When Scientists Go Wild

Well before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, I’ve been living in Germany. When I think about the ways that my friends and family members in the United States have fared during the outbreak, I feel grateful to be here. But my appreciation is not blissful ignorance, rather, I look a bit more deeply into German society by reading the news or just walking through my neighborhood. From Munich to Berlin, since the summer of 2020, coronavirus skeptics and anti-vaxxers have protested against public health measures and vaccines throughout Germany, with some expressing bigoted claims. In May 2020, I wrote an article for The Atlantic Magazine about vaccine hesitancy and the rise of the far-right in Germany.

My Atlantic Magazine article was my attempt to understand Germany’s medical history and more explicitly how the anti-vaccination movement in Europe has been riddled with anti-Semitism. In this article I argued:

Denying the need for public-health measures, including vaccination, slipped into tacitly implying that the disease would carry off the Jewish and the poor. Sometimes the calculation was explicit. A monthly magazine distributed by the German physician Gustav Jäger argued that the cholera epidemic would remove “weaklings” from the “better classes” of society. These words were code for the poor and for ethnic minorities, and not only do they link contagion to ableism, but they deny members of ethnic minority groups their humanity.

I never thought there would be another twist to the German Covid-19. Just this fall, Dr. Winfried Stöcker—a physician and enterpreneur—decided to take matters into his own hands and develop and distribute an unauthorized vaccine. Not only didn’t he carry out proper clinical trials but did test it on himself. He also owns the airport, which he bought in 2016. Not only did he cross some ethical boundaries but his actions will prevent the vaccine-hesitant from seeking a Covid vaccine. But it doesn’t stop there. In my December 2021 article in the London Review of Books blog, I noted:

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.

Don’t get me wrong, Germany has so much to offer with its universal healthcare and higher quality of life—in comparison to the United States. However, rogue scientists have the potential to undermine people’s trust in science.