Germany’s health minister has been lambasted for fearmongering by experts after warning that a killer COVID variant could emerge this autumn.
Germany’s now-infamous Health Minister, Karl Lauterbach, has warned the country’s population that a new, extremely deadly variant of COVID could emerge in Autumn, which would, in turn, require a return of harsh lockdown measures.
However, the forced-vaccination loving minister has been lambasted by both experts within the medical world, as well as members of his own government over the warning, with one virologist saying that his comments were ultimately unscientific.
According to Bild, Lauterbach said that he believed that there was a probability that a so-called “killer variant” could hit Germany in Autumn after a Summer out of lockdown, which would necessitate the return of harsh forced mask-wearing measures.
What’s more, the Health Minister appears to believe that the unvaxxed are to blame in this hypothetical scenario, linking the rejection of his forced vaccination measures to the apparently forthcoming medical crisis.
“The failure of compulsory vaccination was a bitter disappointment,” Lauterbach is reported by the publication as saying. “The attempt was correct. But you have to accept the result. It was very clear.”
“But after a good summer, the large vaccination gap can give us a tough autumn,” he continued. ” It’s entirely possible we’ll get a highly contagious Omicron variant as deadly as Delta. That would be an absolute killer option.”
While the health minister appears to believe a “killer” virus may be right around the corner, other medical experts appear to strongly dispute this, reprimanding the leftist politician for his claim.
“According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the appearance of a ‘killer variant’ in autumn is a very unlikely scenario,” Der Spiegel reports one expert, WHO-linked virologist Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit as saying, who also reportedly described the SPD member’s comments as unscientific.
“We saw with Omicron, which was an immune escape variant, that the vaccination provided good protection against serious illness and death,” the expert is also reported as saying. “Because immunity is not only based on neutralizing antibodies, but also on cellular immunity.”
Some of Lauterbach’s colleagues within the German coalition government have also taken aim at the Federal Health Minister, with one lambasting the politician’s comments as unhelpful.
“…I consider vague forecasts about the “possibility” of the emergence of an “absolute killer variant” to be really unhelpful,” said one senior German Green party member, Konstantin von Notz, with another colleague describing the comments as being a frontrunner for “nonsense of the year”.
Meanwhile, Bild has reported that Lauterbach has declined to provide the name of the study from which he has drawn his doomsday predictions.
This is not the first time the SPD politician has landed himself in hot water over his public Chinese Coronavirus predictions, with Bild also previously catching the forced jab advocate out for seemingly giving different outlooks on the COVID pandemic in public than he does in private.
At a time when the minister was giving stark views on the pandemic in Germany publicly, the publication reported the minister as writing in a letter to a colleague that the situation was in fact “stable”.
“…it has been shown that the omicron variant causes significantly milder courses,” the minister is believed to have written, noting that it was unlikely that the health service would ever be overwhelmed.