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.
He claimed that tens of thousands of deaths in Germany may have been linked to the Covid-19 vaccine.
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.
Now, a former head of toxicology at American biopharmaceutical firm Pfizer’s European centres has walked into a parliamentary hearing room and made a similar claim about one of the most widely used vaccines in history.
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.
But what does the testimony actually say, what is verified, and what is not?
THE PFIZER INSIDER
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.
Sterz was invited to testify by the AfD, Germany’s far-right opposition party, which organised the expert hearing before the Bundestag’s Corona Enquete Commission, a parliamentary body reviewing Germany’s Covid-19 response.
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.
FIVE MINUTES IN THE BUNDESTAG
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.
Preclinical studies are the laboratory and animal tests conducted before a drug is tested in humans. They are a standard part of drug development.
He stated that no carcinogenicity study, which checks whether a substance can trigger cancer, was conducted before 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.
Germany’s health minister Karl Lauterbach, who was present at the session, rejected Sterz’s claims as false.
AN EXTRAPOLATION, NOT A STUDY
This is where the science requires careful handling.
The 2,133 deaths figure from the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut is a real, recorded number.
But it is important to understand what it means: these are deaths that were reported after vaccination, not deaths that were proven to be caused by the vaccine.
Reporting a death after vaccination and proving the vaccine caused it are two entirely different things.
The 30x multiplier Sterz applied comes from a Harvard Pilgrim Health Care study, the most cited source on underreporting in America’s vaccine safety monitoring system, known as VAERS.
That study estimated that fewer than one per cent of vaccine adverse events are ever reported.
However, the study was never completed due to logistical delays at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The US Department of Health’s own guidance explicitly warns that VAERS data cannot be used to establish causation or calculate actual death rates.
Epidemiologists have consistently warned that a multiplier designed for the American reporting system cannot simply be transplanted onto Germany, which has an entirely different healthcare structure and reporting culture.
The 60,000-figure is therefore Sterz’s own calculation. It is not a finding from a peer-reviewed study, a population-level analysis, or any official statistic.
The European Medicines Agency has maintained that Comirnaty was assessed to the standards applicable at the time and that its benefits significantly outweighed its risks.
A Lancet study examining death trends across 13 Western European countries, which measured how many more people died during the pandemic compared to what would normally be expected in those same countries, found that higher vaccination rates were actually associated with lower death tolls.
The study attributed pandemic-era mortality to multiple factors, including delayed medical care during lockdowns and the long-term health impacts of Covid-19 itself.
Rare but real adverse events, including myocarditis, which is the inflammation of the heart muscle, are acknowledged by regulators.
A Lancet cohort study covering more than 100 million people confirmed that the risk was highest in men aged 18 to 25 after a second dose, but that the incidence remained rare.
Stanford Medicine research published in December 2025 found that catching Covid-19 itself is approximately 10 times more likely to cause myocarditis than receiving the mRNA vaccine.
MUSK PULLS THE TRIGGER
Musk said his second vaccine dose had nearly sent him to hospital, describing it as feeling like he was dying. He questioned why this testimony and estimate were not being reported everywhere.
Separately, claims circulating online that media organisations funded by Bill Gates were deliberately suppressing the story are not supported by evidence.
Sterz himself has described the World Health Organization (WHO) as financially controlled by Gates in a separate interview.
THE REAL QUESTION
Sterz’s core argument, that the speed of Covid vaccine development led to shortened preclinical testing, is a legitimate area of ongoing scientific and regulatory debate.
Questions about carcinogenicity studies and reproductive toxicity protocols are being examined in multiple countries, and these are reasonable questions to ask.
What is not established is whether any of these gaps caused the scale of harm Sterz projects.
The distance between a genuine regulatory question and a specific death toll estimate of 60,000 is enormous, and that is precisely the gap that went missing as this story spread around the world.
The Bundestag testimony is on record. The science remains contested. They are not the same thing.
