Why doctors had to protect their patients from vaccination
In Brecht’s “Life of Galileo” (1939), the scientist Galileo recants what he knows to be true under pressure from the Inquisition. His student is disappointed. Galileo replies: the problem is not the courage of individuals, but a system that demands courage where honesty should be a matter of course.
The doctors who issued vaccination exemption certificates did not want to be heroes. They wanted to practise their profession. That they were punished for it is the real indictment.
What happens when medical coercion becomes the norm, the world has witnessed before. The answer was formulated in Nuremberg in 1947:
The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. The person involved should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion.
When the Covid vaccination campaign began in late 2020, physicians observed that a growing number of their patients faced considerable health risks, whether from pre-existing conditions, allergies or vaccine injuries already suffered. They did what their professional code required: they assessed individual health status and, where medical grounds existed, issued a vaccination exemption certificate.
Yet many of them were criminally prosecuted, their practices raided, their licences suspended or revoked. The charge: issuing “false health certificates” under § 278 of the German Criminal Code. What this charge conceals: the doctors acted on the basis of their individual medical assessment, and on the basis of evidence that proved them right.
To understand the gravity of these medical decisions, one must know the circumstances under which physicians acted. Each of the following points would have been sufficient on its own to justify a careful individual risk-benefit assessment. Taken together, they made medical judgement not just a right but a duty.
From spring 2020, the scientific data showed a nuanced picture: for the vast majority of the population, particularly children, young people and healthy adults, a Covid-19 infection was mild or asymptomatic. The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), according to John Ioannidis (Stanford), was below 0.05% for those under 50.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) itself assessed the risk significantly more moderately in internal protocols as early as March 2021 than in its public communications. The later-released RKI protocols revealed a systematic discrepancy between the internal risk assessment and the dramatised public messaging, a finding that calls into question the very foundation of the entire vaccination campaign.
For the majority of patients, Covid-19 was not a life-threatening disease. This is not trivialisation but an epidemiological fact that had to be taken into account in every vaccination decision.
The Covid vaccines received conditional marketing authorisation, a process that shortened or bypassed essential safety steps. The approval studies exhibited fundamental methodological flaws:
Doctors who knew of these shortcomings were not acting “unscientifically” when they exempted patients from vaccination. On the contrary, they were exercising due diligence.
Within a very short period, the Covid vaccines generated more reported adverse events than all other vaccines of the past decades combined. This is not alarmism but a statistical finding derived from the official reporting systems (VAERS, EudraVigilance, PEI safety reports).
Documented serious adverse events include:The underreporting rate is substantial: studies show that only a fraction of actual adverse events are reported. Doctors who observed these adverse events in their patients had not only the right but the duty to protect vulnerable patients from further vaccination.
The central argument for the vaccination campaign, and particularly for mandatory vaccination in certain professions, was the so-called third-party protection: those who got vaccinated would protect not only themselves but others. This promise proved false.
If the vaccine protects neither against infection nor against transmission, any justification for mandatory vaccination collapses, as does any stigmatisation of doctors who issued exemptions to their patients. The vaccination decision was and remains a purely individual risk-benefit assessment.
The internal protocols of the Robert Koch Institute, partially released in 2024, revealed a disturbing discrepancy between public communication and the internal assessment of the experts:
These protocols retrospectively confirm what many doctors already knew from their clinical experience: the official risk assessment did not correspond to scientific reality. Doctors who made independent medical decisions on this basis were not acting against science. They were acting on the basis of a more honest assessment than the one officially prescribed to them.
In March 2022, Germany’s facility-based vaccination mandate came into force (§ 20a IfSG). It affected:
For these people, the mandate meant: either they accepted a vaccine whose long-term safety was unproven and whose adverse event profile was becoming increasingly alarming, or they lost their job, their career, their livelihood.
In this situation, many turned to their doctors. Not out of convenience, but out of legitimate health concerns. And doctors who, after careful examination, established a vaccination contraindication acted exactly as professional law and medical ethics require: they protected their patients from a health risk that these patients neither had to nor wanted to accept.
The Declaration of Geneva of the World Medical Association, the modern version of the Hippocratic Oath last revised in 2017, obliges every physician:
“The health and well-being of my patient will be my first consideration.”
And further:
“I will not use my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat.”
The Model Professional Code (§ 25 MBO-Ä) obliges doctors to issue certificates “to the best of their knowledge and conscience”. This means: a physician who identifies medical reasons against vaccination in a patient, whether due to pre-existing conditions, allergic dispositions, previously suffered vaccine injuries or an individual risk-benefit assessment, is professionally obliged to document this.
Issuing a vaccination exemption certificate in these cases was neither a favour nor a political act. It was the fulfilment of a medical duty.
A medical certificate is legally “false” if the physician acts against their better judgement, that is, documents a diagnosis they know to be untrue (§ 278 German Criminal Code).
In the proceedings against physicians, this standard was perverted. The question was not whether the doctor acted in good faith and after careful examination. Instead, it was assumed that vaccination contraindications could only exist in extreme exceptional cases, and that any doctor who issued “too many” certificates was automatically under suspicion of fraud.
This double standard ignores:The doctors who issued vaccination exemption certificates did not act against science. They acted on its basis. They considered the actual risk profile, the alarming adverse event record, the lack of long-term safety data, the absence of transmission protection, and the internal assessments of the authorities that were withheld from the public.
They followed the Declaration of Geneva. They followed the Model Professional Code. They followed their medical conscience. That they were punished for this is not proof of their guilt; it is testimony to the failure of those institutions that subordinated the protection of health to political obedience.
Each of these doctors deserves rehabilitation: legally, professionally and morally.