Wodarg has been a member of the Social Democratic Party since 1988. From 1992 to 2002 he was the head of the SPD's Schleswig-Flensburg district. From November 19, 2005 to December 1, 2007 Wodarg was chairman of the SPD district of Flensburg. Since 1990 Wodarg has been member of the executive committee of the national Association of Social Democrats in the Health Sector, and since 1994 the federal deputy chairman, and in 2002 he became elected chairman of the federal Committee.
Member of parliament
From 1986 to 1998 Wodarg belonged to the parish council of his native Nieby. From 1994 to 2009 he has been a member of the Bundestag. Here Wodarg was spokesman from 2003 to 2005 of the SPD caucus in the inquiry commission ethics and law of modern medicine and spokesman for issues of minorities in the German-Danish border area. He was a representative for the directly elected Bundestag seat for the Flensburg-Schleswig constituency from 1994 but lost his mandate in the 2009 German federal election. Since 1999 Wodarg has also belonged to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Since 2002 he has been vice chairman of the Socialist Group, and since 2006 president of the German social democrats and deputy head of the German delegation.
Wodarg gained notoriety during public discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic when he argued that SARS-CoV-2 was only one of many similar viruses which usually go undetected as part of an ordinary seasonal period of respiratory infections, and that the worldwide activities to stop the pandemic were "hype" caused by the selective perception of researchers. His comments on the COVID-19 pandemic drew criticism from German scientists and some German media outlets. According to the critics, Wodarg's claims largely contradicted the verifiable facts; some of his statements were neither verifiable nor falsifiable; and because the facts Wodarg presented had nothing to do with each other, his statements had proved to be misleading.
Controversies
Wodarg first came to the attention of the general public in the 1980s when he was head of the Public Health Department in Flensburg, Germany, and as such was responsible for employing as a doctor the medical impostor Gert Postel, later famously revealed to be a postman by training. Transparency International Germany, on whose board of directors Wodarg serves, distanced itself from his statements on 17 March 2020: "Transparency International Germany rejects the sweeping criticism of board member Dr Wolfgang Wodarg of the government measures to protect the population from the coronavirus. Wolfgang Wodarg is speaking on this matter as a private individual and not in his capacity as a member of the Management Board." On March 25, 2020, the board decided to suspend his membership in the association "until further notice", which means that Wodarg can no longer exercise any functions on the board or as head of the health working groupfor the time being. The Board of Directors will commission an independent committee to look into Wodarg's statements about the coronavirus and to determine whether his behaviour has harmed the interests of Transparency International Germany. Transparency Chairman Hartmut Bäumer said that the reason for this was that Wodarg had expressed his views on "radical media" such as KenFM, Rubikon, Geolitico, and in an interview with Eva Herman; all of whom, in his opinion, "regularly work with conspiracy theories, with anti-democratic and sometimes anti-Semitic prejudices" and "oppose the basic democratic principles of Transparency"; while "some of them are personally close to the AfD".
Selected works
Die Debatte zur Sterbehilfe als Chance für eine neue Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik, in: Robertson-von Trotha, Caroline Y. : Tod und Sterben in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft. Eine interdisziplinäre Auseinandersetzung, Baden-Baden 2008
