2025 Update.
In February 2022, Andreas Schöfbeck, then-CEO of statutory health insurer BKK ProVita, sent an explosive open letter to the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) and other authorities after analyzing anonymized doctor billing data from 10.9 million insured persons across the BKK group.
What Happened in 2022
• The data revealed 216,695 coded treatments for COVID-19 vaccine side effects in just the first ~9 months of 2021.
• Extrapolated nationwide, Schöfbeck estimated 2.5–3 million Germans (4–5 % of all vaccinated individuals) had sought medical care — a 10–12× higher figure than the PEI’s official reports.
• He described the discrepancy as a “strong alarm signal” indicating severe under-reporting and demanded immediate validation from other insurers and authorities.
• Days after the letter went public, on March 1, 2022, the BKK ProVita board fired Schöfbeck without notice, publicly distanced itself from his statements, and scrubbed all related content from its website.
• PEI and medical bodies rejected the analysis, claiming billing codes were unreliable.
Developments 2023–2025
• No independent large-scale re-examination of Schöfbeck’s figures has ever been conducted.
• Three years later, the very injuries he warned about are now officially recognized as real — yet the man who raised the alarm lost his job for it.
• In a significant step forward, Germany now officially recognizes “Post-Vac Syndrome” on equal footing with Long COVID: as of January 1, 2025, specialized outpatient clinics and compensation pathways explicitly cover chronic symptoms after COVID-19 vaccination.
Original Letter – February 21, 2022
(Full English translation – verified against the German original)
Dear Prof. Dr. Cichutek,
The Paul Ehrlich Institute announced in a press release that for the calendar year 2021 244,576 suspected cases of vaccination side effects after corona vaccination were reported. The data available to our company gives us reason to believe that there is a very considerable under-recording of suspected cases of vaccination side effects after corona vaccination. I am enclosing an evaluation with my letter. The data basis for our evaluation is the billing data of the doctors. Our sample comes from the anonymized database of the company health insurance funds. The sample includes 10,937,716 insured persons. So far we have the doctors’ billing data for the first half of 2021 and about half for the third quarter of 2021. Our query includes the valid ICD codes for vaccination side effects. This evaluation has shown that, although the complete data for 2021 are not yet available to us, we already have 216,695 treated cases of vaccination side effects after corona vaccination from this sample. If these figures are extrapolated to the year as a whole and to the population in Germany, probably 2.5–3 million people in Germany have received medical treatment because of vaccination side effects after corona vaccination. We see this as a considerable alarm signal that must be taken into account when the vaccines are used further. In our view, the figures can be validated relatively easily and also at short notice by having the other types of health insurance (AOKs, substitute health insurance funds, etc.) carry out a corresponding evaluation of the data available to them. Extrapolated to the number of vaccinated people in Germany, this means that roughly 4–5 % of the vaccinated people were under medical treatment because of vaccination side effects. In view of the considerable under-recording of vaccination side effects that we are seeing, it is an important concern to identify the causes for this in the short term. Our first assumption is that, because no remuneration is paid for reporting vaccination side effects, doctors do not report them to the Paul Ehrlich Institute because of the considerable effort involved. Doctors have told us that reporting a suspected case of vaccination side effects takes around half an hour. This means that reporting 3 million suspected cases of vaccination side effects would require around 1.5 million working hours from doctors. That would be almost the annual workload of 1,000 doctors. This should also be clarified in the short term. Therefore, a copy of this letter is also being sent to the German Medical Association and the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians. The National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Funds is also receiving a copy of this letter with the request to obtain appropriate data analyses from all health insurance funds. Since danger to human life cannot be ruled out, we ask for feedback on the measures taken by February 22, 2022 at 6 p.m.
Andreas Schöfbeck
Member of the Board
