France Accused of ‘Hysteria Over COVID Variant’ After Nearly 15,000 Truckers Tested Negative
21st Century Wire | December 29, 2020
Before Christmas, sensational reports of a new COVID “variant” in the UK prompted European neighbors France, Netherlands and Belgium – to close their international borders for fear of a dangerous new viral wave. As a result, ferries were unable to leave the Port of Dover until Christmas morning, with some 6,000 hauliers remaining in Kent over the subsequent days, and with many spending Christmas Day and Boxing Day parked, waiting to cross the English Channel. What was all the fuss about? Is there really a new “mutant strain” which UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock claims is still ravaging through the British Isles?
As part of this bio-security theatre, military personnel were then deployed to Kent, including a massive cohort of 1100 British troops, 30 French firefighters, and 60 Polish soldiers – all to supposedly to provide aid and services to the drivers, and to “speed up testing to 600 per hour” carried out at nearby Manston airfield.
As it turns out, all of this was completely unnecessary.
UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps tweeted: “Update on Kent lorry situation: 15,526 #Coronavirus tests now carried out. Just 36 positive results, which are being verified (0.23%). Manston now empty and lorries should no longer head there please.”
What the Government and Mainstream Media will not tell the public is that if the highly dubious PCR Testing was used, then that tiny reported number of 36 ‘positive cases’ could have easily fallen within the margin of false positive errors – meaning all 15,000 plus drivers may have been ‘COVID free’ – an incredible but very telling data point – all but proving that the virus is likely to be severely over-hyped right now in the UK.
As 21WIRE already reported last week, Hancock’s claims of a new ‘dangerous and more transmissible’ virus were totally unfounded and based on sloppy science from the UK government’s NERVTAG science advisory committee.
Because of the near nonexistent COVID cases within this giant trucker sample, critics are now railing against France and other European countries for panicking and closing their borders based on irrational fear of an non-existent “mutant strain” of COVID-19. But the UK authorities have no business pointing the finger at anyone….
MSN reported on Dec 25th…
The French authorities slapped restrictions on hauliers crossing the Channel following the [alleged] emergence of the VUi202012/01 coronavirus mutation which is believed to spread faster than other strains.
The UK and France agreed to a testing regime to allow trucks to start flowing again on the Dover-Calais link.
The Standard has been told that out of the first 1,500 tests none came back positive.
A Whitehall source criticised the “over hasty” action by the French authorities, adding: “All of this trouble – there have been 1,500 tests – no positives.”
The EU’s Transport Commissioner Adina VÄlean criticised Emmanuel Macron’s government over the weekend’s freight ban.
She tweeted: “I am pleased that at this moment, we have trucks slowly crossing the Channel, and I want to thank UK authorities that they started testing the drivers at a capacity of 300 tests per hour.
“I deplore that France went against our recommendations and brought us back to the situation we were in in March when the supply chains were interrupted.”
Mind you, that’s more than a bit rich for anyone in the UK Government-Media Complex to accuse France of over-reacting – when it was Matt Hancock and the fawning mainstream press who for weeks shamelessly pumped-out incessant fear-based claims of an allege COVID “mutant strain” – absent of any actual evidence to back-up their wild assertions. Lesson learned?
SEE MORE:
UK ‘Variant Fears’ Are Over-Hyped Says Leading US Microbiologist
THE PCR DECEPTION
Short Documentary About the Test Used for Covid-19
The Conscious Resistance Network | December 23, 2020
Watch on Minds / Flote / Bitchute / Odysee / Hive
Script:
Reports are streaming in, declaring a Dark Winter for the world due to COVID19. The media rushes to tell the public that case numbers are on the rise again. In response, case numbers are used to support calls for lockdowns, travel and dining restrictions, and the push for compulsory vaccines.
However, in recent months an abundance of evidence has shown that the “gold standard” procedure for detecting COVID-19 is unreliable and could be producing untold numbers of false positives. If this is the case, why are health officials around the world calling for more tests?
This report is a brief look into the history of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) procedure and the evidence that PCR is unreliable and should not be used as a determinant for the number of COVID-19 cases or as a factor in political decisions. Please share with friends and family to keep them informed, and if someone shared this with you, please watch with an open mind.
The PCR Deception
In the months since the COVID-19 panic began health authorities around the world have encouraged the public to “get tested” to help track the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the strain of coronavirus that causes COVID19. However, as fear and hysteria subside, the scientific community and public at large are calling into question the efficacy of the test used to determine a patients status.
The main test that is used to determine an individual status involves the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method. This incredibly sensitive technique was developed by Berkeley scientist Kary Mullis, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993. The PCR method amplifies a small segment of DNA hundreds of times to make it easier to analyze. For COVID19, a process known as Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is used to detect SARS-CoV-2 by amplifying the virus’ genetic material so it can be detected by scientists.
PCR is sometimes described as a technique or process, but for simplicity we will refer to it as a test. PCR is viewed as the gold standard, however, it is not without problems. PCR amplifies a virus’s genetic material and then each sample goes through a number of cycles until a virus is recovered. This is known as the “cycle threshold” and has become a key component in the debate around the efficacy of the PCR test.
In late August 2020, I attended a press conference in Houston, Texas to ask Houston Health Authority Dr. David Persse about concerns about PCR.
Dr. Persse says that when the labs report numbers of COVID-19 cases to the City of Houston they only offer a binary option of “yes” for positive or “no” for negative. “But, in reality, it comes in what is called cycle-thresholds. It’s an inverse relationship, so the higher the number the less virus there was in the initial sample,” Persse explained. “Some labs will report out to 40 cycle-thresholds, and if they get a positive at 40 – which means there is a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of virus there – that gets reported to us as positive and we don’t know any different.”
Persse noted that the key question is, at what value is someone considered still infectious?
“Because if you test me and I have a tiny amount of virus, does that mean I am contagious? that I am still infectious to someone else? If you are shedding a little bit of virus are you just starting? or are you on the downside?.”
He believes the answer is for the scientific community to set a national standard for cycle-threshold. Unfortunately, a national standard would not solve the problems expressed by Dr. Persse.
UK Parliament and Scientists Have Concerns About PCR Test
In the first weeks of September 2020 a number of important revelations regarding PCR came to light. First, new research from the University of Oxford’s Center for Evidence-Based Medicine and the University of the West of England found that the PCR test poses the potential for false positives when testing for COVID-19. Professor Carl Heneghan, one of the authors of the study said there was a risk that an increase in testing in the UK will lead to an increase in the risk of “sample contamination” and thus an increase in COVID-19 cases.
The team reviewed evidence from 25 studies where virus specimens had positive PCR tests. The researchers state that the “genetic photocopying” technique scientists use to magnify the sample of genetic material collected is so sensitive it could be picking up fragments of dead virus from previous infections. The researchers reach a similar conclusion as Dr. David Persse, specifically they state:
“A binary Yes/No approach to the interpretation RT-PCR unvalidated against viral culture will result in false positives with segregation of large numbers of people who are no longer infectious and hence not a threat to public health.”
