My latest article discusses the history and present state of ethics of experimentation in Germany.
Edna Bonhomme
29 December 2021
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.