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Prologue
Last week was floating on Twitter the old video of the standing ovation at the Wimbledon Championship opening day in June 2021 paid in homage to Dame Sarah Gilbert, who was sitting in the Royal box. Now a household name, Gilbert is the co-creator of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 adenovirus vector DNA vaccine, Vaxzevria (bizarrely, Novak Djokovic, world-famous vaccine “refusenik”, played in the first game after that standing ovation - incidentally, it seems that in January 2023 he will be allowed to play in Australia).
You might also be aware of the Barbie doll made in her likeness in August last year. And you might remember also the collection of her damehood at Windsor Castle on 15 February this year. You could say that Gilbert is now a British national treasure, if not an international one.
The day after watching that video, I found myself scanning the second-hand books of one of my local charity shops. At that moment, dear reader, the planets must have aligned for me (not according to my SkyMap app, but there you go). There it was: Vaxxers, by Sarah Gilbert.
You have to act on a sign from destiny when you get one. After first having checked on the Amazon app that it was indeed a bargain, I decided to splash out on the £1 tag price and got it: used, like new.
Safe, effective, lifesaver, and not-for-profit
Vaxxers was first published in mid-year 2021. It was chosen as book of the Year by the Financial Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Prospect, Guardian and The Times.
Gilbert tells us from the start that her book is
“the story of a race. Not, as it has so often been portrayed, a race against other scientists making other vaccines. With billions of people needing to be protected, we were always going to need all the vaccines we could get. [...] Instead, it was a race against the devastating virus that took millions of lives, ruined livelihoods, emptied schools, kept us apart from people we loved and closed down entire societies.”
Nothing new here, as the book starts with the ubiquitous propaganda lines. I have to remind Gilbert that it has not been the virus that “ruined livelihoods, emptied schools, kept us apart from people we loved and closed down entire societies”. The direct sources of the misery that millions of people have been through were the tyrannical COVID-19 policies enacted in unison and with careful coordination by the vast majority of the world countries. Also, it has not been established yet if those policies have killed and continue to kill more people than the virus has killed. If the current level of non-COVID-19-related excess mortality continues, COVID-19 policies are set to win.
From there, the whole of my experience of the book became a downward slope.
The book makes sure that we get the idea that Vaxzevria is ‘safe and effective’, and that it ‘saves lives’. The words ‘safe’ or ‘safely’ in relation to the vaccine appear 143 times. ‘Safe and effective’ or ‘safe and highly effective’ show up 8 times. ‘Save lives’ 17 times. These messages pop up more often than once every other page.
If you have followed me @theravennurse, you know I despise the misleading “safe and effective” and the “save lives” propaganda mantras. Safety and effectiveness must be qualified. And we all have to die: we cannot save lives, we can only postpone some deaths for an uncertain amount of time. These are not semantic pedantries. These are key principles which should inform public health policies. Our governments have disregarded these principles in planning all COVID-19 pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions.
Having mentioned safety, I have not checked if the book is marketed in the following countries: Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Thailand, the Netherlands, Norway, Iceland, Congo, Bulgaria, Sweden, Latvia, and Slovenia. These countries deemed Vaxzevria more deleterious than beneficial and banned it. In some countries, the removal of Vaxzevria from their vaccination programmes happened after just a few weeks of use and a few hundreds of thousands injections.
The book must have also had little circulation in several other European countries, including Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, which also stopped its use. The UK is not purchasing Vaxzevria anymore, reportedly to avoid confusing the public with too many COVID-19 vaccine types in circulation.
But, in the UK, the book must have been a hit, at least in 2021. The British population took up a total of 55 million Vaxzevria injections over several months. Compare that to Norway. There, after only 120,000 injections, rare blood clotting events were found at a rate which would undermine the vaccine harm/benefit ratio. Norway banned Vaxzevria after six weeks of use. I have written on this topic in one of my previous posts.
Now it seems that Vaxzevria is the preferred COVID-19 vaccine for developing countries. The Guardian has reported on Prof. Anthony Harnden, the deputy chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), who confirmed that
“[Vaxzevria] was a fantastic vaccine, and it still is a fantastic vaccine for the world ... and the population which received AstraZeneca vaccines of course got very good protection from it [...]. ”
Harnden is also reported in the Guardian as having said that
“[Vaxzevria] is a very effective vaccine that doesn’t have the same storage and transport issues that the mRNA vaccines have. So [it] is a very good vaccine for [the] developing world where the temperature requirements can be more problematic.”
Do blood clots form less easily in warmer countries? In any case, statistical data, if any, might be collected in those countries, and that might show that Vaxzevria is “completely safe” after all.
Talking about more statistics, in Vaxxers the word ‘money’ comes up 48 times. In all of its appearances it is used in the context of the fundraising efforts for the Vaxzevria project, apart from the following instance at the beginning of the book:
“We wanted to save lives, not to make money [‘save lives’ again!].”
Regardless, someone must have made some money from the creation of Vaxzevria. Gilbert owned at the time 5.2 percent of the shares of the biotech company Vaccitech, an Oxford University spin-out company she co-founded and that owns the biotechnology behind Vaxzevria. Vaccitech raised $111 million from the initial public offering on the Nasdaq exchange. This means that Gilbert could have cashed in a little short of $6 million. In addition, Vaccitech will receive 1.4 percent of net revenue from the sale of Vaxzevria through its AstraZeneca partnership.
