“Hello, this is the head sworn,” says Friedrich Pürner on the phone. The former head of the Aichach-Friedberg health department is now responsible for licensing foreign doctors in Upper Bavaria: “A pure administrative activity and not what I learned as a doctor and epidemiologist.” How long he will stay there is unclear because he has sued the delegation, which has since become a transfer. The proceedings are still pending. The farce about the 54-year-old, who was seconded in November 2020 and complained against it, has now been going on for a good year.
The delegation immediately followed Pürner’s criticism of the corona measures and of Prime Minister Markus Söder. So he doubted the sense of community masks and also the incidence scale of 30 or 50. At the time, the doctor called it a “punitive transfer”. He sued the delegation; shortly before the trial began, the State Health Office withdrew the delegation and sent him to his post in Upper Bavaria. Between work and the lawsuits, Pürner found time to write a book and feed more than 35,000 Twitter followers with often very provocative posts. On Monday he posted: “The problem is the untrustworthiness of politics. The worst scenarios have been described since 2020. They did not materialize.”
Applause from the lateral thinker camp
In the conversation, Pürner is emphatically factual and tries not to appear as a lateral thinker. He is concerned with fundamental errors in the health system. He also expresses a lack of understanding for the fact that the carnival is taking place or for “Wetten, dass ?!” Crowds came together in a confined space and without a mask. Nevertheless, Pürner received a lot of applause from the lateral thinkers camp and from the AfD. Is he playing down Corona? “Covid 19 is by no means to be underestimated, especially for the elderly and people with previous illnesses,” he says and adds: “But we have to learn again to assess dangers.”
It demands a different approach to the fight against the pandemic. Because Corona is usually harmless for children and young people, but all the more for the vulnerable groups it describes, the latter would have to be protected, the others would then have more freedom. The immunologist Reinhold Förster from the Medical University in Hanover understands the starting point, but does not consider this to be feasible: “Too many people would be affected.” The infected would also infect the vulnerable group – despite vaccinations.
Experts disagree
He is not fundamentally against vaccination, but as the chief of the department, he has been pushing for more vaccinations for years. Pürner claims: The corona vaccines are new and untested, long-term consequences are still largely unknown and older cells can no longer learn to produce the antibodies.
Here, too, Förster contradicts: “In the elderly, the vaccinations do indeed work worse, but that is the case with all vaccinations.” Simply because the immune system is no longer working so well. The President of the Paul Ehrlich Institute, Klaus Cichutek, replies in exactly the same way: “The general problem with older people is that the immune system no longer works as well. Protein isn’t working. “
With his criticism of the vaccination, Pürner makes a return difficult from the perspective of the state government. Incidentally, his post is vacant, the acting management is currently on pause.