Germany hits again at RFK Jr.’s ‘unfounded’ Covid vaccine claims | EUROtoday

Germany has vehemently dismissed accusations from US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who claimed the nation had undermined affected person autonomy, significantly all through the COVID-19 pandemic.

German Health Minister Nina Warken issued a press release late on Saturday, asserting: “The statements made by the US Secretary of Health are completely unfounded, factually incorrect, and must be rejected.”

Earlier that day, Mr Kennedy had posted a video stating he had written to the German minister. His letter was reportedly primarily based on data from Germany suggesting the federal government was “limiting people’s abilities to act on their own convictions when they face medical decisions.”

The American well being secretary stated that “I’ve discovered that greater than a thousand German physicians and hundreds of their sufferers now face prosecution and punishment for issuing exemptions from carrying masks or getting COVID-19 vaccines in the course of the pandemic.”

Warken rejected Kennedy’s claims, saying that “during the coronavirus pandemic, there was never any obligation on the medical profession to administer COVID-19 vaccinations. Anyone who did not want to offer vaccinations for medical, ethical, or personal reasons was not liable to prosecution, nor did they have to fear sanctions.”

Kennedy did not give provide specific examples or say which reports he was referring to but added that “in my letter, I explained that Germany is targeting physicians who put their patients first and punishing citizens for making their own medical choices.”

He concluded that “the German authorities is now violating the sacred affected person doctor relationship, changing it’s a harmful system that makes physicians enforcers of state insurance policies.”

Kennedy stated that in his letter he made clear that “Germany has the opportunity and the responsibility to correct this trajectory, to restore medical autonomy, to end politically motivated prosecutions.”

Warken identified that there have been no skilled bans or fines for not getting vaccinated.

“Criminal prosecution was solely pursued in circumstances of fraud and doc forgery, such because the issuance of false vaccination certificates or pretend masks certificates,” the minister said.

She also clarified that in general in Germany “patients are also free to decide which therapy they wish to undergo.”

Former German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, who was in charge during the pandemic, also replied, addressing Kennedy directly on X saying that he “should take care of health problems in his own country. Short life expectancy, extreme costs, tens of thousands of drug deaths and murder victims.”

“In Germany, medical doctors are usually not punished by the federal government for issuing false medical certificates. In our nation, the courts are unbiased,” Lauterbach wrote.

While a majority of Germans have been desperate to get vaccinated towards the COVID-19 virus in the course of the pandemic, there have been additionally protests by a small minority of vaccine skeptics in Germany which have been typically supported by far-right actions.