2024-02-06 13:00:49
It was a post that caused a stir among lateral thinkers and was advertised by them in advance on Telegram: In December 2023, the MDR reported on alleged DNA contamination of Covid vaccines, which the manufacturer Biontech denies. After protests from experts, the broadcaster took the “Umschau” report offline and published a correction with the sentence: “Based on careful internal examination, it is clear: our journalistic due diligence criteria were not met.”
What exactly was wrong from MDR’s perspective remained unclear. A spokeswoman asked for your understanding that “the MDR will not comment further on this.”
The broadcaster has since changed its mind: At the end of last week, it published another correction in which it confirmed the criticism. The article was based on an analysis by a biologist “who was commissioned by a private individual and carried out the test in a non-accredited private laboratory on five expired vaccine batches whose transport and storage conditions could not be verified,” explains the MDR. Independent investigations were not possible before the broadcast.
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The station standards include “ensuring a particularly high level of resilience of the sources, especially when reporting on suspicion and/or particularly controversial topics”. This was not sufficient and the broadcaster “decided that the article did not meet all journalistic quality standards”. The process is now being “processed internally with the aim of jointly agreeing on derivations for future research”.
The broadcaster once again left further questions unanswered, such as the authors of the article: According to the spokeswoman, it did not publish their names at their request. She had previously simply stated that the article was created by a collective of authors.
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