Heneghan, who is also the the editor of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, told the BBC that the binary approach is a problem and tests should have a cut-off point so small amounts of virus do not lead to a positive result. This is because of the cycle threshold mentioned by Dr. Persse. A person who is shedding an active virus and someone who has leftover infection could both receive the same positive test result. Heneghan also stated that the test could be detecting old virus which would explain the rise in cases in the UK and said setting a standard for the cycle threshold would eliminate the quarantining and contact tracing of people who are healthy and help the public better understand the true nature of COVID-19.
Shortly after Heneghan’s criticisms the UK’s leading health agency, Public Health England, released an update on the testing methods used to detect COVID-19 and appeared to agree with Professor Heneghan regarding the concerns on the cycle threshold. On September 9, 2020, PHE released an update which concluded, “all laboratories should determine the threshold for a positive result at the limit of detection.”
This is not the first time Heneghan’s work has directly impacted the UK’s COVID-19 policies. In July 2020, UK health secretary Matt Hancock called for an “urgent review” of the daily COVID-19 death numbers produced by Public Health England after it was revealed the stats included people who died from other causes. The Guardian reported that Professor Heneghan and a fellow scientist released a paper showing that if someone dies after having tested positive for COVID-19, their death is recorded in the COVID-19 death statistics. A source in the Department of Health and Social Care told The Guadian, “You could have been tested positive in February, have no symptoms, then hit by a bus in July and you’d be recorded as a COVID death.’”
Heneghan also recently told the BMJ , “one issue in trying to interpret numbers of detected cases is that there is no set definition of a case. At the moment it seems that a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) positive result is the only criterion required for a case to be recognised.”
“In any other disease we would have a clearly defined specification that would usually involve signs, symptoms, and a test result. We are moving into a biotech world where the norms of clinical reasoning are going out of the window. A PCR test does not equal covid-19; it should not, but in some definitions it does.”
Heneghan says he is concerned that as soon as there is the appearance of an outbreak there is panic and over-reacting. “This is a huge problem because politicians are operating in a non-evidence-based way when it comes to non-drug interventions,” he stated.
Heneghan is correct that the scientific authorities ought to take false positives seriously, especially when a person can be sent to isolate or quarantine for weeks due to a positive test result. Even the U.S. FDA’s own fact sheet on testing acknowledges the dangers posed by false positives:
“ in the event of a false positive result, risks to patients could include the following: a recommendation for isolation of the patient…. unnecessary prescription of a treatment or therapy, or other unintended adverse effects.”
A CDC fact sheet also acknowledges the possibility of false positives with the PCR test.
Professor Heneghan believes the confusion around COVID-19 has come as a result of a shift away from “evidence-based medicine.” In a recent opinion piece published at The Spectator, Heneghan wrote that patients have become a “prisoner of a system labelling him or her as ‘positive’ when we are not sure what that label means.” He warns:
“Governments are producing a series of contradictory and confusing policies which have a brief shelf life as the next crisis emerges. It is increasingly clear the evidence is often ignored. Keeping up to date is a full time occupation.”
More evidence for the unreliability of PCR came on November 11, 2020, when the Lisbon Court of Appeal ruled that PCR ““in view of current scientific evidence, this test shows itself to be unable to determine beyond reasonable doubt that such positivity corresponds to the infection of a person by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”
The decision relates to an appeal by the Regional Health Administration of the Azores,Portugal which forced four German citizens to comply with a 14 day quarantine in a hotel room. After the four citizens appealed the decision, the panel of judges concluded that “the number of cycles of such amplification results in a greater or lesser reliability of such tests. And the problem is that this reliability shows itself, in terms of scientific evidence (…) as more than debatable.”
The ruling was criticized by some scientists in Portugal and has been completely ignored by the United States media and politcians.
More recently, On December 3, 2020, the Florida Department of Health announced a new update requiring all laboratories conducting COVID-19 tests to record new details for the PCR test.
The update notes that all Florida “laboratories are subject to mandatory reporting to the Florida Department of Health (FDOH),” including for “PCR, other RNA, antigen and antibody results.” The update adds new requirements for the PCR test, asking labs to record the “cycle threshold” (CT) values for the process. The FDOH document states:
“Cycle threshold (CT) values and their reference ranges, as applicable, must be reported by laboratories to FDOH via electronic laboratory reporting or by fax immediately.”
On December 14, the World Health Organization (WHO) posted a notice on their website warning that PCR may not be entirely accurate for detecting SARS-CoV-2. The WHO memo admits that using too high of a cycle threshold will likely result in false positives.
“Users of RT-PCR reagents should read the IFU carefully to determine if manual adjustment of the PCR positivity threshold is necessary to account for any background noise which may lead to a specimen with a high cycle threshold (Ct) value result being interpreted as a positive result.”
“The design principle of RT-PCR means that for patients with high levels of circulating virus (viral load), relatively few cycles will be needed to detect virus and so the Ct value will be low. Conversely, when specimens return a high Ct value, it means that many cycles were required to detect virus. In some circumstances, the distinction between background noise and actual presence of the target virus is difficult to ascertain.”
The fact that the Florida Department of Health and the WHO is taking this step is another sign that an increasing number of health professionals and regulators are questioning the accuracy of PCR. Unfortunately, both of these stories have been ignored by the mainstream media.
As noted earlier, this incredibly sensitive technique was developed by Berkeley scientist Kary Mullis, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993. By the mid-90’s, Mullis had become skeptical that PCR was able to detect HIV and made several statements towards the end of his life indicating that he believed the technique was being improperly used by researchers.
As we approach 2021 the public is being told that a Dark Winter is waiting, with governments and media predicting a rise in cases and deaths. However, it’s important that we pause to acknowledge the many concerns surrounding the PCR test before international health authorities crash the economy, send millions into poverty, and threaten civil liberties. We must help the public understand the limitations of the PCR test and the dangers of resting public health policy on such a flawed process.
Finally, we must also hold accountable those who continue to promote PCR and refuse to answer these questions or even acknowledge these concerns. We cannot ignore the disastrous results produced by policymakers who failed to heed warnings about PCR.
BBC News Report Warning About “Fake News” Contains Fake News
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | December 28, 2020
An alarmist BBC News report warning about the dangers of “fake news” contained a claim which was itself a glaring example of fake news.
The article, entitled ‘The casualties of this year’s viral conspiracy theories,’ ominously warned that conspiracy theories were “destroying relationships and endangering lives.”
Prime amongst them according to Marianna Spring, the BBC’s “specialist disinformation reporter,” were a “flurry of online falsehoods about coronavirus.”
“We catalogued mass poisonings and overdoses of hydroxychloroquine – a drug that world leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro falsely claimed cures or prevents COVID-19,” wrote Spring.
