Germany’s outgoing health minister has defended his former pro-Covid lockdown stance amid claims that his actions during the pandemic could have amounted to “misconduct”.
Karl Lauterbach, a member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), has insisted his decision to keep German lockdown measures tight in 2022 as other nations dropped their restrictions entirely was based on scientific evidence.
According to a November 27 report by Süddeutsche Zeitung, this claim has been put in doubt, with uncovered letters from the minister showing he overruled health advice to reduce the official risk rate related to the virus.
Documents showed that Germany’s Robert Koch Institute — the country’s independent federal health agency — had recommended the risk level be reduced from “very high” to “high” in February 2022.
Lauterbach overruled the decision, saying that the downgrade would be “politically undesirable”.
The SPD’s political rivals said they now wanted answers. Andrew Ullmann, a former traffic-light coalition colleague of Lauterbach, has suggested an inquiry was required to examine whether the minister possibly engaged in “misconduct”.
Similar calls have repeatedly been made by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, with its MEP Christine Anderson telling Brussels Signal on November 28 that the minister had been “consciously ignoring the evidence regarding the harm his policies have caused to people’s health and individual liberties”.
“The perpetrators of these unprecedented infringements on fundamental rights and civil liberties need to be held to account. That’s why we need committees of inquiry both in the Bundestag and the European Parliament,” said Anderson, who also serves as secretary for the Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN) group.
Lauterbach has taken to X to defend himself, arguing that keeping Germany’s Covid restrictions at a time when other countries were opening up again saved lives.
“If we had already lowered the risk level in February 2022, when hundreds of people were still dying from Covid every day, that would have been a mistake,” he said, arguing that, for this reason, the downgrade was “rightfully postponed”.
Brussels Signal approached the minister for comment but as of writing none had been forthcoming.
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