Biography
Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg is a german physician and Health Policy Adviser. He is an Honorary Member of the Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe (PACE) and a Board Member of Transparency International Germany.
His european initiatives and reports brought important issues such as "Faked Pandemics", private military companies, the role of media for democracy, palliative medicine or genetic testing and genetically modified organisms on the political agenda.
Born in 1947. He studied medicine in Berlin and Hamburg and obtained his medical degree and a doctor´s grade from the University of Hamburg. He obtained his postgraduate qualifications in internal medicine and pneumology, in public health, social medicine, hygiene and environmental medicine in Germany and further training in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University/ Baltimore, USA.
He worked as a ship´s doctor, port health authority and in the Bernhard-Nocht-Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Hamburg. He practiced medicine in several clinics and was the director of a public health institute in Northern Germany for 13 years before getting elected for the German Bundestag.
Dr. Wodarg initiated and chaired for ten years the Specialist Committee on Environmental Health of the Chamber of Physicians (FAGUSH) and was a member of the Epidemiology Task Force in his country Schleswig-Holstein.
He was MP from 1994 till 2009, for the whole time a member of the Health Committee and since 2005 in the Committee for Economic Cooperation and Development.
He initiated and was the speaker of the Enquete Commission "Law and Ethics of Modern Medicine" of the German Bundestag.
From 1998 until January 2010, Dr. Wodarg was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe (PACE), since 2002 Vice-Chairman of the European Socialist Group, since 2006 speaker of the German Social Democrats and deputy head of the german delegation in Strasbourg. He was the Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Culture, Education and Science and afterwards Chairman of the Subcommittee on Health until January 2009. Parallel he was a Member of the Political Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe.
Recently he was rapporteur on "Private military and security firms and the erosion of the state monopoly on the use of force” for the Political Affairs Committee and on "Palliative care: a model for innovative health and social policies” for the Social, Health and Family Affairs Committee.
Dr. Wodarg is a lecturer at the University of Flensburg and President of the Rheuma-Liga Schleswig-Holstein.
| 29.07.2010 |
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Faked Pandemic: WHO and Big Pharma, H1N1-Report of the Council of Europe - "The way in which the H1N1 influenza pandemic has been handled, not only by WHO, but also by the competent health authorities at the level of the European Union and at national level, gives rise to alarm." says the report "The handling of the H1N1 pandemic: more transparency needed" presented by Mr. Paul FLYNN, United Kingdom (SOC), which has been adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on 24 th of june 2010.
Here you find not only the text of the resolution and the recommendation but also all background informations given in the explanatory report and the WHO answers to questions of the parliamentarians.
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| 28.01.2010 |
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Press-Echo: Swine flu didn´t fly - The Huffington Post:
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| 27.01.2010 |
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Public hearing on handling of H1N1 pandemic - A public parliamentary hearing "The handling of the H1N1 pandemic: more transparency needed?" was held during the session on 26 January. The hearing brought together representatives of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and of European vaccine manufacturers, as well as independent medical experts, to discuss this topic with parliamentarians. The hearing was initiated by the outgoing Chair of PACE’s Sub-committee on Health Wolfgang Wodarg, who together with some other members of the Assembly of the Council of Europe requested in a motion in December that the Assembly look into this question. The hearing was open to the press. Both hearing and press conference were webcast live. Here the statement presented by Dr. Wodarg:
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| 25.01.2010 |
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Hype about swine flu - English translation of the interview in a german newspaper TAZ:
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| 15.01.2010 |
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CoE: Public hearing on the handling of the Swine Flu pandemic -
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| 11.01.2010 |
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Influenza A - "They Organized the Psychosis" (PRESS-ECHO) - English translation of the L´Humanité-article from the Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher:
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| 28.12.2009 |
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Faked pandemic - Here my Interview for the danish "Information" on the swine-flu pandemic:
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| 11.12.2009 |
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Council of Europe will investigate and debate on "Faked Pandemic" - In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.
The "birds-flu"-campaign (2005/06) combined with the "swine-flu"-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies.
The Council of Europe and its member-states should ask for immediate investigations and consequences on their national levels as well as on the international level.
The definition of an alarming pandemic must not be under the influence of drug-sellers.
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| 10.02.2009 |
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Euronews - Reducing the intensity of patients’ suffering should not be considered a luxury, says the Council of Europe. It has recommended that palliative care be included in member states’ health-policies. Wolfgang Wodarg, in the Social, Health and Family Affairs Committee, wrote the text for a resolution on this which has been unanimously adopted.
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| 29.01.2009 |
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COE: Parliamentarians demand close regulation of private military and security firms - Council of Europe governments should closely regulate private military and security companies to ensure that in practice their personnel meet the human rights standards which apply to regular armies and state security services, according to PACE. After debating a report by Wolfgang Wodarg (Germany, SOC), the parliamentarians called for a convention which would require such firms to be more transparent, and to seek parliamentary approval for any foreign missions they carried out. Any laws and rules applying to the regular army or police should also apply to them.
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| 28.01.2009 |
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Palliative care is an essential and innovative complement to curative medicine, says PACE - PACE has recommended that member States establish a consistent and comprehensible health-policy approach to palliative care in a resolution unanimously adopted today. "Palliative care is not a humanitarian luxury which we can no longer afford in the current difficult economic situation; it must be available not only to the terminally ill but also to seriously ill and chronically ill patients. Care provision is still extremely inadequate", said Wolfgang Wodarg (Germany, SOC), rapporteur on this question for the Social, Health and Family Affairs Committee.
