"Only a Matter of Time Until the Next Pandemic," Says German Health Minister

“Only a Matter of Time Until the Next Pandemic,” Says German Health Minister

In a cheery tweet featuring a pic of himself and other smiling delegates at the opening of the World Health Summit in Berlin on Sunday, German Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach has declared that it’s “only a matter of time until the next pandemic comes”.

Although Lauterbach is careful to tag co-sponsors like the WHO, the World Health Summit (WHS) is essentially a German Government event. It is organised every year by the Charité teaching hospital in Berlin on behalf of a WHS Foundation which is funded by both the German federal Government and the Berlin municipal Government.

Germany’s ‘star virologist’ Christian Drosten is the Chair of the Charité’s virology department. Drosten developed the notoriously hypersensitive COVID-19 PCR protocol which helped to create the COVID-19 pandemic via the detection of billions of ‘asymptomatic cases’.

The Dean of the Charité teaching hospital, Axel Pries, is also president of the World Health Summit. In a PowerPoint presentation prepared for the German Parliament or Bundestag, Pries describes the “vision” of the World Health Summit as “partnership with the German federal Government to promote a geopolitical ‘soft power’ with humanitarian engagement”. He includes the following among the “aims” of the event:

Increasing the German presence and relevance in global health
Using the potential of the WHS for the German Global Health Strategy

Pries’s presentation is titled (in English!): ‘Global Health – made in Germany together with the World.’

As discussed in my earlier article, Germany has been the driving force behind the WHO’s proposed ‘Pandemic Treaty’ and the related revisions of the International Health Regulations. Furthermore, as touched upon by Jürgen Kirchner, early on in the COVID-19 pandemic German officials, including Lauterbach’s predecessor Jens Spahn, voiced their “dream” of making Germany a global vaccine “hub” thanks to the mRNA-based innovations of the German firms BioNTech and Curevac.

Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X.

Stop Press: Professor David Livermore has written in Spiked that the world needs to “calm down about ‘Disease X’”. Disease X, which doesn’t exist but was added to the WHO’s catalogue of threats in 2018 as a ‘placeholder’ is reported to be “20 times more lethal than COVID-19, with the potential to kill 50million people worldwide. Supposedly, it comes from an animal source and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) claims it is ready to develop a vaccine for it”.