The German government has sharply rejected claims by the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, that doctors in Germany have faced legal action for issuing vaccine and mask exemptions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The statements made by the US secretary of health are completely unfounded, factually incorrect, and must be rejected,” Germany’s health minister, Nina Warken, said in a strongly worded statement released late on Saturday.
In a video posted on X, Kennedy, a longtime vaccine sceptic, said he had written a letter to Warken calling for an “end to politically motivated prosecutions”. He provided no sources for his claims and misspelled Warken’s name as “Workin”.
Kennedy alleged the government was “limiting people’s abilities to act on their own convictions when they face medical decisions”, accusing it of “violating the sacred patient-physician relationship” and of making doctors “enforcers of state policies”.
The US health secretary said: “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 masks or getting Covid-19 vaccines.”
He did not provide specific examples or say which reports he was referring to, but added: “In my letter, I explained that Germany is targeting physicians who put their patients first and punishing citizens for making their own medical choices.”
He said that “no democracy grounded in confidence and transparency should move in that direction” but that Germany had “the opportunity and the responsibility to correct this trajectory [and] to restore medical autonomy”.
Warken rejected Kennedy’s claims, saying that during the pandemic there was “never any obligation on the medical profession to administer Covid-19 vaccinations”. She said criminal prosecution was only pursued in cases of fraud and document forgery.
“Anyone who did not want to offer vaccinations for medical, ethical, or personal reasons was not liable to prosecution [or] sanctions,” she said, adding that in general in Germany, “patients are also free to decide which therapy they wish to undergo”.
A former German health minister, Karl Lauterbach, who was in charge during the pandemic, also replied, saying Kennedy “should take care of health problems in his own country” such as a short life expectancy and excessive healthcare costs.
“In Germany, doctors are not punished by the government for issuing false medical certificates. In our country, the courts are independent,” Lauterbach wrote.
Kennedy has backed several conspiracy theories and been accused of spreading vaccine misinformation and scientifically debunked health theories as part of the Trump administration’s controversial Make America Healthy Again initiative.
