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German Businessman Creates "Alternative" COVID-19 Vaccine and Administers It at His Own Airport

01 December 2021, 14:00

The vaccine has not been studied or registered.

On November 27, a queue of several hundred people wanting a coronavirus shot formed at Lübeck airport. However, police dispersed the crowd, as people were being injected with an unregistered homemade vaccine invented by the airport owner.

We tell the story of German businessman Winfried Stecker, who created his own illegal vaccination campaign.

Who Is Stecker

In August 2021, on the talk show "Corona Forever?" hosted by Roland Tichy (former editor-in-chief of several German economic publications), a guest appeared who described errors in the creation of mRNA vaccines: "During the second shot, antibodies collide with cells that produce the antigen, and this makes the body sick."

It turned out that the 74-year-old man had his own coronavirus vaccine, a lecture about which was heard by everyone present at the show. Winfried Stecker made German COVID denialists love vaccines. Or rather, one specific vaccine that had not passed any clinical trials.

Information about the drug is only available in a blog run by professional doctor Stecker. Hundreds of Germans write on all social networks that they would like to be vaccinated specifically by the billionaire. In various regions there are several doctors whose addresses are passed on secretly; they administer Stecker's vaccine.

Unlike the free vaccines (BioNTech/Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson&Johnson), the Winfried LubecaVax vaccine must be paid for: €60-90. According to German media reports, 20,000 people in Germany have already been vaccinated with this vaccine.

The coronavirus pandemic turned the eccentric elderly millionaire of right-wing views into a symbol of resistance to the "biofarce" and to authorities who, allegedly by joint efforts, are blocking his "reliable people's" vaccine.

The Vaccine and Jam in One Blog

Information about the vaccine sits alongside jam recipes on Winfried Stecker's blog (in particular, the latest entry is dedicated to quince jelly). If you read the entries about the vaccine and the jam one after another, you can find many similarities.

Vaccine instructions: "Take three portions of 15 micrograms of recombinant receptor-binding domain (Arg319-Phe541) per person. I use Alhydrogel from InvivoGen as the adjuvant. Shake well and draw 200 microliters of this mixture into a tuberculin syringe. Add 10 milliliters of saline to the syringe, add the previous solution, and mix. Of these, 500 microliters, which you mix with your portion of antigen, go into one injection."

Even in the video where Stecker talks about the vaccine, he takes it out of a jam jar with a strawberry lid.

By spring 2021, Germany was facing a critical vaccine situation amid the lockdown. Then the appearance of a specialist who had earned hundreds of millions of euros from laboratory research and claimed his vaccine could supply the whole world within a couple of months seemed to many like salvation.

Many people justified the businessman's decision not to conduct long studies and simply test the vaccine on himself, his family and a hundred volunteers. According to him, he invented the vaccine as early as March 2020, immediately injected himself and his loved ones, and on May 8, 2020 announced that he now had immunity to the virus.

"Unconventional Solutions"

In September 2020, Stecker sent a friendly letter and data about the vaccine to the head of the Paul Ehrlich Institute (without permission from this organization, a vaccine cannot be released to the market in Germany).

The businessman wrote: "The fury with which 'corona' has attacked us demands unconventional solutions." The institute then filed a complaint with the prosecutor's office about a possible violation of the law: "clinical trials of an experimental drug without appropriate permits."

After this, the businessman stopped trying to legalize the vaccine, drew closer to COVID denialists and launched his vaccination campaign. Stecker's supporters are residents of Germany who are dissatisfied with the fact that the pandemic has become not just a business but an "engine of the German economy."

The businessman's statements resonate with the sense of justice of a significant part of Germans. They consider it a violation that a professional doctor is forbidden to administer to patients a drug he developed.

Paradox: critics of the mRNA vaccine say it is insufficiently studied, yet they trust a drug whose main characteristic is a fundamental refusal to be studied.

It should be noted that after the crowd wanting vaccination at Lübeck airport was dispersed, four more new cases were opened against Stecker and his employees.