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Dozens of people have been injected with an unregulated "homemade" COVID-19 vaccine in Lübeck Airport, Germany. Airport owner Winfried Stöcker developed the vaccine, which does not have approval from the German drug regulator, claiming that is 97 percent effective against the virus. Four men are now under investigation for violating German medical laws, while Stöcker and his legal team claim they have done nothing wrong.
The police received a tip-off about the unapproved vaccine drive and attended Lübeck Airport on Saturday afternoon. According to local reports, around 150 people were in the waiting hall and a further 80 people were in front of the terminal waiting for their vaccine. By the time police arrived, around 50 people had been dosed by the unapproved jab.
"Accordingly, colleagues from the 4th police station were able to find around 80 people in front of the airport building at around 3 pm," says a spokesperson, reports LN Online.
Stöcker previously owned a laboratory company that he later sold, and has since developed his own vaccine that he published online for anyone to use. According to a write-up on his website, Stöcker then applied to Paul-Ehrlich Institute (PEI), which is the German Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedicines, after he "had already done a trial on five (!) persons", but they "coolly sued" him.
Taking matters into his own hands, Stöcker then delivered the dose to 65 colleagues, friends, and family members (which he claims is legal), which he says returned around a 97 percent protection. Of course, the data is not peer-reviewed, there is limited information on their process, and the sample is tiny – but Stöcker firmly believes there is no time to waste, and has since gone about delivering the unregistered vaccine to people in Germany.
The legal team representing Stöcker claims that as he did not deliver any of the vaccines himself.
It is unclear why so many people wished for the bootleg vaccine when registered vaccines are available in Germany and vaccination rates have stagnated in recent times, but Stöcker has built a strong following from people that truly believe his vaccine is the best option. The vaccine itself is not an mRNA vaccine, but a recombinant antigen construct that is commonly used in Hepatitis A and B jabs. In the write-up on his website, Stöcker was extremely confident the jab would work and provide lasting protection, and believes it to be far easier to scale into mass production.
According to Vice, he claims to have delivered the vaccine to 20,000 people across the country, despite no actual clinical trials or analysis of side effects. He states there is no time for such long-term trials, which fits his hasty approach to developing the vaccine, after it reportedly took him only around 30 minutes to create.