However, as LockdownSkeptics points out, the claim that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t cure or prevent COVID-19 or that it is a poison is itself completely fake news.
“I’m afraid that doesn’t pass the fact-checking test, Ms Spring. Over 200 studies have shown HCQ is an effective treatment for Covid. Trump and Bolsonaro may have exaggerated the preventative and curative properties of HCQ, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely ineffective and anyone taking it is likely to poison themselves. On the contrary, it’s almost certainly no more dangerous than any of the Covid vaccines.”
Despite the efficacy of the drug, hydroxychloroquine has been demonized by the mainstream media from the beginning, partly as a way of preventing Trump from claiming success in fighting COVID and partly because it would have reduced the urgency for a vaccine, which is set to be used as a reason to restrict people’s mobility and travel rights.
German MP suggests restrictions ‘similar’ to Covid-19 lockdowns to fight climate change
RT | December 28, 2020
Humanity should sacrifice “personal freedom” just as many nations did during the Covid-19 pandemic in order to successfully fight climate change, a German MP has said, adding that there will “never” be a vaccine against CO2.
Germany had barely started its coronavirus vaccination campaign when a Social Democratic MP, Karl Lauterbach, warned that his compatriots need to brace themselves for yet another challenge: global warming.
“We need measures to deal with climate change that are similar to the restrictions on personal freedom [imposed] to combat the pandemic,” the professor of health economics and epidemiology at the University of Cologne wrote in a guest piece for Die Welt newspaper. He added that he hoped climate change issues would play “a dominant role” during the upcoming election campaign ahead of the federal ballot scheduled for September 2021.
The politician said he “had an impression” that Germany, Europe, and particularly the US “would not have been able to defeat the Covid pandemic without the development of a vaccine.” All these nations are still quite far from defeating the virus, as their vaccination campaigns have only just started, and the number of new infections in these nations remains relatively high. But he appeared much more concerned about the fact “there will never be a vaccine against CO2.”
Lauterbach admitted he was rather skeptical about whether his dream future, in which humanity would beat climate change through the sacrifice of freedoms, would ever be achieved. “My experience of combating the coronavirus pandemic has unfortunately made me extremely pessimistic about whether we will be able to successfully stop climate change in time,” he admitted.
According to the MP, the problem lies with the fact that Germans have “underestimated” the pandemic and continue to do so. Now, as the vaccination campaign kicks off, some might be too tempted to throw off the shackles of yet another lockdown well before the time is right to ease the restrictions, he warned.
It is “necessary” for the lockdown to remain in place until the number of new cases falls “well below 50 per 100,000 people in a week,” the epidemiologist said, calling on fellow citizens to “have discipline, altruism and … patience to achieve this.”
However, many Germans seem unlikely to agree with such advice. The nation has repeatedly seen massive protests against coronavirus restrictions. The government’s decision to re-introduce a partial lockdown in early November sparked a new wave of demonstrations, some of which turned violent. Some of those opposing the lockdown went as far as to compare themselves with the anti-Nazi resistance, provoking a harsh rebuke from Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.
The fact that Christmas parties in Germany were limited to close family members would have done little to brighten the nation’s mood. The ban on drinking alcohol in public and buying fireworks for use on New Year’s Eve probably came as unwelcome news too.
The nation launched its vaccination campaign on Saturday – a day ahead of the joint EU inoculation drive. Ensuring the German population is immune to the virus will likely still take some time, since each European country has so far received only around 10,000 doses. More are expected to be delivered in January.
Developers of Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Tied to UK Eugenics Movement
By Jeremy Loffredo and Whitney Webb |
Unlimited Hangout| December 26, 2020
The developers of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine have previously undisclosed ties to the re-named British Eugenics Society as well as other Eugenics-linked institutions like the Wellcome Trust.
On April 30th, AstraZeneca and Oxford University announced a “landmark agreement” for the development of a COVID-19 vaccine. The agreement involves AstraZeneca overseeing aspects of the development as well as manufacturing and distribution while the Oxford side, via the Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group, researched and developed the vaccine. Less than a month after this agreement was reached, the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership was awarded a contract from the US government as part of Operation Warp Speed, the public-private COVID-19 vaccination effort dominated by the US military and US intelligence.
Though the partnership was announced in April, Oxford’s Jenner Institute had already begun developing the COVID-19 vaccine months before, in mid-January. According to a recent BBC report, it was in January that the Jenner Institute first became aware of how serious the pandemic would soon become, when Professor Andrew Pollard, who works for both the Jenner Institute and heads the Oxford Vaccine Group, “shared a taxi with a modeler who worked for the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.” During the taxi ride, “the scientist told him data suggested there was going to be a pandemic not unlike the 1918 flu.” Due to this sole encounter, we are told, the Jenner Institute then began to pour millions into the early development of a vaccine for COVID-19 well before the scope of the crisis was clear.
For much of 2020, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was treated as an early front-runner, though its lead would later be marred by scandals related to its clinical trials, including the death of participants, sudden trial pauses, the use of a problematic “placebo” with its own host of side effects and the “unintentional” mis-dosing of some participants that skewed its self-reported efficacy rate.
The significant issues that emerged during trials have provoked little concern from the vaccine’s two lead developers, despite critical attention from even mainstream media of its complications. The lead developer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, Adrian Hill, told NBC on December 9th that the experimental vaccine should be approved and distributed to the public before the conclusion of the safety trials, saying,”to wait for the end of the trial would be the middle of next year. That’s too late, this vaccine is effective, available at large scale and easily deployed.”
Sarah Gilbert, the other lead researcher on the vaccine, seemed to believe that pre-mature safety approval was likely, telling the BBC on December 13 that the chances of rolling out the vaccine by the end of the year are “pretty high.” Now, the UK is expected to approve the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine shortly after Christmas, with India also set to approve the vaccine next week.
While the controversies surrounding the vaccine’s trials did ultimately undermine its previous frontrunner status, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine remains heavily promoted as the vaccine of choice for the developing world, as it is cheaper and has much less complicated storage requirement than its main competitors, Pfizer and Moderna.
Earlier this month, Dr. Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, told CNBC that “The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is the vaccine right now that is going to be able to immunize the planet more effectively, more rapidly than any other vaccine we have” in large part because it is a “vaccine that can get to lower middle-income countries.” CNBC also quoted Andrew Baum, global head of health care for Citi Group, as saying that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine “is really the only vaccine that is going to suppress or even eradicate SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in the many millions of individuals in the developing world.”
In addition to longstanding claims that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will be the vaccine of choice for the developing world, this vaccine candidate has also been treated by several outlets in the mainstream and even independent media as “good for people, bad for profits” due to the partnership’s “explicit intention of supplying [the vaccine] around the world on a not-for-profit basis, meaning that the poorest nations on the planet will not have to worry about being shut out of a cure due to lack of funds.”
