Rogue Science
Edna Bonhomme
On a chilly late November afternoon, 150 people gathered at Lübeck airport in Schleswig-Holstein to be injected with a substance they had been told would protect them from Covid-19. The unauthorised vaccine was developed by Dr Winfried Stöcker, who didn’t carry out proper clinical trials but did test it on himself. He also owns the airport, which he bought in 2016. He founded Euroimmun, a medical diagnostics company, in 1987. A US corporation bought it in 2017 for €1.2 billion.
Fifty people were injected before the German police intervened and arrested Dr Stöcker. He has claimed that more than ten thousand people have already been given one of his shots. His experiment is unlikely to increase people’s trust in medicine. Instead, it will cast more doubt among the unvaccinated about the effectiveness and safety of Covid-19 vaccines, pharmaceutical companies and physicians.
The rise of medicine as a profession in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century brought with it rules governing who could practise as a doctor. The first Medizinal-Ordnung (medical regulatory body) was established in Hamburg in 1796. In 1818 they set up a Gesundheitsrat (health committee) to weed out charlatans. The Charité hospital was integrated into Berlin University (now Humboldt University) in the mid-nineteeth century to curb the surgeons and apothecaries operating outside the university system.
There are of course historical reasons for Germans to mistrust state interventions in healthcare. Even before the Nazis came to power, the Prussian State Health Council held a conference on ‘Eugenics in the Service of National Welfare’, which led to the drafting of legislation calling for ‘voluntary’ sterilisation. As Robert Proctor noted in Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, Nazi scientists didn’t only carry out horrific experiments on human subjects, but ‘participated in the construction of Nazi racial policy’.
The Nuremberg Code of 1947 sought to prevent the abuses committed by Nazi scientists from happening again. It set out ten ‘basic principles that must be observed’ in medical experiments on human beings, beginning with: ‘The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.’
Germany now has the largest pharmaceutical market in Europe, with more than five hundred companies, including BioNTech. But vaccine hesitancy in Germany is high: nearly 30 per cent of the population have not received a first dose. At the beginning of December vaccine passports and other new restrictions were introduced, and compulsory vaccination is being considered for next year. In Germany as elsewhere, the anti-vax movement has become a rallying point for the far-right.
Stöcker is a former member of the neoliberal FDP, but Der Spiegel reported in April that he donated €20,000 to the far-right AfD two years ago. In 2014,hecancelled a benefit concert for refugees that had been planned in his department store in Görlitz. He told Sächsische Zeitung that he didn’t welcome foreign refugees. He used the German equivalent of the n-word and suggested that Africans ‘should work to raise the standard of living in Africa instead of coming begging to us’.
Stöcker’s actions cross an ethical line, but more egregious are the structural inequities of healthcare systems in Germany and elsewhere. Nurses in Germany, like everywhere else, are stressed and burned out, and healthcare workers have called for better pay and conditions. And, as Silvia Federici noted recently in theNation, nurses’ unions in nearly thirty countries have demanded that governments and pharmaceutical companies waive patents on Covid-19 vaccines. People in the global south are being blamed for new variants when the rich world has failed to share vaccines and medical care. Real innovation would be to pioneer a free healthcare system that is truly universal.
Comments
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30 December 2021
at
9:16am
woll
says:
Is Germany so exceptional? A little balance might be useful.
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31 December 2021
at
6:06am
Graucho
says:
A more interesting case of vaccine hesitancy is Russia. Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? After decades upon decades of being fed lies and propaganda the good folk of the former Soviet Union have become inured to the point of not believing anything they are told even when it's sensible.
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31 December 2021
at
9:11pm
Robert
says:
Since Dr Bonhomme is an American who lives in Germany, her account of what's happening is probably not coloured by any desire to unfavourably compare Britain with Germany.
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1 January 2022
at
11:00am
MattG
says:
@
Robert
Agreed. She just rolls out the usual tropes which she knows the readership loves.
