New York : Elon Musk has claimed his second Covid-19 vaccine dose felt like it was killing him. This comes after a clip of a former Pfizer toxicologist, who left the company back in 2007, telling Germany’s parliament that the mRNA vaccine should never have been approved went viral online. It has the makings of a Michael Mann film. In The Insider, Mann’s 1999 thriller based on a true story, a tobacco industry scientist blows the whistle on what his employers knew and concealed.
The hearing room was not packed. The testimony lasted five minutes. And yet, by the end of last week, the clip had been seen by tens of millions of people. Musk, who has over 200 million followers on X, amplified the testimony and questioned why it was not headline news everywhere. The post reignited a global debate about Covid-19 vaccine safety, regulatory shortcuts, and who gets to decide what counts as credible science.
The man at the centre of the controversy is Dr Helmut Sterz, born in 1946, who spent decades in pharmaceutical toxicology, the science of how substances affect living organisms and their potential to cause harm. He led toxicology centres for Swiss multinational healthcare company Roche and later for Pfizer, heading the company’s European laboratories in Amboise, France, and Sandwich, UK. He retired in 2007 when the Amboise facility closed, nearly 14 years before the Covid-19 vaccines were developed.
He has also published a book titled Die Impf-Mafia (The Vaccine Mafia), in which he argues the vaccines were illegal. His public position on this issue predates the hearing by over a year. On March 19, 2026, Sterz appeared before the commission and argued that 10 essential preclinical safety studies were skipped before Comirnaty, the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine administered to billions worldwide, received approval.
He also raised concerns about reproductive toxicity testing, which checks whether a substance can harm fertility or a developing foetus, arguing the studies done were inadequate. His most widely quoted figure was this: Germany’s drug safety watchdog, the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, recorded approximately 2,133 deaths reported after Comirnaty vaccination. Sterz multiplied the reported 2,133 German deaths by 30 because he applied a widely cited USbased estimate that around 30 times more vaccinerelated adverse events go unreported than are officially recorded.
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