However, investigation into the vaccine’s developers and the realities of their “no-profit pledge” reveals a very different story than that which has been spun for most of the year by corporate press releases, experts and academics tied to the vaccine and the mainstream press.
For instance, mainstream media has had little, if anything, to say about the role of the vaccine developers’ private company – Vaccitech – in the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership, a company whose main investors include former top Deutsche Bank executives, Silicon Valley behemoth Google and the UK government. All of them stand to profit from the vaccine alongside the vaccine’s two developers, Adrian Hill and Sarah Gilbert, who retain an estimated 10% stake in the company. Another overlooked point is the plan to dramatically alter the current sales model for the vaccine following the initial wave of its administration, which would see profits soar, especially if the now obvious push to make COVID-19 vaccination an annual affair for the foreseeable future is made reality.
Yet, arguably most troubling of all is the direct link of the vaccine’s lead developers to the Wellcome Trust and, in the case of Adrian Hill, the Galton Institute, two groups with longstanding ties to the UK Eugenics movement. The latter organization, named for the “father of eugenics” Francis Galton, is the re-named UK Eugenics Society, a group notorious for its promotion of racist pseudoscience and efforts to “improve racial stock” by reducing the population of those deemed inferior for over a century.
The ties of Adrian Hill to the Galton Institute should raise obvious concerns given the push to make the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine he developed with Gilbert the vaccine of choice for the developing world, particularly countries in Latin America, South and Southeast Asia and Africa, the very areas where the Galton Institute’s past members have called for reducing population growth.
In the final installment of this series on Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s vaccination effort, and race, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine’s ties to Eugenics-linked institutions, the secretive role of Vaccitech, and the myth of the vaccine’s sale being “non-profit” and altruistically motivated are explored in detail.
GlaxoSmithKline and the Jenner Institute
The Edward Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research was initially established in 1995 in Compton in Berkshire as a public-private partnership between the UK government, via the Medical Research Council and the Department of Health, and the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. Following a “review by the [institute’s] sponsors,” it was relaunched in 2005 in Oxford under the leadership of Adrian Hill, who—prior to that appointment—held a senior position at the Wellcome Trust’s Centre for Human Genetics. Hill, the lead developer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, still leads a research group at Wellcome aimed at “understand[ing] the genetic basis of susceptibility to different infectious diseases, especially. . . severe respiratory infections,” which conducts most of its studies in Africa. The UK’s Medical Research Council has also become a collaborator with the Wellcome Trust, specifically on vaccine-related initiatives. The Wellcome Trust, discussed at greater length later in this article, was originally created with funding from Henry Wellcome, who founded the company that later became GlaxoSmithKline.
Hill’s partner at the Jenner Institute and the other co-developer of the Oxford COVID-19 vaccine is Sarah Gilbert. Gilbert also hails from the Wellcome Trust, where she was a “program director,” and is a student of Hill’s. Together, Gilbert and Hill have worked to position the institute to be the center of all future vaccination efforts undertaken in response to global pandemics.
Professor Sarah Gilbert at Oxford, Photo by John Cairns
The Jenner Institute’s relocation to Oxford was largely facilitated by the Medical Research Council, which donated £1.25 million between 2005 and 2006, after the decision was made to replace the institute’s original sponsors (GlaxoSmithKline, the Medical Research Council, the Department of Health) with the University of Oxford and the Institute for Animal Health, now called the Pirbright Institute. The involvement of Pirbright meant that the relaunched Jenner Institute became unique in developing vaccines for both humans and livestock.
The relaunched Jenner Institute has come to dominate publicly funded vaccine development in the UK as well as the testing of vaccines produced by the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies via clinical trials and has overseen prominent safety trials for vaccines of high media interest in recent years. Some of the Jenner Institute–conducted trials later drew controversy, such as those using South African infants in 2009 in which seven infants died.
An investigation conducted by the British Medical Journal found that the Hill-led Jenner Institute had, in the South African instance, knowingly misled parents about the negative results of and questionable methods used in animal studies as well the vaccine being known to be ineffective. The vaccine in question, an experimental tuberculosis vaccine developed jointly by Emergent Biosolutions and the Jenner Institute, was scrapped after the controversial study in infants confirmed what was already known, that the vaccine was ineffective. The trial, largely funded by Oxford and the Wellcome Trust, was subsequently praised as “historic” by the BBC. Hill, at the time the study was conducted, had a personal financial stake in the vaccine.
Similar instances of dodgy practices in efficacy trials and the effects of increased dosages have led vaccine experts to criticize the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Hill and Gilbert. Hill and Gilbert hold a considerable financial stake in the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. While the vaccine reportedly has an efficacy of over 90 percent, those figures—often cited in mainstream reports—are self-reported by the vaccine’s developers and manufacturers (i.e., the Oxford team and AstraZeneca), which is significant given that Hill and other Jenner Institute scientists have previously been caught manipulating trial results to benefit a vaccine product in which they were personally invested.
The prominence of the Jenner Institute in vaccine development and testing has largely come through Hill’s additional leadership role at the UK’s Vaccines Network, which chooses what vaccines to develop, how to develop them, and which firms should receive “targeted investments” from the UK government. The Vaccines Network also plays a key role in identifying “what vaccine technologies could play an important role in future outbreaks.” Two of the main backers of the UK’s Vaccines Network are the Wellcome Trust and GlaxoSmithKline.
Unsurprisingly, the Vaccines Network has steered many millions of pounds toward the Hill-run Jenner Institute, with completed projects including a “plug and display” virus-like particle platform for rapid-response vaccination. Also funded by the Vaccines Network were the Jenner Institute’s initial studies of novel chimpanzee adenovirus vaccines for coronavirus (in this case, MERS), the same viral vector used for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. In addition to the Vaccines Network, the Jenner Institute also coordinates the efforts of the EU’s Vaccines Network equivalent, MultiMalVax.
Professor Adrian Hill at the Jenner Institute, Photo by John Cairns
The Jenner Institute also has a close relationship with GlaxoSmithKline and the Italian biotech Okairos, which was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline in 2014. Soon after it was acquired, Okairos, and its new owner GlaxoSmithKline, became key players in the 2014 experimental Ebola vaccine push, an effort that mirrors the current COVID-19 vaccine development rush in many key ways. The rushed safety trials for that vaccine were overseen by Adrian Hill and the Jenner Institute and funded by the UK government and the Wellcome Trust. GlaxoSmithKline and Okairos are the only firms represented on the Jenner Institute’s Scientific Advisory Board.
The Jenner Institute, along with GlaxoSmithKline-Okairos and a small French biotech called Imaxio, have been developing an experimental malaria vaccine since 2015, with human trials of that vaccine announced on December 12, 2020. Those trials will be conducted on 4,800 children in Africa over the course of 2021, in many of the same countries where Hill’s research group at the Wellcome Center for Human Genetics has been studying genetic susceptibility to several diseases. “A lot more people will die in Africa this year from malaria than will die from Covid,” Hill recently said in regard to the soon-to-begin trials.
