Thoughts on Science, Medicine And Sundry Things
This is the private homepage of Prof. Dr. Dr. Harald Walach →.
A complete overview of my publications can be found here →. One focus of content is my small Methodology for Beginners →, which now has 25 chapters.
In my personal blog, I chat about my everyday scientific life and share some thoughts on what I see and experience.
In many of my blogs during the coronavirus pandemic, I have repeatedly asked, “Where are the investigative journalists?” “Where is the critical press?” With a few exceptions, I have noticed little critical reporting on official coronavirus policy, the ‘measures’, the state’s desire to force vaccinations on everyone, and related topics. The press has almost always sung from the same hymn sheet as the official statements from the government and its health related agencies. In my interview study, which I have so far only analysed in my coronavirus novel “Verschachtelte Wahrheit”, I also asked several media professionals why this is the case. The answers were complex, but one key element runs through them all:
The mental filter. There may well have been official directives from above at times, telling the editorial staff which way to go. But far more important is the “perceived truth”, what most people see as the “right” thing, what is politically correct, what people need to be taught. It is no longer what is actually the case that counts, but rather that one displays the correct attitude. And the correct stance is that of those perceived as progressive, liberal, left-wing—in short, the majority—and, coincidentally, it is also the stance of those in power. If you fail to toe this majority line, as a normal reporter or editor you run the risk of no longer being taken seriously, of no longer getting assignments, and perhaps even of losing your contract. The precarious world of short-term contracts and freelance work, which can be terminated at any time, has, according to my informants, largely replaced the once more common positions of editors and chief reporters who could not easily be sacked and were therefore steadfast in their views.
Anyone who hasn’t been asleep over the past few years will have noticed: the signs point to coercion and state paternalism. Everywhere. But especially in the healthcare sector. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was a vast funnel designed to drive the majority of people towards untested and, as we now know, dangerous genetic prevention technologies, which politicians euphemistically sold to us as ‘vaccinations’. The promises were all hollow, not to say outright lies. From Germany’s Merkel’s “The pandemic will be over once we have the vaccine” to Health Ministers’ Spahn and Lauterbach’s “effective and safe”.
During this pandemic, on 10 February 2020, a new Measles Protection Act was enacted, which came into force on 1 March 2020, conveniently at a time when nobody was really paying attention. The draft dates from September 2019, and anyone familiar with ministerial bureaucracy knows that something like this must have been hatched some time beforehand so that it could then be presented to parliament as a draft.
The core of this law is the requirement for nursery school children to provide proof of measles vaccination so that they can attend nursery school or a childcare centre. Immunity to measles can also be demonstrated by antibody titers, i.e., by the fact that a child has already had measles (see). As compulsory schooling takes precedence in Germany, checks may still be carried out and a missing vaccination certificate reported to the health authority, but the authorities are not permitted to prevent the child from attending school. Once compulsory schooling has ended, i.e., for secondary and further education, this may become an issue again.
In effect, therefore, the requirement to provide proof of a measles vaccination amounts to the introduction of a compulsory measles vaccination.
Our new version of the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI) with norm data from a representative German sample is now available (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40359-025-03671-3).
When Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, became known in Germany at the end of the 1990s, I conducted some of the first scientific work on mindfulness together with a number of students. In 1999, Marcus Majumdar and I conducted the first evaluation of an MBSR training programme [1-3], for which we received the Continentale Insurance Research Award. Nina Buchheld, now Nina Rose, also approached me at that time with the suggestion of writing a thesis on the subject of mindfulness. We decided to develop a mindfulness questionnaire, the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI) [4, 5]. If I am not mistaken, this was the first questionnaire instrument for measuring mindfulness. Shortly afterwards, research exploded and a wealth of other questionnaires were developed. Our instrument, the FMI, had a certain unique selling point: Nina Buchheld derived the items strictly empirically from Buddhist mindfulness literature, presented a long list of possible items to various mindfulness teachers and asked them to assess how accurate and understandable they were. From this initial list, she selected the items that were considered best and gave them to a sample group. The 30 questions that had the best psychometric properties were then included in our long version of the questionnaire. This was immediately translated into English by Paul Grossman [6].
Personnel changes within the US health authorities have resulted in new priorities. Jay Bhattacharya has been director of the National Institutes of Health since 2025, the super-agency that conducts its own research and funds much of the research in the US through large programmes. In addition, Anthony Fauci was replaced by Jeffery Taubenberger as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) after a brief interim period.
In an editorial in Nature Medicine describing the new direction of this institute, Bhattacharya, Taubenberger and their co-author Powers now clearly distance themselves from basically everything that constituted pandemic management in the US and, as a result, almost the entire world [1].
The authors write:
“… many of the recommended policies, including lockdowns, social distancing, school closures, wearing masks and vaccine mandates, lacked robust confirmatory evidence and remain the subject of debate about their overall benefits and unintended consequences. Where enforced, vaccine mandates contributed to decreased public confidence in routine voluntary immunizations. We recognize that much of the American public lost trust in the NIAID, the National Institutes of Health (NIH; of which the NIAID is a part), and in the greater scientific community. As current leaders of the NIH and the NIAID, we acknowledge this breach of trust…”
Let us pause for a moment to consider these words. They describe nothing less than the acknowledgement that the core elements of the so-called ‘pandemic response’, i.e. the political response to the pandemic, were devoid of scientific basis.
On December 16, 2025, I was a guest on David Lorimer’s podcast “Imaginal Inspirations” discussing the topic “From Science to Consciousness.”
About the host: David Lorimer is Programme Director of the Scientific and Medical Network and Chair of the Galileo Commission, an academic movement dedicated to expanding the evidence base of a science of consciousness.
Listen to the podcast for free (English):
