Wolfgang Wodarg

Wolfgang Wodarg (born 2 March 1947) is a German physician and politician. He was a member of the Bundestag for the SPD from 1994 to 2009.

As chair of the

Wodarg first came to the attention of the general public in the 1980s when he was head of the Public Health Department (German: Gesundheitsamt) in Flensburg, Germany and hired the medical impostor Gert Postel as deputy head, later famously revealed to be a postman by training.^[4] This caused controversy, though he retained his position until elected to the Bundestag. He later appeared in the documentary Der Hochstapler – Die schwindelerregende Karriere des Postboten Gert Postel.^[5]

Member of parliament

From 1986 to 1998 Wodarg belonged to the parish council of his native Nieby.

From 1994 to 2009 he was a member of the Bundestag. Here Wodarg was spokesman from 2003 to 2005 of the SPD caucus in the inquiry commission ethics and law of modern medicine and spokesman for issues of minorities in the German-Danish border area.

He was a representative for the directly elected Bundestag seat for the Flensburg-Schleswig constituency from 1994 but lost his mandate in the 2009 German federal election.

Since 1999 Wodarg has also belonged to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Since 2002 he has been vice chairman of the Socialist Group, and since 2006 president of the German social democrats and deputy head of the German delegation.

COVID-19 pandemic

Wodarg gained notoriety during public discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic when he argued that SARS-CoV-2 was only one of many similar viruses which usually go undetected as part of an ordinary seasonal period of respiratory infections, and that the worldwide activities to stop the pandemic were "hype" caused by the selective perception of researchers.^[6]

His comments on the COVID-19 pandemic drew criticism from German scientists and some German media outlets. According to the critics, Wodarg's claims largely contradicted the verifiable facts; some of his statements were neither verifiable nor falsifiable; and because the facts Wodarg presented had nothing to do with each other, his statements had proved to be misleading.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]}

In a December 2020 petition to the European Medicines Agency, Wodarg and former Pfizer scientist Michael Yeadon called for all mRNA vaccine trials to be halted.^[21] Their petition, which suggested without evidence that the vaccines could cause infertility in women by targeting the syncytin-1 protein necessary for placenta formation, soon began circulating on social media.^[22] The misinformation caused by the petition spread from social media into doctors offices, where concerned women began asking their gynecologists if it was true. A survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation in January found that 13% of unvaccinated people in the U.S. had heard that COVID-19 vaccines caused infertility.^[23] David Gorski wrote on Science-Based Medicine that Wodarg and Yeadon were "stoking real fear that the new COVID-19 vaccines will make women infertile and [...] doing it based on speculative nonsense".^[24]