As of: March 9, 2024, 11:30 a.m
By: Alexander Schäfer
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Dr.
Thomas Voshaar became a Corona expert with his Moerser model.
Now the pulmonologist from North Rhine-Westphalia is talking about mistakes that still have an impact today.
Moers – Four years ago, the first patient who tested positive for Corona was admitted to the Bethanien Hospital in Moers in North Rhine-Westphalia.
The head of the lung clinic at that time was Dr.
Thomas Voshaar.
With his Moerser model, the now 65-year-old became a sought-after expert worldwide in the fight against Covid 19. Alexander Schäfer from wa.de spoke to the doctor about successes and mistakes in the pandemic.
You said in December 2020: “We are preparing for a catastrophe”.
Because politicians had decided to relax restrictions at Christmas.
Did it happen like that?
No.
There were tense phases in all hospitals at the time, including ours, of course.
However, a catastrophe in the sense that we were overloaded as a hospital did not occur.
But we have experienced an incredible number of catastrophic fates of families.
Which fates do you mean?
People came to us from all over Germany, from Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium.
I remember three family members from Belgium.
They were the last of, I think, 17. The others had died, both young and old.
Then these three set off because they had read about us and said, we are coming to you and you have to make sure that we don't die too.
So many corona deaths in one family group.
How can that be?
When large families met in very small spaces for several hours, ate and chatted together, this resulted in these people becoming seriously ill within a short period of time.
The cause was the high viral load in the room.
The greater the amount of virus that was inhaled, the more likely and usually more severely and quickly people became ill.
Most of them died on the ventilator.
August 2020 in action: Dr.
Thomas Voshaar, chief physician of pulmonology at the Bethanien Hospital in Moers, explains the ventilation of Covid-19 patients to the then North Rhine-Westphalia Prime Minister Armin Laschet.
© Marius Becker/dpa
Corona patients from Belgium find help in NRW
Were you able to help the patients from Belgium?
Yes, everything turned out well.
As with the mother and her adult daughter from Dortmund.
We even took them in even though they weren't sick yet.
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What happened?
The two came from Dortmund by car and presented themselves to us in the emergency room around 7 or 8 p.m.
They tested positive but weren't really sick.
They told us that everyone in their family was dead except for them.
Husband and father, siblings, uncles and so on.
They cried and shook, didn't want to go home again and didn't let themselves be sent away.
How did it turn out with those from Dortmund?
You are actually sick.
The mother had a moderately severe course, the daughter was relatively mildly ill.
Both survived.
How many people's lives did your Moerser model, which was, among other things, against early invasive ventilation, save?
We processed it scientifically and published it internationally.
As far as I know, we were the only hospital in Germany that actually disclosed its Corona numbers every week.
Age, gender, how many are being ventilated, how many have died, how many have survived?
We therefore know that there were more than 500 patients who were seriously ill according to the international definition and required intensive care.
We had a mortality rate of less than 10 percent among patients requiring intensive care, while worldwide and also in Germany it was between 30 and 80 percent.
The 80 percent mortality rate for invasive ventilation comes from a German retrospective study that has just been accepted for publication.
Karl Lauterbach makes “a lot of mistakes” as a health politician
The then NRW Prime Minister Armin Laschet and the then Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn visited your clinic in 2020.
Was Karl Lauterbach ever there?
No.
We spoke on the phone once or twice.
He had heard about our model “from his friends at Harvard.”
At least that's what he said on Markus Lanz's show.
Afterwards we spoke on the phone for a while.
There were no further contacts.
How do you assess his work as Health Minister during the pandemic?
He is said to be a very smart health economist.
As a health politician, he makes a lot of mistakes; a lot of things are not coordinated and thought through.
He also seems to have a certain and cultivated resistance to advice.
However, this can be seen as positive when it comes to lobbyists.
It's a difficult job and he has big plans, you have to recognize that.
What do you accuse Lauterbach and the Corona policy of?
The opposite of panic is a rational and data-based plan.
It was a mistake to associate all Corona measures with stoking fear.
If you want to win people over and lead them, then you have to make decisions and communicate with reason and prudence.
Fear, lobbying, ideology, taking advantage, camp formation and biased advice have led to errors and omissions.
Dr.
Thomas Voshaar is now retired.
© Pascal Skwara/Bethanien Hospital
What mistakes were those?
We knew early on that the risk of infection was great in small indoor spaces, but that there was practically none outside.
Nevertheless, there were restrictions on spending time in the fresh air.
It was also clear that infection can never be reliably prevented.
But you can reduce the risk, which is a lot.
Neither masks nor contact restrictions can reduce the risk of infection to zero.
Nevertheless, many believed in and pursued the zero-Covid strategy.
A mistake.
And a truly catastrophic mistake with many consequences was to believe that vaccination affects transmissibility.
We knew that this was not the case with respiratory viruses.
The vaccination protected against severe disease, but had only a minimal effect on transmissibility.
“You were ostracized if you didn’t get vaccinated.