Currently, the Jenner Institute is funded by the Jenner Vaccine Foundation, but the foundation’s documents note on several occasions a considerable influx of money from Wellcome Trust Strategic Awards. A “special review panel” from the Wellcome Trust actually lobbied the Jenner Institute to apply for further “strategic core funding” from the trust after visiting the institute and appraising its work. The Jenner Institute frames its funding from Wellcome as the key guidance behind its development decisions, which are made “based on the successful model of Wellcome Trust Strategic Award support.”
The Jenner Institute’s foundation, however, is not the only source of income for its lead researchers. Hill and Gilbert have been working to commercialize many of the institute’s vaccines through their own private company, Vaccitech. Though media reports often describe the vaccine as being a joint effort between AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, Vaccitech is a key stakeholder in that partnership, given that the vaccine candidate relies on technology developed by Hill and Gilbert and owned by Vaccitech. A deeper look into Vaccitech offers a clue as to why the company’s name has been absent from nearly all media reports on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, as it demolishes the much-touted claim that the vaccine is “nonprofit” and offered at low cost for charitable reasons.
Vaccitech: doing well by going “good”?
The official reason Sarah Gilbert and Adrian Hill created Vaccitech in 2016 per The Times is because “Oxford’s researchers [are] encouraged to form companies to commercialize their work.” Vaccitech, like other “commercialized” Oxford research enterprises, was spun out of the Jenner Institute via the university’s commercialization arm, Oxford Science Innovations, which is currently Vaccitech’s largest stakeholder at 46 percent. Hill and Gilbert are reported to maintain a 10 percent stake in the company.
The largest investor in Oxford Science Innovations, and by extension one of the largest shareholders in Vaccitech, is Braavos Capital, the venture-capital firm started in 2019 by Andrew Crawford-Brunt, Deutsche Bank’s long-time global head of equity trading at its London branch. Through its stake in Oxford Science Innovations, Braavos owns about 9 percent of Vaccitech.
Prior to COVID-19, Vaccitech’s main focus, especially last year, was the development of a universal vaccine for the flu. Vaccitech’s efforts in this regard were praised by Google, which is also invested in Vaccitech. At the same time, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was funding research to develop a universal flu vaccine, reportedly because the field of influenza vaccinology was not yet able “to design a flu vaccine that would protect broadly against the strains of flu that infect people every winter and those in nature that could emerge to trigger a disruptive and deadly pandemic,” according to a STAT News report from last year. The Gates Foundation effort originally partnered with Google’s cofounder Larry Page and his wife Lucy.
To fully finance Hill and Gilbert’s Vaccitech, and specifically its quest to develop a universal flu vaccine, Oxford Science Innovations sought £600 million from “outside investors,” chief among them the Wellcome Trust and the venture-capital arm of Google, Google Ventures. This means that Google is poised to make a profit from the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine at a time when its video platform YouTube has moved to ban COVID-19 vaccine–related content that shines a negative light on COVID-19 vaccines, including the Oxford-AstraZeneca candidate. Other investors in Vaccitech include Sequoia Capital’s Chinese branch and the Chinese pharmaceutical company Fosun Pharma. In addition, the UK government has put an estimated £5 million into the company and is also expected to make a return on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
Vaccitech’s homepage showing company co-founders Adrian Hill and Sarah Gilbert. From vaccitech.co.uk
Information on the profit motive behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been muddied due to the extensive media promotion of the claim that Hill and Gilbert will not be collecting royalties on the vaccine and that AstraZeneca is not making a profit off the vaccine. However, this is only true until the pandemic is “officially” declared over, and the virus is labeled a persistent or seasonal condition that will require the mass administration of COVID-19 vaccines at regular intervals and possibly annually. Sky News reported that the determination of when the pandemic is over “will be based on the views of a range of [unspecified] independent bodies.” At that point, both Vaccitech and Oxford will obtain royalties from AstraZeneca’s sales of the vaccine.
Those tied to the vaccine have been at the center of promoting the idea that the COVID-19 vaccine will soon become an annual affair. For instance, in early May, John Bell—an Oxford medical professor and an “architect” of the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership—told NBC News, “I suspect we may need to have relatively regular vaccinations against coronaviruses going into the future,” adding that the vaccine would likely be needed every year like the flu vaccine. NBC News failed to note that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in which Bell is involved stands to significantly benefit financially if that does come to pass.
More recently, Bell told The Week that, “should there prove to be a market for regular vaccinations against coronavirus in the future, ‘there is some money to be made.’” Such sentiments have been echoed by Pascal Soriot, the CEO of AstraZeneca, who told Bloomberg last month that the company stood to make a “reasonable profit” once the pandemic was declared over and COVID-19 deemed a seasonal illness requiring regular vaccinations. On this matter, Vaccitech’s CEO, Bill Enright, stated that Vaccitech investors would receive a “big chunk of the royalties from a successful vaccine as well as ‘milestone’ payments” if and when the pandemic is declared over and COVID-19 vaccines become a seasonal event.
Vaccitech, in particular, appears quite certain that this possibility is slated to become reality. For all subsequent iterations of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, Vaccitech will reacquire a much larger percentage of rights to the vaccine, rights it is currently splitting with Oxford for the first iteration. Sky News has noted that the technology that Vaccitech owns “could drive the second generation of COVID-19 vaccines” and that it “has [already] received £2.3 million of public funding to develop it.”
US government officials such as Anthony Fauci have also signaled that the COVID-19 vaccine will require annual shots. Notably, the government, through Health and Human Service’s BARDA, has poured over $1 billion into the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine development. In addition to government officials, several recently published mainstream media reports have claimed that the “expert” consensus “seem[s] to be leaning toward an annual shot like the flu vaccine” with regards to the COVID-19 vaccine. For instance, Dr. Charles Chiu, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of California–San Francisco, recently told Salon, “This may end up being a vaccine that’s not a one-time thing or even a two-time thing. . . it may end up being what we call either a seasonal vaccine, or vaccine that needs to be administered every couple of years.”
Such hints about an annual COVID-19 vaccine from 2021 onward have recently become commonplace from the leading COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers themselves. For instance, on December 13th, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was quoted by the Telegraph as saying, “How long this [vaccine] protection lasts is something we don’t know … I think it is a likely scenario that you will need periodical vaccinations.” Pfizer also recently issued a statement that noted that “we don’t know how the virus will change, and we also don’t know how durable the protective effect of any vaccination will be,” adding that its vaccine would be suitable “for repeated administration as booster shots” in the event that the vaccine only induces an immune response for a few months.
