Karl Lauterbach

Karl Wilhelm Lauterbach (born 21 February 1963) is a German scientist, physician, and politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), who has served as Federal Minister of Health since 8 December 2021.

From 1989 to 1992, he studied health policy and management as well as epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, graduating with a Doctor of Science in 1992.

From 1992 to 1993, he held a fellowship at the Harvard Medical School, sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which is close to the CDU.

From 1998 until 2005, Lauterbach served as the director of the Institute of Health Economics and Clinical Epidemiology (IGKE) at the University of Cologne.

He was a member of the Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung der Entwicklung im Gesundheitswesen (the council of experts advising the federal government on developments in the German healthcare system) from 1999 until he was elected to the Bundestag in September 2005.

Lauterbach was a CDU member for several years before joining the SPD in 2001.

In 2003, he was a member of the Rürup Commission, a government-appointed committee of experts that was established to review the financing of the social insurance systems.

He is professor of health economics and epidemiology at the University of Cologne (on leave since 2005).

Since the 2005 German federal election, he has been a member of the Bundestag (the German parliament).

During the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, his name became well known through his frequent appearances on television talk shows as an invited guest expert, along with his frequent use of Twitter to provide commentary about the ongoing pandemic.

Lauterbach studied human medicine at the RWTH Aachen University, University of Texas at San Antonio and graduated from the University of Düsseldorf.

At the 2005 federal elections Lauterbach made his entry to the Bundestag with a direct mandate by winning in his electoral district Leverkusen – Cologne IV.

Between 2005 and 2013, he served on the Health Committee.

Within the SPD parliamentary group, Lauterbach belongs to the Parliamentary Left, a left-wing movement.

He was appointed adjunct professor at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2008.

He was part of the governing coalition until 2009, when his party went into opposition.

Ahead of the 2013 federal elections, Peer Steinbrück included Lauterbach in his shadow cabinet for the SPD's campaign to unseat incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel.

During the campaign, he served as shadow minister of health.

In the negotiations to form a government following the elections, he led the SPD delegation in the health working group and his co-chair from the CDU/CSU was Jens Spahn.

From 2013 until 2019, he served as deputy chairman of the SPD parliamentary group under the leadership of successive chairpersons Thomas Oppermann (2013–2017) and Andrea Nahles (2017–2019).

Appointed by Federal Minister of Health Hermann Gröhe, Lauterbach served as member of an expert commission on the reform of Germany's hospital care from 2015 until 2017.

From 2018 until 2019, he chaired an expert commission advising Mayor of Berlin Michael Müller on strategies for the city's health sector.

In the 2019 SPD leadership election, Lauterbach announced his intention to run for the position as the party's co-chair, together with Nina Scheer.

He has since been serving on the German Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection and its Subcommittee on European Law.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lauterbach quickly rose to national prominence.

He served as an advisor of Chancellor Angela Merkel during the pandemic.

He became well known to a wide audience through his frequency of appearances – an unsurpassed 30 by 17 December 2020 – as guest expert in talk shows, as well as his frequent use of Twitter.

Early on in the pandemic, during the first lockdown from April to June 2020, he often cautioned against the negative effects of premature relaxation of restrictions.

Later he was one of those who warned early of a second wave of the pandemic.

In August 2021, he criticized state governments – education is managed by individual states in Germany – for what he saw as their poor pandemic preparation for the upcoming school year, and proposed to limit travelling by long-distance trains to those with a recent negative COVID-19 test, the vaccinated, and the recovered (the '3G rule').

For his views he became the target of intense hatred by many critics and anti-vaxxers, frequently receiving death threats.

However, his reputation was believed to have contributed to his strong result in the 2021 federal election.

In the 2021 German federal election, Lauterbach comfortably won the seat in Leverkusen and thus secured his return to the Bundestag, in spite of not having been nominated at a top place in the SPD's party list.

In the negotiations to form a so-called traffic light coalition of the SPD, the Green Party and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) following the 2021 federal elections, Lauterbach was part of his party's delegation in the working group on health, co-chaired by Katja Pähle, Maria Klein-Schmeink and Christine Aschenberg-Dugnus.

In December 2021, Lauterbach was designated as Federal Minister of Health in the traffic light coalition.

He assumed the office on 8 December 2021 when the Scholz cabinet was formally appointed by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Due to Lauterbach's high profile in Germany as a media commentator on COVID-19 pandemic, The Economist' described his nomination to the cabinet as "perhaps the most eagerly awaited health minister appointment in the history of the democratic world".

At his formal induction ceremony, Lauterbach said: "Health policy, as I see it, can only be successful when it’s anchored in evidence-based medicine."

On 10 December, the Bundestag passed a healthcare worker COVID-19 vaccine law, which was to come into effect on 15 March 2022.

Lauterbach told the Bundestag that: "Such a vaccine mandate is necessary because it is completely unacceptable that at the end of the second year of this pandemic [despite Deltacron infection surge], Germans who live in care homes die unnecessarily because workers there are unvaccinated."