Germany has pulled many of its COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, now declaring that most people above the age of 75 do not need to be inoculated.
The country’s Standing Committee on Vaccination said in a report issued earlier this month that its position on the vaccine was changing in an effort to “reflect the current epidemiological situation and the population’s immune status.”
“A large proportion of the adult population now has hybrid immunity, characterised by exposure to a variety of antigenic contacts, and is therefore sufficiently well protected against severe cases of COVID-19,” the report says, noting that the shift “also applies to healthy pregnant women.”
“Consequently, the recommendation to achieve baseline immunity for the adult population (including pregnant women without underlying conditions or pregnancy-related complications) is no longer applicable,” it explains. “In [the] future, the standard vaccination recommendation will apply to those ≥ 75 years of age.”
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. condemned Germany in January for prosecuting doctors who granted patients exemptions from mask and vaccine mandates during the pandemic. “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 their masks or getting COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic,” Kennedy said in a video at the time. “When any government criminalizes doctors for advising their patients, it crosses a line that free societies have always treated as sacred.”
Kennedy noted that doctors were instead “serving the welfare of the collective as determined by unelected technocrats with no medical training.”
Meanwhile, in the United States, Kennedy terminated emergency-use authorizations for COVID-19-related drugs and products.
