Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is calling on Germany to end what he described as unjust prosecutions of German doctors for granting patients exemptions from mask and vaccine requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’ve learned that more than a thousand German physicians and thousands of their patients now face prosecution and punishment for issuing exemptions from wearing their masks or getting COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic,” Kennedy said in a video on X on Jan. 11.
“When any government criminalizes doctors for advising their patients, it crosses a line that free societies have always treated as sacred.”
Kennedy said he sent a letter to Nina Warken, his German counterpart.
“In my letter, I made it clear that Germany has the opportunity and the responsibility to correct this trajectory, to restore medical autonomy, to end politically motivated prosecutions, and to uphold the rights that anchor every democratic nation,” he said.
Warken said in a statement that no doctors have been prosecuted for the reasons Kennedy outlined.
“Criminal prosecution occurred exclusively in cases of fraud and forgery, such as the issuance of false vaccination certificates or fake mask certificates,” she said.
Karl Lauterbach, however, who was Germany’s health minister from 2021 to May 2025, said on X that “in Germany, doctors are not punished by the government for issuing false certificates” and that “the courts are independent.”
Warken also said in her statement that Kennedy’s comments were “completely unfounded, factually incorrect, and should be rejected.” She said that in Germany, doctors autonomously decide on how to treat patients and that patients are free to choose which treatments to receive.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was never an obligation for physicians to administer vaccinations against the virus,” she said.
“Those who chose not to offer vaccinations for medical, ethical, or personal reasons were neither committing a crime nor facing sanctions. There was no professional ban or fine for not vaccinating.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment on Warken’s statement.
Kennedy had said in his video that unspecified reports from Germany “show a government sidelining patient autonomy and limiting people’s ability to act on their own convictions when they face medical decisions.”
“The German government is now violating the sacred patient–physician relationship. Replacing it is a dangerous system that makes physicians enforcers of state policies,” he said.
“Your health is no longer your doctor’s priority under this system. Your doctor instead is serving the welfare of the collective, as determined by unelected technocrats with no medical training. Anybody can see the danger in this system. No democracy grounded in confidence and transparency should move in that direction. Patients must always have the freedom to make personal medical decisions without coercion or political pressure.”
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