It was then timely that, a year ago, AstraZeneca started signing new Vaxzevria contracts in a shift away from its not-for-profit commitment – albeit, nothing like the market share that Pfizer and Moderna dominate. As a result, Vaccitech shareholders could have got a good payout and will continue to reap sales profits.
If Gilbert sold her stake in Vaccitech, she is now a six-million-dollar woman. If she has retained some shares, she will also continue to receive a cut of the proceedings of further sales to developing countries. Fair enough, she saves millions of lives before breakfast. But, the future does not look promising for Vaxzevria sales. Revenue from Vaxzevria has slumped 83 per cent to $173 million in the third quarter of this year.
Enough about Dame Sarah Gilbert. The fact is that, through an odd train of thought, all the above led me to think about something that most people are unaware of: Alexander Fleming’s lucrative vaccine business.
Century-old bogus vaccines
Back several years ago, I found one of the most enlightening books I have ever read. I had just started my BSc in nursing, having left my telecommunication design engineering career. As a mature newbie, I was thirsty for medical knowledge – a thirst that has never been quenched.
Browsing through the British Medical Journal, a review of a new book popped out. The review concludes, after only glowing remarks throughout the piece, that this book
“should be standard issue for every first year medic.”
So I got it. The book is Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates, by David Wootton.
Bad Medicine is a book on the history of medicine. It offers a plethora of little and big gems of insight into the progress, or rather, as Wootton puts it, the non-progress of medicine. One fascinating account is that of Sir Alexander Fleming’s work not on penicillin, but on vaccines.
Fleming is another British national and international treasure. Most people get to learn very soon how he discovered penicillin and “saved” humanity. Since this post is not a biography of Fleming, I will not expand on the other less well-known fact that his discovery was in fact a serendipitous rediscovery.
It was 1928 when Fleming rediscovered penicillin. Fleming used it on a few occasions for topical applications on wounds. But, by April 1929, he had lost interest in developing a clinical use of penicillin. The antibiotic did not become the worldwide known wonder drug (and a true “life-prolonger”) until the early 40s, through the work of Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain. They ended up sharing with Fleming the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945. Fleming collected his knighthood for scientific achievements a year earlier.
Wootton tells us that the ten-year-delayed progress of the science of antibiotics is one of several cases where the history of medicine turns out to be
“a history, not of progress, but of delay; not of events, but of non-events; not of an inflexible logic but of a sloppy logic, not of overdetermination, but of underdetermination. And these cases, it turns out, are in medicine (at least until very recently) the norm, not the exceptions.”
Sir Alexander Fleming. From a photograph by Dr P N Cardew, in Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth, Gwyn Macfarlane. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1984. Another amazing book.
Between 1930 and 1940, Fleming was more interested in studying vaccines in the laboratory at St Mary’s in London, where he worked under Sir Almroth Wright. As I cannot put it better than the original, I conclude by reporting here the whole section by Wootton:
“The laboratory in which [Fleming] worked was funded by the production of vaccines. Almroth Wright in effect ran a private company within St Mary’s Hospital in London; from its income he ran a couple of wards and paid the salaries of a small staff. The enterprise seems also to have been personally profitable for Wright and his close associates, including Fleming [...].
Wright and Fleming (Fleming had charge of the production of vaccines from 1920 on) produced vaccines against acne, boils, influenza, gonorrhoea, tuberculosis, and cancer. The modern view would be that all these vaccines were totally ineffectual: the whole profitable business was founded on a failure to carry out adequate controlled trials to see if people receiving Wright’s vaccines did better than those not receiving them.
Wright had been involved in a controversy over the statistics he had used to show that his typhoid vaccine (which really was effective) worked, and he carefully avoided subjecting his new vaccines to proper tests. Instead he invented a spurious measure, the opsonin index, of the body’s resistance to infection, and claimed this measured the improvement resulting from his vaccinations.
Fleming thus made a very good living out of selling what were, in effect, sophisticated quack remedies.”
Epilogue
Could history be repeating itself? The whole point of having medicine regulators like the MHRA in the UK is to not allow businesses like the one in which Fleming conducted his manufacturing of completely ineffectual vaccines to market their medicines. I have written before about why I do not have confidence in the protection that the MHRA says it gives the UK public.
Without a doubt, clinical trials can be poorly conducted, proper tests can be bypassed, and statistics can be manipulated. At the same time, myths are created, titles are awarded, and prizes are given.
And what will I do with my copy of Vaxxers? I reckon that, after expenses, an eBay auction can double my investment. That I can put towards my winter supply of immunity-boosting vitamin D3, Vitamin C, and Zinc.
Wootton will continue to stay on my bookshelf.
Pete, that is a crucial point you have raised, and a tragic one for some.
Thanks for this, very interesting. Also there's now, in the UK and probably in some other countries too, the added complication that many people will have had AZ "DNA" jabs followed by Pfizer or Moderna mRNA "boosters" which were just about the only ones offered in the UK after AZ was "quietly dropped". The companies barely tested their own 'vaccines' never mind what a combination of the two types would do .... and in the event of trying to sue someone for adverse effects (or worse), who do you blame? Each one will say it's the other's fault and both will say "we never told anyone to mix them, don't blame us"