This must never happen again.”
So the 2G rule was wrong?
The then World Medical President Frank Ulrich Montgomery spoke right up to the end about the tyranny of the unvaccinated.
He wasn't the only one who excluded people from this society.
You were ostracized if you didn't get vaccinated.
This must never happen again.
The 2G access rules were wrong.
As wrong as the abolition of the status for those who have recovered after just three months.
We knew from basic science that an actual infection offers better, broader and, above all, longer-lasting protection than any vaccination.
I was inappropriately insulted for my statement that after two vaccinations we would now have to allow the immune system to adapt further to new variants in order to reach a safe endemic state.
What was missed?
From the very beginning, we did not provide scientific support for everything we did.
We have not observed what happens if we impose this or that measure.
Or: What actually happens after the vaccination?
We did not investigate or specifically observe this.
We have bought vaccines for billions of euros, but we have not set up any accompanying observational studies.
It was Hendrik Streeck, practically as an individual, who looked closely at what the antibodies were like, who developed which antibodies and how an antibody titer behaved.
That means we basically had and still have a major scientific failure.
Til today.
And even worse, processing is blocked.
Til today?
Yes, booster vaccinations are recommended, for example, although we have practically no data basis for this.
There are people who are suspected of having post-vac syndrome.
But we don't know what that is.
These people receive less attention than, for example, people with so-called post-Covid syndrome.
To date, we know very little about the effectiveness of the vaccination and possible side effects.
There are now large studies that show that the vaccination has had less effect than previously thought.
There is also a currently published multinational cohort study with almost 100 million vaccinated people.
Accordingly, side effects occur more frequently after vaccination than previously assumed.
But the general tenor was that there were no side effects - without being able to know that.
Don't get me wrong: the vaccination was probably our salvation, I still believe that to this day.
But there has been a failure to invest in accompanying cohort studies to examine outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
Specifically, the question arises of absolute risk reduction in certain age groups.
About Thomas Voshaar
Thomas Voshaar became chief physician at the Clinic for Lung and Bronchial Medicine in Moers before his 34th birthday.
During the corona pandemic - new variants sometimes cause unusual symptoms - he made a name for himself as an expert and was one of Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn's close circle of advisors.
The doctor achieved worldwide recognition with the so-called Moerser Model, a holistic model for corona patient care.
The now 65-year-old has been retired since the end of September 2023.
But he is still active - for example as deputy chairman of the association “Socrates, a forum of critical rationalists”.
There is currently no “scientific basis for a fifth or sixth vaccination”
In a TV interview, did you advocate a reassessment of the vaccines?
Why?
In addition to the open questions about the actual effect of the mRNA vaccines and the frequency of side effects, there is a third point that now needs to be scientifically addressed quickly.
There is evidence from various countries and laboratories that the mRNA vaccine is contaminated with DNA.
This is due to the manufacturing process.
This was probably changed at Pfizer after the vaccine was approved for large-scale production.
The WHO even has a specification for the vaccine that determines how much DNA is still acceptable as a contaminant.
This amount is obviously exceeded more often.
We don't yet know whether this poses a danger to the organism or not.
But the problem is our lack of knowledge.
Since the DNA fragments, like the mRNA, are packed in nanolipids, so to speak, they can also get into the cells, probably also into the cell nuclei.
There is further new information about the manufacturing process and the targeted programming on the plasmid DNA, which serves as a template for mRNA production.
This information is now becoming public in bits and pieces, which initially causes concern.
This all needs to be addressed and examined carefully.
Vaccinations themselves must not be discredited.
Without vaccination, our civilization would not exist as it does.
That's why it's so important to investigate every suspicion immediately and, above all, not to block it.
Are you still getting vaccinated against Corona?
No.
I have been vaccinated twice and knowingly had an infection.
That's enough.
More infections will come and update my immune system and keep it fresh.
I can't see at the moment that we have a scientific basis for a fifth or sixth vaccination.
On the contrary: it could even be disadvantageous.
However, the RKI continues to recommend vaccination to people over 60, among others.
I know.
But I come to a different conclusion in my assessment.
The RKI has also recommended vaccination for children in the past.
In retrospect, that was unnecessary.
The recommendation for older people remained.
But it is still not scientifically evident that they need to be vaccinated.
As I said, valid data is missing everywhere.
They are replaced by an overpowering opinion.
Did Sweden get through the pandemic better?
In the end it seems that the Swedes did it better.
In order to really assess this, we would first have to have reliable test results from Germany.
But we don’t have enough concrete and valid figures and data from Germany.
We are more of a land of opinions and beliefs without data.
Are you still wearing a mask?
No.
I don't work in the hospital anymore.
I might wear one if I had a terrible cold and needed to go somewhere.
So that I don't infect anyone.
But in normal everyday life there is no reason for me to wear a mask.
How dangerous is Covid 19 today?
Also or precisely because influenza progresses a little differently every year, it can now be compared to the flu.
Things were different in 2020.