Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is calling on Germany to end what he described as unjust prosecutions of German doctors for granting patients exemptions from mask and vaccine requirements during the COVID-19 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 on X on Jan. 11. “When any government criminalizes doctors for advising their patients, it crosses a line that free societies have always treated as sacred.” Kennedy said he sent a letter to Nina Warken, his German counterpart. “In my letter, I made it clear that Germany has the opportunity and the responsibility to correct this trajectory, to restore medical autonomy, to end politically motivated prosecutions, and to uphold the rights that anchor every democratic nation,” he said. Warken said in a statement that no doctors have been prosecuted for the reasons Kennedy outlined. “Criminal prosecution occurred exclusively in cases of fraud and forgery, such as the issuance of false vaccination certificates or fake mask certificates,” she said. Karl Lauterbach, however, who was Germany’s health minister from 2021 to May 2025, said on X that […]