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Lothar Wieler: "As long as I am an official of this state, I will serve it responsibly"
Photo: Jürgen Heinrich / imago images / Jürgen Heinrich
Lothar Wieler, President of the Robert Koch Institute, faces massive threats.
"I wish things were more pleasant, but I still get threats," he told the newspapers of the Funke media group.
If, for example, it is publicly claimed that he is responsible for schools being closed, or if the claim is made somewhere that he wants lockdown instead of freedom, "then the threats, including death threats, increase massively."
But that doesn't prevent him from doing his job.
"But the risk doesn't stop me from doing my duty," said Wieler.
"As long as I am an official of this state, I will serve it responsibly."
The RKI boss defended his institute again against criticism because of incomplete vaccination data.
An RKI report, according to which more adults are probably vaccinated than official data suggest, caused a stir last week.
He shared the anger about the reporting problems, but the RKI was not responsible, said Wieler.
"But the reporting of the vaccinating bodies is required by law in the Coronavirus Vaccination Ordinance, it must be complete and timely in order to be able to map the vaccination progress in Germany as accurately and up-to-date as possible," he continued.
"It's unfair to put the blame on the RKI."
The officially reported data are the minimum vaccination rate, said the RKI boss.
With the entry of resident doctors into vaccination, the vaccination quota can no longer be recorded as precisely as in the vaccination centers.
"We can only say that up to 84 percent of adults had been vaccinated at least once by the end of September and up to 80 percent had been vaccinated completely." It was impossible to say how high the actual rate is now.
Overall, the RKI currently rates the situation in terms of the number of infections as stagnating.
The developments in the individual federal states differ.
In a comparison of the past two weeks, Saxony, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Saarland recorded significant increases, according to the current RKI weekly report.
aar / dpa