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2 January 2022
at
8:07pm
Henry Holland
says:
The "German quack doctor" story Edna Bonhomme leads with is intriguing, but Dr. Winfried Stöcker is a symptom of the huge current conflict in German society on government Covid policies, rather than any significant generator of this rift. On Bohnomme's webpage at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science the critical nature of her own engagement with public health politics is explicit: "she [Bonhomme] goes to show how categories of disease and data collection are linked to postcolonial conceptualizations of health and power produce [sic.] new bionic beings." It's therefore bewildering that Bonhomme's post gives little credence to the democratic and critical core of Germany's anti-lockdown and vaccine skepticism movement, in which the far right have no greater representation, in proportional terms, than in German society as a whole. To claim that this is a coherent "anti-vax" movement is to ignore or distort the facts about those participating: many participants have had their first two immunisations; a minority of participants have also had their third (booster) immunisation. Actors in this broad-based critical coalition include the widely-respected Otto Schily, former Federal Minister of the Interior for the SPD (1998-2005).
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3 January 2022
at
11:24am
Camus
says:
Most of the protests come from Saxony and Thuringia which the homes of the AfD and Pegida clans where the infection rates are over 1000 and the levels of vaccination stagnate at 50%. Any correlation ?
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3 January 2022
at
1:05pm
woll
says:
@
Camus
Your figures are incorrect. Check www.zeit.de/wissen/aktuelle-corona-zahlen-karte-deutschland-landkreise which gives:
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4 January 2022
at
12:50am
Graucho
says:
@
woll
There is a definite correlation between low vaccination rates and voting for Trump in the U.S. It may of course be that the real common cause isn't right wing politics so much as being gullible enough to believe that anything on the internet and social media is true.
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4 January 2022
at
8:45am
woll
says:
@
Graucho
Agreed, and there are certainly similarities in Germany. But there are also many other reasons for antivax views - libertarianism, disapproving of state inteference in private health, left wing anti-state considerations, steinerism, dislike of injections, adherence to natural and alternative medicines, just can't be bothered etc etc. All sorts of people, from hippies to neofascists have taken part in the demonstrations in Germany. The shouty hard right have taken advantage of this and make a lot of noise. But still, merely to equate antivax with hard right views is a simplification of a complex - and though I don't much sympathise, interesting - phenomenon.
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4 January 2022
at
10:59am
MattG
says:
@
woll
the German word for your list is "Lebensreformbewegung".
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3 January 2022
at
3:33pm
andy ynda
says:
The vaccine made by Stöcker is developed on the same principles as the Abdala protein vaccine produced by Cuba. Stöcker's recipe can be found on his personal blog, alongside recipes for marmalade if anyone wants to compare the two vaccines. The design is simple and less costly to produce than the mRNA vaccines, and the resulting vaccine can be stored at normal fridge temperatures. I appreciate the irony that a libertarian billionaire and a communist country developed very similar vaccines, but I suspect the vaccine from Cuba will contribute more to vaccination campaigns in the global south.
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5 January 2022
at
9:14am
PBL
says:
I live in Bielefeld, where over 90% of the eligible population (over 80% of the total population) is vaccinated. A major reason for vaccine hesitancy around here was the frequently-changing messaging in Spring 2021, especially concerning the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. First, only for the under 65's, then, a couple of weeks later, after the fingering of what became known as VITT by a Greifswald medical scientist, not for the under 60's (meanwhile OK for the over 65's but few heard that). But the mRNA vaccines are OK, aren't they? Well, not necessarily -- people started to hear about myo/pericarditis events in younger men, having been sensibilised by the VITT events. In my circle of acquaintances there are 4 vaccine-resistants (although I think two subsequently changed their minds). There is also one with a friend who got VITT, and another with a relative who got myocarditis after a mRNA shot. Me, I'm double-jabbed with AZD1222 and boostered with a full shot of mRNA1273. I also understand statistics and have been reading the medical-scientific literature avidly. I can't speak for Saxons or Thuringians, or indeed anyone outside Bielefeld, but none of the overt reasons for hesitancy I have encountered have anything to do with anything in history.
