do now? Mistakes have been made. How are we going to deal with this in the future, how are you going to make sure that this doesn’t happen again, Doctor?”
Multipolar: There must be public discussion forums in all cities.
Wodarg: An alibi event, whatever it’s called, which can be easily manipulated, is not enough. This thing is far too big.
Multipolar: To conclude our conversation, I would like to move on to another, perhaps even more frightening aspect of the coronavirus era. People have died, and not just because of the virus or the measures. There have also been political deaths, many of which remain unexplained. I would like to remind you of one case that has been forgotten, namely that of Thomas Oppermann, then Vice President of the Bundestag and former SPD parliamentary group leader, who died in October 2020. A few days before his death, he had spoken very clearly and critically about the measures. That was shortly before the second lockdown. He said at the time that he expected “further court rulings that would overturn the coronavirus measures”. The “actionism of the state governments” was leading to measures that “violate either the principle of proportionality or the principle of equal treatment”. These were his words in the press. And in October, he called for “an open general debate in the Bundestag” on the issue. A week later, the second lockdown came into force.

Thomas Oppermann in the Bundestag in May 2020 | Image: picture alliance/dpa/dpa-Zentralbild | Britta Pedersen
But shortly before that, between his statements and the lockdown, he died on 25 October 2020, literally just minutes before a major interview on ZDF, where he was about to present his arguments to an audience of millions. ZDF published a short report on the following day. It said: “Oppermann was invited to the programme ‘Berlin direkt’ on Sunday as a live interview guest on the topic of ‘Bundestag and Corona’ and was to be broadcast live from the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen. While the first programme was being broadcast on Berlin direkt, Thomas Oppermann suddenly collapsed.” The head of the ZDF capital city studio in Berlin, Theo Koll, recalled that “in the preliminary discussion for the planned programme, Thomas Oppermann was seen as professional and relaxed as ever.” Nothing more has been heard about the death since then. However, previously unknown statements from a witness have been made.
Wodarg: “ Of course I have to protect those from whom I have this information. I was told that he was in make-up for the performance, and those who are normally there also realised this, probably all of them. And that he was then offered a coffee, drank a coffee and then collapsed, dead. And what everyone noticed in particular was that no police came, that nothing was done with the body, that it was simply taken away. And that there was no particularly thorough investigation into the cause of death. I also don’t know whether toxicological tests were carried out, I’m not aware of that, but it looks to me as if he was poisoned before the performance. I can’t prove that, but the initial suspicion is so strong that the public prosecutor’s office should have taken action, and they didn’t. That’s something that always scares me. That is something that has always frightened me, and which I find devastating. I knew Thomas Oppermann personally as a colleague from the parliamentary group. I always found him nice and very open. I didn’t always agree with him, but he was always great to talk to. He was clever and responded to everything and had his own opinion. I always found him to be a fair, good politician. And that’s why I was very shocked at the time. I do believe that there were people who were very afraid that people like him would disrupt the planned activities.
Multipolar: In any case, you could get the impression that the second lockdown in autumn 2020 was pushed through with great force and had been planned for a long time. And perhaps after Oppermann’s death, other politicians were also afraid that something similar would happen to them if they were to speak out like he did.
Wodarg: That is of course one example, yes. In Africa, the presidents who died suddenly, that was also a selection of people who were critical, who were then suddenly no longer alive. And that’s something you can assume – if it’s a large-scale campaign that wants to change the world and needs fear-mongering to achieve this, then critical politicians would of course interfere.
Multipolar: You allude to the deaths of the presidents of Burundi in June 2020 and Tanzania in March 2021, both of which bucked the global trend of coronavirus measures. The coronavirus period therefore needs to be addressed not only in medical and political terms, but also at this level. Thank you for allowing us to talk about all these issues. There is still a lot of work to be done. Let’s hope that many people will now take part in an open discussion and find the courage to do so.
Wodarg: Yes. I think we have to have the courage, even if it is sometimes difficult. But if we don’t have the courage to say what needs to be said, what moves us, then we become victims and people can do whatever they want to us. That doesn’t fit in with what we need to be human, what gives us dignity and autonomy, so that we can make our own decisions about our lives and shape our lives together as we see fit, and that we don’t just have to obey. These are fundamental values that we were proud of for decades. I am still proud of them and I want us to retain this self-confidence. Those who disturb this should be pilloried. They need to be unmasked so that it becomes clear how evil everything they have done to their fellow human beings is.
About the interviewee: Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, born in 1947, is an internist and pulmonologist, specialist in hygiene and environmental medicine as well as public health and social medicine. After his clinical work as an internist, he was, among other things, a public health officer in Schleswig-Holstein for 13 years, at the same time lecturer at universities and colleges of applied sciences and chairman of the expert committee for health-related environmental protection at the Schleswig-Holstein Medical Association; in 1991 he received a scholarship at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA (epidemiology). As a member of the German Bundestag from 1994 to 2009, he was the initiator and spokesman of the Enquête Commission “Ethics and Law of Modern Medicine”, a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, where he was Chairman of the Subcommittee on Health and Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Culture, Education and Science. In 2009, he initiated the Committee of Inquiry in Strasbourg into the role of the WHO in the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic and continued to be involved as a scientific expert after leaving Parliament. He has worked as a freelance university lecturer, doctor and health scientist since 2011 and was an honorary board member and health working group leader at Transparency International Germany until 2020. Further information can be found on his website.