No, Karl Lauterbach did not tweet that compulsory vaccination was directed against the AfD

It is not without a certain irony that many sites and users who emphasize that they do not trust the government and politicians repeatedly prove themselves to be not very trustworthy.
A current example of this is the screenshot of a tweet that supposedly came from Karl Lauterbach. There he allegedly says that compulsory vaccination only has secondary health reasons, but that compulsory vaccination is primarily a political decision against the AfD. However, the person who faked the screenshot made several mistakes!

The fake screenshot

The screenshot has been shared on Facebook, Twitter and Telegram since April 8th:

Accordingly, Lauterbach apparently only recently tweeted:

“In order to save democracy in Germany, it is still important to enforce mandatory vaccinations. Because no vaccination requirement means a victory for the right-wing extremist AfD. Medical reasons are secondary here, the political reasons are primary.”

The fact check

The screenshot was first distributed on the morning of April 8th. The timing was chosen deliberately because the Bundestag voted on compulsory vaccination . According to the screenshot, the tweet is eight hours old, so it was apparently created around the time of the vote or a little later.

It is very surprising that Lauterbach apparently writes very openly about the fact that compulsory vaccination has primarily political reasons. Such a statement should have caused a much larger uproar, yet there is only this one screenshot in which the tweet received 379 replies, 457 retweets and 3,085 likes. Only a single person took a screenshot of this statement? More than unlikely!

Of course, the tweet cannot be found , which is proof for relevant circles that it has now been deleted.
However, the other way around is that it never existed!

The careless error

The tweet apparently from Karl Lauterbach and was written on April 7th.
But the problem: Between December 7th and December 12th, 2021, he renamed his Twitter name: from “Karl Lauterbach” to “Prof. Karl Lauterbach”. He has had this Twitter name since then without any name changes .

However, his old Twitter name can still be read in the fake:

So there are only two options:

• Either the tweet was created before December 12th, then the screenshot would have to have been circulating at least since December 2021, since the age of the screenshot is supposed to be 8 hours
• Or the forger simply looked for an old tweet from Lauterbach and changed the text - but made several mistakes in the process:

Not only is the name old, but another detail is also wrong:

• Above the tweet it says “View this thread,” indicating that the language setting has been set to German
• The time is 8 hours - but with the German language setting it should say 8 hours

Conclusion

Several details show that the screenshot is a fake:
In December 2021, Lauterbach changed his Twitter name to “Prof. Karl Lauterbach”, also the time and the thread reference are inconsistent: the time is in English, but the thread reference is in German.

It is therefore clearly a fake.

Additional source: AFP

Also interesting:

After about two years, the investigation has been completed and Bodo Schiffmann, the most prominent doctor from the “lateral thinking” movement who currently lives in Tanzania, now has to go to court!
Public prosecutor's office charges doctor Schiffmann with sedition