Sucharit Bhakdi (born Sucharit Punyaratabandhu, 1 November 1946, in Washington, D.C.) is a retired Thai-German microbiologist.[1] In 2020 Bhakdi became a prominent exponent of ideas about coronavirus pandemic that ran counter to the agreed science.[2] He studied at the Universities of Bonn, Gießen, Mainz and Copenhagen, and at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg. He was professor of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and from 1991 to 2012 was head of the Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene there.[3]
Over his career, Bhakdi has produced scientific work in fields such as bacteriology and atherosclerosis, and has published multiple scientific articles in these areas. Awards he has received include the Order of Merit of Rhineland-Palatinate.[4]
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Bhakdi started a Youtube channel proposing that the number of deaths stemming from SARS-CoV-2 infection had been overstated. Writing for Foreign Policy, Tyson Barker described Bhakdi as a prominent example from a "crop of debunked but credentialed so-called experts minting conspiracy theories and undermining fact-based information".[5] The German non-profit Correctiv fact-checked one of Bhakdi's Youtube videos, and found a number of problematic claims, including the claim that any COVID-19 vaccine would be "pointless", and that the virus posed no more threat than influenza.[6]