On September 7, 2019, Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Wuhan. Bundesregierung.de documents three stops: a speech at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), a visit to automotive supplier ZF-Powertrain, and the opening of a new Webasto plant. The official website of Tongji Hospital documents a fourth stop — and Xinhua, China’s state wire agency, sent a photographer.
That stop does not appear in the German travel records.
The Three Official Stops#
The Bundesregierung.de travel report lists in Wuhan: HUST (speech), ZF-Powertrain, Webasto. The speech is available in full on Bundesregierung.de. The Webasto opening is documented by a Webasto Group press release: 41,000 square metres, approximately 50 million euros in investment.
That is the official German programme.
The Fourth Stop#
The English-language website of Tongji Hospital documents for the same day: Merkel visited the Optical Valley Campus from 14:30 to 15:25 — known as the Wuhan Sino-German Friendship Hospital. Present: government spokesman Steffen Seibert, Ambassador Dr. Clemens von Goetze, and Chinese Ambassador Wu Ken. The page has been archived in the Wayback Machine since 28 July 2021.
Xinhua photographer Xiao Yijiu was there. His press photo — “German Chancellor Angela Merkel visits Tongji Hospital of Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, Sept. 7, 2019” — is licensed at Alamy. The Global Times reported explicitly: “Germany’s Merkel visits German founded hospital in Wuhan, Hubei Province.”
Topics discussed, according to Tongji Hospital: DRG payment models, paediatrics, German-Chinese medical education, German medical students at Tongji. The hospital quotes Merkel expressing her hope to strengthen bilateral cooperation between universities and medical institutions.
This visit does not appear in the Bundesregierung.de summary. The official weekly schedule of the Federal Chancellery, which is more detailed than the press report, is not publicly accessible. Whether it lists the Tongji appointment is therefore unknown.
What Tongji Hospital Is#
Tongji Medical College has been the medical faculty of HUST since 2000. Tongji Hospital is among the seven best hospitals in China (Tertiary A). The Optical Valley Campus — the Sino-German Friendship Hospital — opened on 16 October 2018. The German-Chinese Institute for Emergency and Disaster Medicine (SGIDEM) has been based at Tongji Hospital since 13 December 2011; the institutional German-Chinese framework was eight years old at the time of Merkel’s visit.
Tongji Hospital and HUST received approval from the Hubei Provincial Development and Reform Commission for an “Emergency Prevention and Control P3 Laboratory and Testing Center.” The date of that approval relative to Merkel’s visit cannot be determined from accessible sources. Functionally, a clinical P3 testing laboratory at a hospital is diagnostic infrastructure for infectious disease emergencies — not a basic research laboratory for dangerous pathogens. According to a PMC study on China’s BSL landscape, the BSL-3 research operators in Wuhan in 2019 were: Wuhan University, Huazhong Agricultural University, and the WIV — HUST is not listed.
Webasto and the Cluster: What Is Wrong#
Brownstone Institute, the Daily Sceptic, and several alternative media outlets have linked Merkel’s Webasto visit in Wuhan to the first German COVID cluster in January 2020. The connection is geographically wrong.
The index case patient was an employee of Webasto Shanghai — not Webasto Wuhan. Her parents from Wuhan visited her in Shanghai before her trip to Germany. On 19 January 2020 she travelled to Webasto headquarters in Stockdorf. On 27 January, Bavaria reported Germany’s first confirmed COVID-19 case. Sources: ZDF heute, RKI.
Webasto Wuhan — the site Merkel opened — played no documented role in the transmission chain. The parents of the Shanghai employee came from Wuhan, not from Webasto Wuhan. The time between Merkel’s visit on 7 September 2019 and the employee’s arrival in Stockdorf on 19 January 2020 is 4.5 months — beyond any known coronavirus incubation period.
Finding#
Merkel’s Wuhan visit on 7 September 2019 is fully documented. Bundesregierung.de lists three stops. A fourth — Tongji Hospital, Optical Valley Campus, 14:30–15:25, with government spokesman Seibert and Ambassador von Goetze — is documented by the Chinese hospital website and a Xinhua press photograph. It is absent from the German travel records.
Why, is unresolved. The institutional connection between Tongji Medical College and HUST makes subsumption of the appointment under the HUST block plausible. It is not documented.
The Webasto cluster narrative, which frames this visit as causally linked to Germany’s first COVID case, is geographically and biologically wrong.
What remains open: the exact date of the HUST/Tongji P3 laboratory approval, and the complete Chancellery schedule for 7 September 2019.