Then, this past Tuesday, Moderna released information that suggested immunity from its COVID-19 vaccine would only last several months, with Forbes writing that “the duration of neutralizing antibodies from the Moderna vaccine will be relatively short, potentially less than a year,” an outcome that would favor the push for an annual COVID-19 shot. The developer of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, Ugur Sahin of BioNTech, also stated on Tuesday that “The virus will stay with us for the next 10 years… We need to get used to the fact there’ll be more outbreaks.” He later added that “if the virus becomes more efficient… we might need a higher uptake of the vaccine for life to return to normal,” implying that these regular outbreaks he foresees occurring over the next ten years would be correlated with increased vaccine administration.
Quotes from the developers of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine themselves also point to a pandemic-dominated future and a desire for the crisis to be prolonged so that the vaccine can be widely distributed. Gilbert told the UK Independent in August that she believes COVID-19 is just the beginning and that COVID-like pandemics will become more frequent in the near future. The Jenner Institute vaccine team seems so determined to create the COVID vaccine that, in June, Hill was quoted by the Washington Post in June as stating that he wanted the pandemic to stick around, saying, “We’re in the bizarre position of wanting COVID to stay, at least for a little while. But cases are declining.” He also stated that his team was in “a race against the virus disappearing.”
With the vaccine developers, “medical experts,” government officials, and the CEOs of major vaccine manufacturers all agreeing that a seasonal COVID-19 vaccine is an increasingly likely outcome, it is worth considering a possible ulterior motive regarding the initial “nonprofit” model being used by the Jenner Institute/Vaccitech and AstraZeneca for their joint COVID-19 vaccine.
Given that vaccine guidance in several countries states that each dose of the multidose COVID-19 vaccine must be produced by the same manufacturer as previous doses, the implication is that in the event of a need for periodic COVID-19 vaccine variants, those who initially received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine would likely be required to receive that same “brand” of vaccine seasonally. In other words, those who initially received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine would likely be required, not just to receive a second dose of the same “brand,” but continue receiving that same “brand” of vaccine every year. Notably, no interaction studies have yet been conducted on the interactions between the COVID-19 vaccines and other medications as well as other vaccines.
If this turns out to be the case, it would certainly behoove the Oxford-Vaccitech-AstraZeneca team to want their vaccine to be the most widely used one in the first year in order to guarantee the largest market for subsequent annual COVID-19 vaccines. This could be a possible motive behind the efforts of the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership “to supply the entire world with the Oxford jab” and to supply the vaccine “to the most vulnerable groups to COVID-19.” This vaccine has already been purchased, even before regulatory approval, by governments around the world, including in Europe, North America, Australia and most Latin American countries.
The Wellcome Trust
Adrian Hill currently holds a senior position at the Wellcome Trust’s Centre for Human Genomics. The Wellcome Trust is a scientific charity based in London, established in 1936 with funds from pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome. As previously mentioned, Wellcome founded the pharmaceutical company that eventually became the industry giant GlaxoSmithKline. Today, the Wellcome Trust has a $25.9 billion endowment and engages in philanthropic endeavors, including funding clinical trials and research.
Hill has been closely tied to Wellcome for decades. In 1994, he participated in the founding of the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics and was awarded a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellowship the following year. He became a Wellcome professor of human genetics in 1996.
The Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics website boasts of the large-scale genetic mapping they’ve conducted in Africa. The center also publishes papers that explore genetic dispositions in relation to male fertility and “reproductive success.” The crossroads between race and genes is important in the center’s work, as an entire working group at the center, the Myers Group, is dedicated to mapping the “genetic impacts of migration events.” The center also funded a paper that argued that so long as eugenics is not coercive it’s an acceptable policy initiative. The paper asks, “Is the fact that an action or policy is a case of eugenics necessarily a reason not to do it?” According to Hill’s page on the Wellcome Trust site, race and genetics have long played a central role in his scientific approach, and his group currently focuses on the role genetics plays in African populations with regard to susceptibility to specific infectious diseases.
The Wellcome Genome Campus, which houses the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, is located on the grounds of Hixton Hall, in Cambridgeshire, England.
Of even greater concern, last year Science Mag reported that Wellcome was accused by both a whistleblower and the University of Cape Town South Africa of illegally exploiting hundreds of Africans by “commercializing a gene chip without proper legal agreements and without the consent of the hundreds of African people whose donated DNA was used to develop the chip.” Jantina de Vries, a bioethicist at the University of Cape Town South Africa told the journal that it was “clearly unethical.” Since the controversy, other African institutions and peoples such as the indigenous Nama peoples of Namibia have demanded that Wellcome return the DNA it collected.
The Wellcome Centre regularly co-funds the research and development of vaccines and birth control methods with the Gates Foundation, a foundation that actively and admittedly engages in population and reproductive control in Africa and South Asia by, among other things, prioritizing the wide-spread distribution of injectable long-acting, reversible contraceptives (LARCs). The Wellcome Trust has also directly funded studies that sought to develop methods to “improve uptake” of LARCs in places such as rural Rwanda.
As researcher Jacob Levich wrote in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, LARCs afford women in the Global South “the least choice possible short of actual sterilization.” Some LARCs can render women infertile for as long as five years, and, as Levich argues, they “leave far more control in the hands of providers, and less in the hands of women, than condoms, oral contraceptives, or traditional methods.”
One example is Norplant, a contraceptive implant manufactured by Schering (now Bayer) that can prevent pregnancy for up to five years. It was taken off the US market in 2002 after more than fifty thousand women filed lawsuits against the company and the doctors who prescribed it. Seventy of those class action suits were related to side effects such as depression, extreme nausea, scalp-hair loss, ovarian cysts, migraines, and excessive bleeding.
Slightly modified and rebranded as Jadelle, the dangerous drug was promoted in Africa by the Gates Foundation in conjunction with USAID and EngenderHealth. Formerly named the Sterilization League for Human Betterment, EngenderHealth’s original mission, inspired by racial eugenics, was to “improve the biological stock of the human race.” Jadelle is not approved by the FDA for use in the United States.
Another scandal-ridden LARC is Pfizer’s Depo-Provera, an injectable contraceptive used in several African and Asian countries. The Gates Foundation and USAID have collaborated to fund this drug’s distribution and introduce it into the health-care systems of countries including Uganda, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger, Senegal, Bangladesh, and India.
Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, where Hill’s Jenner Institute resides, is enmeshed with the Gates Foundation. His employer, the University of Oxford, has received $11 million for vaccine development research from the foundation over the past three years and $208 million in grants over the past decade. In 2016, the Gates Foundation gave $36 million to a team of researchers that was headed by Pollard for vaccine development. In addition, Pollard’s private laboratory is funded by the Gates Foundation. Given this, it should come as no surprise that the Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiative (GAVI), a public-private partnership founded and currently funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, plans to distribute the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to low-income, predominantly African and Asian, countries once it’s approved.
The Galton Institute: Eugenics for the Twenty-First Century
Both the Wellcome Trust and Adrian Hill share a close relationship with the most infamous eugenics society in Europe, the British Eugenics Society. The Eugenics Society was renamed the Galton Institute in 1989, a name that pays homage to Sir Francis Galton, the so-called father of eugenics, a field that he often described as the “science of improving racial stock.”
