In recent weeks, Germany has been praised for its quick and aggressive response to the spread of COVID-19. Although Italy has a death rate of 11% of those who tested positive for the virus, Germany has had a rate of just under 1%. This has been credited to early testing of a large portion of the population, but as numbers of cases increase, the worst may be yet to come. Fatality numbers always have a lag-time.
Join us for a Hot Topics Call on Monday, April 6 at 11:00 am (ET) with Bundestag Member Prof. Dr. Andrew Ullmann (FDP). A physician by training who specialized in infective diseases, he will discuss Germany’s response to COVID-19 – and the political implications of the current crisis.
To register for this call, please click here.
Prof. Dr. Andrew Ullmann was born in 1963 in Los Angeles, CA, and is a Member of the German Bundestag. He attended medical school at the Ruhr University in Bochum, and completed medical school in 1987. During his residency at the University Hospital, St. Josef Hospital in Bochum, he was a visiting physician at St. Clare’s Hospital/Spellman Center in New York City, where he specialized in HIV/AIDS. He was later qualified as a specialist in infectious diseases after participating in the combined clinical fellowship program at the Harvard Medical School. He completed his habilitation and was qualified as an assistant professor in 2008 at the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In 2012 he became a full professor at the University Hospital in Würzburg.
Andrew Ullmann joined the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in 2003 and was a board member of the FDP`s district organization in Mainz-Bingen from 2003 to 20012. From 2004 until 2012, he was a member of the municipal council of Ober-Olm and from 2009 until 2011 a member of the municipal council in Nieder-Olm. Since 2013, he is member of the Bavarian FDP Committee on Research and Culture, the Bavarian FDP Committee on Health, as well as the FDP federal Health Committee. Prof. Dr. Ullmann was deputy chairman of the FDP in Würzburg from 2013 until 2015 and has served as its chairman since 2015. In the German federal elections of 2017, he was the FDP’s direct candidate in the Würzburg district and was elected to the German Bundestag through the national list of the FDP. He is a member of the Committee on Health and serves there as the chairman of the FDP. He is deputy chairman of the Subcommittee on Global Health, deputy member of the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment and deputy chairman of the German-US Parliamentary Friendship Group.