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5 January 2022
at
8:18pm
Anne Emerson hall
says:
I highly recommend the book, The Demon Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and Ghosts of the Past in Post WWII Germany, by Monica Black, history professor at University of Tennessee Knoxville (Henry Holt, 2020). She tells a far more complex, dare I say nuanced, story about Germany and the long-standing tension between medical science and the belief in folk cures.
Read moreThe current Germany adult vaccination rate stands at 73.9% for one dose, 70.9% for two. Comparative figures for the UK, 77.6% and 71%. Higher, but not a lot. Source: Our World in Data.
German infection rates are gradually sinking, in the UK rising – fast.
The German government has set up restrictions on access to public spaces such as restaurants, bars, sports grounds, galleries. These restrictions particularly apply to the unvaccinated. In England the government just shuts its eyes and hopes for the best.
Dr Stöcker is certainly a right-wing weirdo, with unacceptable views. But he belongs to a small minority. Similar people also exist in the UK. Suggestions for bizarre cures or protections against the virus are hardly confined to Germany.
Vocal antivax groups also exist in Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, Holland and other countries. Their political background is complex, not just right-wing.
Finally the peculiar implication that the German vaccination programme is somehow linked to Nazi crimes of ¾ a century ago really needs a little bit of evidence. If not such tired tropes about Germany are best left well alone.
William Firebrace
Key phrase is "There are of course historical reasons for Germans to mistrust state interventions in healthcare. " Followed by a sentence containing the word "Nazi". Currently this association justifies anti- vax sentiment worldwide.
The "of course" indicates refined education on her part.
Schily's op-ed in the liberal daily Die Welt on 01.12.2021 is unambiguous in its position against introducing compulsory vaccination in Germany:
"I've already been vaccinated three times, and reccomend the vaccine, particularly to vulnerable people. But a general and mandatory obligation to be vaccinated is irresponsible. Such a legal obligation doesn't even exist in the People's Republic of China, which is otherwise upbraided vociferously for being authoritarian."
In the same op-ed, Schily summarises (public) health strategies that have substantial support in the vaccine skepticism movement: "[It is] uncontested that the natural immunisation effected by a recovery [from a Covid infection in children and young people] is far longer-lasting than that received from a vaccine." Moreover, Schily takes the concerns of millions of German residents about major side-effects from the Covid vaccines, particularly among children and young people, seriously: "To the best of my knowledge there certainly is reason to worry that major health damages from the vaccines are occurring, in not insubstantial dimensions."
None of this has anything to do with far-right politics. It has everything to do with centrist parties failing to allow room for the justified demands of major groups in the population: for participative, democratic health care politics. (In Germany, as elsewhere, the far right are successful, populist parasites, jumping into democracy gaps and vacums in societies.)
Sachsen – 7 day incidence 373, adult vaccination 63.2% (once) 60.4% (twice).
Thüringen - 7 day incidence 415, adult vaccination 68% (once) 65.4% (twice).
And yes both states have had a high number of AfD voters in recent elections (around 25% +), and have experienced significant right-wing anti-vax demos. But just what the relationship is between right-wing support and low vaccination rates would need clearer research, there may well be other factors.
This is the latest
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/02/marjorie-taylor-greene-twitter-permanently-suspends-account
But all of it has nothing to do with the tired old tropes rolled out in the blog.
Given what we are all experiencing regarding variants and the varied degrees of protection that vaccines have conferred, I am doubtful that “sharing vaccines” more widely would be very effective. Further, as I understand it, Western companies have been willing to share the formulae but not many countries have infrastructure and expertise to manufacture and deliver vaccines safely.