The outgoing Swiss vaccination boss talks openly about what he would do differently in retrospect: for example when vaccinating young people. This sets him apart from most of the people in charge at the time.
Christoph Berger, President of the Federal Commission for Vaccination Issues, discussed the situation with Nora Kronig, head of the Swiss vaccine strategy, in April 2020 before the start of a media conference.
Peter Klaunzer / Keystone
There was once a time when the President of the Federal Commission on Vaccination (Ekif), Christoph Berger, was given a personal hashtag: #bergermussweg. The head of the Department of Infectious Diseases and Hospital Hygiene at the Zurich Children’s Hospital had to justify the fact that his expert committee had only made a cautiously worded recommendation for the Covid vaccination of children.
For this, Berger was not only sharply criticized by the then “#protect-the-kids” faction on social networks, Swiss television was also outraged. During an appearance on the “Rundschau”, the experienced doctor had to have the presenter list all the blessings of childhood vaccinations. At least a vaccination appeal would have been appropriate, the journalist criticized.
A few months earlier, Berger had been described in the media as a vaccination pope, but now he was an “infectious disease”. Berger bore it with composure. In any case, he never showed anything to the outside world. Not even when he found wild threats and insults in his mailbox every day. Not even when he was kidnapped because of his fame. The kidnapper, a hapless German startup entrepreneur, had assumed that a Swiss doctor in Berger’s position could easily raise 300,000 francs in ransom.
Now Christoph Berger is stepping down as head of Ekif, and he is using this opportunity to take a self-critical assessment. In an interview with the “Sonntags-Zeitung” he recalled the increasing unequal treatment of vaccinated and unvaccinated people during the second year of the pandemic. His indirect conclusion: The regime of measures hit people who didn’t want or couldn’t get vaccinated too hard. Berger: “In retrospect, this could possibly have been ended more quickly after people at risk had had sufficient opportunity to be vaccinated and the effect of the vaccination on transmission was only small.”
From today’s perspective, he describes the fact that young people were put under pressure to vaccinate as “problematic”. “The statement that you have to be vaccinated so that you can go to the camp must be questioned,” he says in the interview.
Berger is not a Corona skeptic. He still believes many of the measures, especially those that were taken at the beginning of the pandemic, are correct today. They prevented even more people at risk from dying, which is why the population supported them.
Berger is anything but a vaccine skeptic. He says: “Of course those who want to can be vaccinated. But recommendations that are primarily about protecting others and not yourself are difficult.”
Compared to other experts, Berger never claimed sovereignty over interpretation during the pandemic. He was neither one of those who accused the unvaccinated of “taking society hostage” nor one of those who raised the alarm every week. But he said things that he probably wouldn’t say today, and he believed in measures that are now considered largely ineffective.
The pandemic policy is still having an impact. It shapes the elections in the USA and is probably the reason why fewer employees at the Zurich Children’s Hospital are vaccinated against flu today than before the pandemic. In Switzerland, the Federal Council now at least admits that rigid protective measures – especially in retirement homes – have caused a lot of suffering. But he is still miles away from a ruthless political analysis of the Corona period.
Christoph Berger is different: He could have resigned quietly and without self-criticism. After all, he was never the loudest. But he decided to take responsibility. For this – and for his voluntary work on the vaccination commission – he deserves respect and thanks.