In the case of the Wellcome Trust, the Trust’s library is the guardian of the Eugenics Society historical archives. When the Wellcome Trust first set up its Contemporary Medical Archive Center, the first organizational archive it sought to acquire was tellingly that of the Eugenics Society-Galton Institute. Wellcome’s website describes the Eugenics Society’s original purpose as “to increase public understanding of heredity and to influence parenthood in Britain, with the aim of biological improvement of the nation and mitigation of the burdens deemed to be imposed on society by the genetically ‘unfit’.” It also states the interests of the society’s members “ranged from the biology of heredity, a subject that developed rapidly during the first half of the 20th century, to the provision of birth control methods, artificial insemination, statistics, sex education and family allowances.” Lesley Hall, Wellcome’s senior archivist, has referred to Francis Galton, a racist eugenicist, as an “eminent late nineteenth century polymath” in her discussion of the Eugenics Society archive held at Wellcome.
A poster published by the Eugenics Society-Galton Institute in the 1930S, from the Wellcome Library
Several top governance positions at the former British Eugenics Society, now the Galton Institute, include individuals who originally worked at The Wellcome Trust, including the Galton Institute’s president Turi King. Dr. Elena Bochukova, a current Galton Council Member and Galton lecturer, previously worked under the direction of Adrian Hill at the Wellcome Trust Center for Human Genetics. The Galton Institute’s Senior Genetics Researcher, Dr. Jess Buxton, was previously a ‘genetics researcher’ at the Wellcome Trust and then went on to carry out independent research financed by Wellcome. Her research, which is particularly race oriented, includes creating the first genetic sequence map of a native Nigerian. Moreover, Adrian Hill himself spoke at the Eugenics Society-Galton Institute at the celebration of their 100th anniversary in 2008.
The Galton Institute publishes what they now call the Galton Review, previously titled the Eugenics Review, where various members of the self-proclaimed “learned society” publish papers focused on population issues, genetics, evolutionary biology, and fertility.
A look at early issues of the Eugenics Review shines a light on Galton’s original ambitions. In the 1955 issue titled “The Immigration of Colored People,” an author asks, “What will become of our national character, good workmanship etc. in the course of a few decades if this immigration of negroes and negroids continues unchecked?” The article ends with an appeal to readers to write their parliamentary representatives and urge them that in view of “racial betterment or deterioration” something must be done urgently to “check the present influx of africans and other negroids.”
Today, it appears that the Galton Institute continues to see the immigration of racial minorities into European cities as an unchecked threat. Mike Coleman, an Oxford professor of demographics and a fellow at the institute runs an anti-immigration organization and advocacy group called MigrationWatch—whose mission is to preserve the European culture of the UK by lobbying the government to stem legal immigration and publishing data that supposedly demonstrates the biological and cultural threat of increasing immigration.
A 1961 issue of the Eugenics Review titled “The Impending Crisis” claims the function of the institute’s upcoming conference is “to honor Margaret Sanger” and describes the population crisis as “quantity threatening quality.”
Sanger, known as the “pioneer of the American birth control movement,” was a staunch advocate for promoting “racial betterment” and the key architect of the Negro Project, which she claimed “was established for the benefit of the colored people.” But as medical ethics fellow at Harvard Medical School, Harriet Washington, argues in her book Medical Apartheid, “The Negro Project sought to find the best way to reduce the black population by promoting eugenic principals.” Sanger was an American member of the British Eugenics Society.
Another early member of the Galton Institute was John Harvey Kellogg, prominent business man and eugenicist. Kellogg founded the Race Betterment Foundation and argued that immigrants and nonwhites would damage the American gene pool. Yet another example is Charles Davenport, a scientist known for his collaborative research efforts with eugenicists in Nazi Germany and his contributions to Nazi Germany’s brutal racial policies, who was vice president of the Galton Institute in 1931.
Another more recent member of the Galton Institute was David Weatherall, for whom the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford is named. Weatherall was a member of the Galton Institute when it was still named the Eugenics Society and he remained a member until his death in 2018. Weatherall, who was knighted by the British monarch in 1987 for his contributions to science, addressed the Galton Institute on numerous occasions and gave a senior lecture on genetics at the institute in 2014, of which no transcript or video is available. As an Oxford professor, Weatherall was Adrian Hill’s doctoral adviser and eventually his boss when Hill began working at the Weatherall Institute conducting immunogenic research in Africa. A key fixture of the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine since its founding is Walter Bodmer, a former president of the Galton Institute.
While the Galton Institute has attempted to distance itself from its past of promoting racial eugenics with surface-level public relations efforts, it has not stopped family members of the infamous racist from achieving leadership positions at the institute. Emeritus professor of molecular genetics at the Galton Institute and one of its officers is none other than David. J Galton, whose work includes Eugenics: The Future of Human Life in the 21st Century. David Galton has written that the Human Genome Mapping Project, originally dreamt up by Galton’s former president Walter Bodmer, had “enormously increased . . . the scope for eugenics . . . because of the development of a very powerful technology for the manipulation of DNA.”
This new “wider definition of eugenics,” Galton has said, “would cover methods of regulating population numbers as well as improving genome quality by selective artificial insemination by donor, gene therapy or gene manipulation of germ-line cells.” In expanding on this new definition, Galton is neutral as to “whether some methods should be made compulsory by the state, or left entirely to the personal choice of the individual.”
Who gets the safest vaccines?
Considering the degree to which the players and institutions behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine (including the lead developer) are tied and connected to institutions that have been instrumental in the rise and perpetuation of racial eugenics, it’s concerning that this particular vaccine is being portrayed by scientists and media alike as the COVID-19 vaccine for the poor and the Global South.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine sells at a fraction of the cost of its COVID-19 vaccine competitors—running between 3 and 5 dollars per dose. Moderna and Pfizer cost 25 to 37 dollars and 20 dollars per dose, respectively. As CNN recently reported, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will “be far easier to transport and distribute in developing countries than its rivals,” several of which require complicated and costly cold supply chains. When the Thomson Reuters Foundation asked several experts which COVID-19 vaccine could “reach the poorest soonest,” all declared a preference for the Oxford-AstraZeneca candidate.
There is also the added fact that a host of safety issues have come to surround the vaccine. Recently, on November 21, a forty-year-old participant in AstraZeneca’s clinical trial who lives in India sent a legal notice to the Serum Institute of India alleging that the vaccine caused him to develop acute neuroencephalopathy, or brain damage. In the notice, the participant said he “must be compensated, in the least, for all the sufferings that he and his family have undergone and are likely to undergo in the future.”
