REGION B – EUROPE

NEW WORLD ORDER

(Germany)

Karl Lauterbach

(Health Minister, 2021+)

The Official Story

KARL LAUTERBACH
(Minister of Health, 2021+)

Karl Wilhelm Lauterbach (born 21 February 1963) is a German scientist, physician, and politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) who has served as Federal Minister of Health since 8 December 2021. He is professor of health economics and epidemiology at the University of Cologne (on leave since 2005). Since the 2005 federal elections, he has been a Member of the Bundestag (the federal parliament of Germany). During the COVID-19 pandemic, his name became well known in Germany, through his frequent appearances on television talk shows as an invited guest expert, along with his frequent use of Twitter to provide commentary about the ongoing pandemic.

Minister of Health

On 6 December 2021, Lauterbach was designated as Federal Minister of Health in the traffic light coalition. He assumed the office on 8 December 2021 when the Scholz cabinet was formally appointed by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Due to Lauterbach’s high profile in Germany as a media commentator on the COVID-19 pandemic, The Economist’s Berlin correspondent Tom Nuttall described his nomination to the cabinet as “perhaps the most eagerly awaited health minister appointment in the history of the democratic world”.

A week into his tenure, during a visit to Hanover, Lauterbach expressed concerns that Germany might be headed towards a much stronger fifth wave of COVID-19 infections, specifically for the omicron variant. He also said he expected the country to suffer from a vaccine shortage in the first quarter.

Political positions

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lauterbach quickly rose to national prominence. He served as an advisor of Chancellor Angela Merkel during the pandemic. He became well known to a wide audience through his frequency of appearances – an unsurpassed 30 by 17 December 2020 – as guest expert in talk shows, as well as his frequent use of Twitter. Early on in the pandemic, during the first lockdown from April to June 2020, he often cautioned against the negative effects of premature relaxation of restrictions. Later he was one of those who warned early of a second wave of the pandemic. In August 2021, he criticized state governments – education is managed by individual states in Germany – for what he saw as their poor pandemic preparation for the upcoming school year, and proposed to limit travelling by long-distance trains to those with a recent negative COVID-19 test, the vaccinated, and the recovered (the ‘3G rule’). For his views he became the target of intense hatred by many COVID-19 deniers and anti-vaxxers, frequently receiving death threats. However, his reputation was believed to have contributed to his strong result in the 2021 federal election.

Source: Wikipedia