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.
As chairman of the association “Doctors and Scientists for Health, Freedom and Democracy – MWGFD e.V.”, I recently wrote a letter to the head of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), Ms Emer Cooke. The letter is published on the MWGFD website in its original English version and in a German translation. I am also making the original version available here as a PDF for download. Ms Cooke claimed that she had no evidence that would cast doubt on the safety of the COVID-19 modRNA vaccines. Really? We thought we’d give Ms Cooke a hand with a bit of literature, as she apparently doesn’t have a proper scientific department to do the work. Therefore, a – not exhaustive, but detailed – annotated bibliography is attached as an appendix to the letter.
A few words on the background:
Some reflections on the “Berlin Declaration on Freedom of Expression” This is the long version of a text I wrote for the magazine “Info3”at their invitation. “Thoughts are free, who can guess them? They fly by like nocturnal shadows. No person can know them, no hunter can shoot them with powder and lead: Thoughts are … Read more
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].