On 28 April 2026, Berlin’s senator for science, health and care, Ina Czyborra (SPD), issued a press release titled “Senate weighs options to improve HPV vaccination coverage”. Core sentence: “HPV can cause cancer — and we have it in our hands to protect ourselves effectively against it.” The plan: information letters to parents of pupils in grades 4 through 10, integrating vaccination into the new U10 child-health check-up, and reminder systems where check-ups are missed.
On 24 April 2026, in the early afternoon, Germany’s Paul-Ehrlich-Institut (PEI) — the federal agency for vaccines and biomedical medicines — posts from its official X account @PEI_Germany a card marking the end of European Immunisation Week. On the card: a cartoon family — mother, child, teenager, adult, elderly woman, male nurse in headscarf. Above it, in friendly green, with an exclamation mark:
The vaccination rate among over-60s for the flu shot is, according to the RKI, at its lowest level in 17 years [1]. The COVID-19 vaccination rate in this age group has fallen by more than a third compared to the previous season [2]. At the same time, data from Denmark show that different BioNTech batches showed different adverse-event rates — a study that the PEI dismissed as “not meaningful” without presenting its own data [3].
No monitoring, no data, no consequences — but the vaccines were of course “safe and effective.”
It is one of the biggest scandals in Germany’s postwar history — and hardly anyone is talking about it. BioNTech, the Mainz-based company celebrated as the hero of the pandemic, positioned itself legally so that it is formally not even a vaccine manufacturer. And the authority responsible for monitoring vaccine safety — the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) — failed to evaluate the legally mandated data for years.
