Carsten Watzl is an immunologist, appointed professor at the University of Dortmund, Secretary General of the German Society for Immunology and Editorial Board member of the European Journal of Immunology. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic Carsten became known to the broader public through his Twitter activities, frequent interviews in the newspapers and appearance in a number of talk-shows. According to Carsten, it all started one afternoon in December 2020 when journalists from the Heute Journal asked him to comment on the upcoming approval of mRNA vaccines. This was also a period of the first public debates about the benefits and risks of vaccination, and also a time when media began to recognize the importance of immunology as a discipline to combat the pandemics. An interesting and fun fact is that from then on, Carsten participated in over 500 interviews and achieved a record of 11 interviews in a single day.
The false claim that COVID-19 vaccines could in any way affect fertility is nothing new. Similar claims have been made against other vaccines. In 2003 for example the Polio vaccination campaign was boycotted in northern Nigeria due to claims that the vaccine could affect fertility [1]. More recently, similar claims were raised against the HPV vaccine, which protects against cervical and other papilloma virus-induced cancers. In every instance these claims were proven to be wrong! In case of the COVID-19 vaccines, even a mechanism was proposed, suggesting a...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...