In response, the Serum Institute claimed the participant’s medical complications are unrelated to the vaccine trial and said it would take “legal action” against the brain-damaged participant for maligning the company’s reputation, seeking damages in excess of $13 million. “This is the first time I have ever heard of a sponsor threatening a trial participant,” Amar Jesani, editor of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, said of the incident. The Serum Institute has received at least $18.6 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and has a deal with AstraZeneca to manufacture a billion doses of the vaccine.
Other manufacturers chosen by Oxford-AstraZeneca to produce their vaccine are also no strangers to controversy. For instance, their manufacturing partner in China, Shenzhen Kangtai Biological Products, has been at the center of controversy for years, especially after 17 infants died from its Hepatitis B vaccine in 2013. The New York Times cited Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, as saying: “Imagine if a similar scandal is reported again in China… It’s not just going to undermine the confidence of the company manufacturing the vaccine, it’s also going to hurt the reputation of AstraZeneca itself and their vaccine, too.”
In another example, the manufacturing partner chosen to produce the vaccine in the US is the scandal-ridden company with ties to the 2001 anthrax attacks, Emergent Biosolutions. Emergent Biosolutions, previously known as BioPort, has a long track record of knowingly selling and marketing products that were never tested for safety and efficacy, including its anthrax vaccine BioThrax and its biodefense product Trobigard. The current head of quality control for Emergent Biosolutions’ lead manufacturing facility in the US has no expertise in pharmaceutical manufacturing and is instead a former high-ranking military intelligence official who operated in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.
The issues raised by their decision to partner with manufacturers with dark histories of product safety issues are compounded by the adverse reactions reported in the Oxford-AstraZeneca trials as well as the ways in which those trials have been conducted. In September, AstraZeneca was forced to pause its experimental COVID-19 vaccine trial after a woman in the UK developed a “suspected serious reaction” that the New York Times reported was consistent with transverse myelitis. TM is a neurological disorder characterized by inflammation of the spinal cord, a major element of the central nervous system. It often results in weakness of the limbs, problems emptying the bladder, and paralysis. Patients can become severely disabled, and there is currently no effective cure.
Concern over an association between TM and vaccines is well established. A review of published case studies in 2009 documented thirty-seven cases of TM associated with various vaccines, including hepatitis B, measles-mumps-rubella, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, among others in infants, children, and adults. The researchers in Israel noted, “The associations of different vaccines with a single autoimmune phenomenon allude to the idea that a common denominator of these vaccines, such as an adjuvant, might trigger this syndrome.” Even the New York Times article on the AstraZeneca trial pause notes past “speculation” that vaccines might be able to trigger TM.
In July, an Oxford-AstraZeneca trial participant developed symptoms of TM, and the vaccine trial was paused at that time. An “independent panel” ultimately concluded the illness was unrelated to the vaccine, and the trial continued. Yet, as Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, these panels are typically made up of “biostatisticians and also medical representatives from the sponsor drug company running the trial.” Then, in October, a trial participant in Brazil died, though in that case, AstraZeneca suggested that the person was part of the control group and thus hadn’t received the COVID-19 vaccine.
According to Forbes, the AstraZeneca vaccine was ineffective at stopping the spread of coronavirus in their animal trials. All six monkeys injected with AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine became infected with the disease after being inoculated. All the monkeys were put to death, which means that it will remain unknown whether those monkeys would have suffered other adverse effects.
Another concern is that trial administrators gave the trial control group (for both human and animal trials) Pfizer’s Nimenrix, a meningitis vaccine, as opposed to a saline solution, which is regarded as the gold standard for controls because researchers can be sure the saline solution won’t cause any adverse reactions. Using Pfizer’s meningitis vaccine as the control placebo allows AstraZeneca to downplay any adverse reactions in its COVID-19 vaccine group by showing that the control group suffered adverse reactions as well. “The meningitis vaccine in the AstraZeneca trial is what I would call a ‘fauxcebo,’ a fake control whose real purpose is to disguise or hide injury in the vaccine group,” said Mary Holland, general counsel at Children’s Health Defense.
Eugenics under another name
Despite these safety concerns and clinical trial scandals, close to 160 countries have purchased the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, and now reports are suggesting that India, the country with the second largest population on Earth, is likely to approve this vaccine by next week.
As documented here, while the vaccine may be heralded as “vital for lower-income countries,” the Oxford-AstraZeneca project is no mere philanthropic pursuit. Not only is there a significant profit motive behind the vaccine, but its lead researcher’s connection to the British Eugenics Society adds another level of warranted scrutiny.
For those encountering stories of eugenicists, it’s common to dismiss such activity as that of “conspiracy theories.” However, it’s undeniable that several prominent individuals and institutions that remain active today have clear ties to eugenicist thinking, which was not so taboo just a few decades ago. Unfortunately, this holds true for the individuals and institutions associated with the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID vaccine, who, as demonstrated in this article, immerse themselves in studies of race science and population control – primarily in Africa while working closely with institutions that have direct and longstanding links to the worst of the Eugenics movement.
As this series has shown, there are many concerns regarding the points where race and the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the US and abroad intersect, both publicly and privately. Part I of this series raised questions about the policy-shaping role of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which suggested that the US government make COVID-19 vaccines available to ethnic minorities and the mentally challenged first. Part II explained how in order to allocate COVID-19 vaccines in the US, health agencies are using a program created by Palantir, a company with a record of helping the US agencies target ethnic minorities through immigration policy and racist policing.
Furthermore, there are plans in place to exercise what could reasonably be described as economic coercion to pressure people to “voluntarily” get vaccinated. Such coercion will be obviously be more effective on poor and working communities, meaning communities of color will be disproportionately affected as well.
Considering these facts, and the case for scrutinizing the safety of Oxford-AstraZeneca’s “affordable” vaccine option made above, any harm caused by vaccine allocation policy in the US and beyond is likely to disproportionately affect poor communities, especially communities of color.
As such, the public should take all vaccine rollout policy with a grain of salt, even when they come cloaked in language of inclusion, racial justice, and public health preservation. As the co-founder of the American Eugenics Society (later renamed “Society for the Study of Social Biology”) Frederick Osborn put it in 1968, “Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics.”
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Fanatical Followers of the Covid Regime: A Jim Jones-Style Cult?
By Professor Roger Watson and Dr. Niall McCrae | The Daily Sceptic | November 15, 2021
As scholars at leading British universities over recent decades, we witnessed the replacement of critical thinking and debate by narrative: facts are discrimination and scientific method is imperialism; truth, instead, is derived from ‘progressive’ values. This educational trend may be a major contributory factor to the ease in which society has been inculcated to the Covid ‘new normal’ of masking, testing, and repeated doses of vaccines for a disease of similar risk to severe influenza.
One doesn’t need much critical reasoning to observe the flawed logic of some vaccination enthusiasts, such as people who respond to experiencing any side effects, however debilitating, by saying “at least I know it’s working”, or, after contracting the disease despite their promised inoculation (over 90% effective, according to initial drug company claims), “I’d have been worse off without the jab.” … continue
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