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| 27.01.2009 |
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PACE points out that media regulation must respect freedom of expression and information - Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg spoke today for the Socialist Group during a debate on the regulation of audiovisual media services, based on a report by Andrew McIntosh (United Kingdom, SOC). PACE reiterated that "all media regulation in Europe must respect the right to freedom of expression and information … regardless of frontiers”.
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| 06.12.2008 |
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PACE rapporteur Wolfgang Wodarg warns against uncontrolled activities of European private military and security companies - In his report on private military and security firms and the erosion of the state monopoly on the use of force, adopted today by the Political Affairs Committee, Wolfgang Wodarg (Germany, SOC) criticises the shift in public security obligations to the private sector.
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| 10.11.2008 |
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Report: Palliative care - a model for innovative health and social policies - Rapporteur: Mr Wolfgang WODARG, Germany, Socialist Group: The rapporteur considers palliative care as a model for innovative health and social policies. Palliative care does not simply meet a cultural and humanitarian need of the most pressing kind. It also provides an innovative structure which, if intelligently developed, will not only produce sustainable change in the health sector, but may also serve as a recipe for success in other policy areas with serious, systemic and recurrent problems (eg drug prevention).
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| 07.10.2008 |
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Council Of Europe Passes Resolution On Indicators For Media In A Democracy - States should measure their level of media freedom against Council of Europe ‘indicators’ Council of Europe member states and parliaments should conduct periodic assessments of the state of their own media freedom, measuring their laws and practice against a range of basic principles drawn up by the Council of Europe, the Assembly said today. The parliamentarians proposed a list of such “indicators” in a resolution based on a report by Wolfgang Wodarg (Germany, SOC).
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| 09.09.2008 |
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Hearing on "Private military and security firms and the erosion of the state monopoly on the use of force" in Paris - The Political Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is organising a hearing on "Private military and security firms and the erosion of the state monopoly on the use of force” in Paris on 10 September 2008 with the participation of parliamentarians from its 47 member states, experts and a representative of a private security firm. According to German parliamentarian Wolfgang Wodarg (SOC), who is due to prepare a report for PACE on this issue, over one million mercenaries are currently operating around the globe, for more than a thousand companies, creating an annual turnover of approximately 200 billion US dollars.
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| 15.07.2008 |
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Indicators for media in a democracy - Freedom of expression and information in the media is an essential requirement of democracy. National parliaments are invited to analyse their own media situation regularly in an objective and comparable manner in order to be able to identify shortcomings in their national media legislation and practice and take appropriate measures to remedy them. Such analyses should be based on the list of basic principles set out in the resolution. The Committee of Ministers is asked to endorse this list and to establish indicators of the functioning of the media environment in a democracy.
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| 14.05.2008 |
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New medicine for neglected diseases - Every year millions of people in developing countries die from infectious tropical diseases such as the sleeping sickness, lepra or malaria. They die because there are no affordable and effective drugs to tackle them. Safe, affordable, effective and field-adapted vaccines and drugs are unfortunately not available due to the lack of research and development in the field of tropical diseases: of all new medicines developed between 1975 and 1999, only 1 % was developed for tropical neglected diseases and tuberculosis! Most of the drugs still used were developed in colonial times. They are often expensive, difficult to administer and hard to tolerate. Several of them, like the drugs against tuberculosis, are becoming ineffective because of increasing parasite resistance.
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| 18.02.2008 |
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Genetic tests: new treaty protects the rights of patients - The new protocol to the Biomedicine Convention spelling out the steps governments must take to regulate the new field of genetic testing is a satisfactory text which protects the rights of patients, PACE said in an opinion adopted today, on the basis of a report by Wolfgang Wodarg (Germany, SOC). Under the protocol, genetic tests must be for health reasons only, supervised by a doctor, and accompanied by counselling, while the results of the tests must be subject to strong data protection.
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| 10.02.2008 |
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About the Council of Europe -
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| 05.02.2008 |
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What’s what? - European Institutions -
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| 06.07.2007 |
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Symposium on global health and intellectual property: Patients, Patents and Profits - Berlin: In his Lecture "Controlling institutions – The significance of public participation" criticised Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg (SPD, MdB), chairman of the sub-committee on health in the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, that patents would no longer be used as a reward, but as weapons in the battle for monopolies. The terrain of research would be mined by patents which in turn would hinder innovation. Furthermore he referred to the fact that via the granting of patents, besides the dispossession of public knowledge, important decisions in health-policy are removed from public control. Decisions of the European patent office, for instance, cannot be reviewed by any parliament. On these grounds, he calls for a compulsory estimation of a patent's consequences and a provision for the retraction of a patent in cases of ample public interest.
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| 27.01.2005 |
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Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) - The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe debated on 26 January 2005 about Genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Mr. Wolfgang Wodarg was the rapporteur for the Committee on the Environment, Agriculture and Local and Regional Affairs of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on this issue. You find here his report and also the text adopted by the Assembly.
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| 28.04.2001 |
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Draft additional protocol to the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, concerning transplantation of organs and tissues of human origin - The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted the additional protocol to the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, concerning transplantation of organs and tissues of human origin, which will provide a European legislative framework for the principles and practices that must prevail in this field. Dr.Wolfgang Wodarg was the rapporteur for the Committee on Culture, Science and Education on this issue.
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| 27.09.1999 |
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Biotechnology and intellectual property - Mr Wolfgang Wodarg was the rapporteur for the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on this issue. You find here his report and also the adopted text of the recommendation on developments in biotechnology and their consequences for agriculture.
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