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Dr. Andreas Sönnigsen appears on Klar TV to discuss the Masern (measles) vaccination and the recent ARD/Tagesschau coverage. He presents his professional background: born and raised in Germany, studied medicine in the USA and Munich, practiced as a general internist from 1997 to 2012, and held professorships at Paracelsus University Salzburg, University of Witten/Herdecke, and Medical University of Vienna. He received the David Sackett Award for evidence-based medicine in 2013 and led the German Network for Evidence-Based Medicine from 2019 to 2021. He has authored works on scientific competence in medicine and on the Corona crisis, and has published over 100 international papers. He has long criticized conflicts of interest that he believes lead to an overly positive portrayal of medical interventions, a critique he says intensified during the Corona era, costing him his Vienna professorship and his chair at the German Network for Evidence-Based Medicine. He remains active post-Corona, including critical views on the measles vaccination mandate, including a talk at a press symposium on the Masernschutzgesetz. His conclusion on the question “does vaccination harm?” is that the benefit–risk ratio from the perspective of an individual child is definitively negative.
In the Panorama segment from February 26, 2026, Sönnigsen is asked how he became part of a balanced-for-and-against discussion about the measles vaccination mandate. He explains he was contacted by a Norddeutscher Rundfunk journalist seeking balance and agreed to participate to stimulate discourse. He clarifies he is not an anti-vaxxer but a proponent of evidence-based medicine and argues that each vaccination, including the measles vaccine, should be evaluated for pros and cons, study quality, the epidemic situation, justification, effectiveness, and side effects, and that this discourse must be conducted.
Sönnigsen contends that the show was not balanced. He discusses the dangers of measles, acknowledging it is not harmless, but argues that in the US, where measles became a notifiable disease in 1912, mortality declined to near zero by the early 1960s, and that the later impact of vaccination showed no further drop in mortality, suggesting in his view that vaccination did not drive the reduction. He asserts that in Germany, comparing mortality from the 1950s/60s to today is inappropriate due to postwar differences in healthcare and hygiene. He claims current German annual measles case numbers are about 330 per year nationwide (over 80 million population), and argues that herd immunity is largely due to people who had natural measles, with about 50% of the population having natural immunity from those born before 1973. He asserts real vaccine effectiveness is 80–85% rather than the commonly cited 98%, citing observational studies and a Cochrane review, and argues the 98% figure is incorrect. He explains that seroconversion rates after vaccination are lower than after natural infection, and that the metric should be real vaccine effectiveness rather than seroconversion rates.
Turning to vaccine safety, Sönnigsen counters Panorama’s claim that there are few and minor vaccine adverse events. He states approximately 100–150 severe vaccine adverse events are reported to the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut each year (2001–2012 analysis). He notes that about half of these have a possible or probable causal link to vaccination, and that there is underreporting by roughly a factor of 10–20. He references the Henry Ford study suggesting vaccinated children have a higher risk of chronic illness (about 60% with at least one chronic condition vs. 18% among unvaccinated), arguing vaccines’ adverse effects are not rare. He calculates that with about 1.2 million annual vaccinations and about 1,200 serious adverse events (assuming 5–10% causal and 10–20x underreporting), roughly one in every thousand children could be affected by a vaccine injury, a figure he uses to argue that the individual risk is high relative to the immediate benefit in a German epidemiological context where measles is rare in ordinary times.
Sönnigsen insists the measles vaccine’s benefits for an average healthy child in Germany are negative in the current epidemiological situation, argues for a “relative contraindication” to vaccination, and emphasizes that parental autonomy should determine whether to vaccinate. He attributes the push for vaccination mandates to government coercion and argues that mandates could backfire, increasing resistance. He also contends that measles cannot be eradicated globally through a German vaccination mandate, given worldwide reservoirs and migration, and notes that the Masernimpfpflicht (measles mandate) comes from 2019 (Spahn’s Masernschutzgesetz) rather than being a universal solution.
The interview closes with the assertion that people should form their own, balanced view, and that the state should not dominate medical decisions.