Fighting the COVID-19 medical tyranny at the vaccination table

A brief history of my troubled months as a vaccinator

Prologue

The COVID-19 vaccination programme has crushed the hallmarks of clinical practice: professional autonomy and therapeutic relationship.

Vaccines are medicines. All medicines have sometimes benefits and often harms. The clinician/patient consultation aims at getting to know each other, building trust, discussing goals, weighing options, and arriving at a therapeutic decision. They are most important for vaccines because these are administered to healthy people, and likely harms become more concerning.

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Interlude: in what follows, wherever I write COVID-19 vaccine please read COVID-19 “gene therapy”, as in the video below it is referred to by Stefan Oelrich. He is the president of Bayer AG Pharmaceuticals. In the video, he is speaking during his October 2021 address at the World Health Summit opening ceremony.

[Note: after writing this post I found that fact-checkers had “debunked” this video. I have now written an entire post where I debunk the debunkers. There I delve into the fact-checkers deception and the cheap tricks of the medicine regulators that led to the shortcuts they were so adamant to tell us they had never taken.]

Stefan Oelrich, president of the Board of Management of Bayer AG, speaking at the November 2021 World Health Summit opening ceremony. The transcript:

“For us, therefore, we are really taking that leap, us as a company, Bayer, in cell and gene therapy, which to me is one of these examples where really we are going to make a difference, hopefully, moving forward. There is some, um, ultimately the mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy. I have always liked to say if we had surveyed two years ago in the public “would you be willing to take a gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body, we would have probably had a 95% refusal rate. I think this pandemic has also opened many people’s eyes to innovation in a way that was maybe not possible before.“

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Speed was the driving factor in the design of COVID-19 vaccination programmes worldwide. In the last part of the year 2020, in the UK there was a sense that vaccines to prevent COVID-19 disease would be offered only to certain groups of people. Instead, we have all seen that we have stopped at neonates – if one excludes the possible expression of the spike protein in breast milk. With the exclusion of infection control measures – washing or jelling hands between patients, and using aseptic techniques at the vaccination table – all other long-established clinical principles, guidelines and procedures were sacrificed at the altar of speed.

Between January and July 2021 I was seconded to work as a nurse vaccinator at the centre I had helped to set up. It was a time of constant struggle. I found myself having to fit my professional and personal ethos, my clinical expertise, and my care for patients within the narrow, rough-cut edges of the COVID-19 vaccination programme.

Also, the whole story of the vaccination programme is a story of constant change with obscure drives. There was relentless moving of the programme goalposts with vague underpinning. Its production line design did everything to attack the way I care as a nurse. I am sure it undermined also how many of my colleagues care.

To “qualify” as a nurse vaccinator you have to complete four online training modules and refer to a few national guideline publications on vaccination. For myself, I had been also piling up and studying clinical and news articles, government guidelines, data tables, videos, and web page downloads on ‘everything COVID-19’ since March 2020. A mountain of data standing in my cloud at more than 6GB, organised in more than 30 folders, from “Behaviour” to “Young People”.

The web of interconnections in this formless mass of information disturbed my night sleep. I would meditate on the COVID-19 vaccine studies I had read. I would bring back images of patients who had sat at my table that day. I would ponder on what else I could have discussed with them in those precious few minutes allowed for vaccination. I would rephrase in my head new clinical findings to discuss the next day with new patients.

But, like every morning, there I am at the vaccination centre. I sit at my designated vaccination table, my usual jovial me. 8:30 am, doors open. The conveyor belt starts rolling.

Let’s “save lives”

In December 2020 I joined the UK vaccination programme on the promise made in October 2020 by Kate Bingham, head of the UK government vaccine task force. Thirty million people would be vaccinated, including only those at risk of severe COVID-19 disease:

“People keep talking about ‘time to vaccinate the whole population’, but that is misguided. There’s going to be no vaccination of people under 18. It’s an adult-only vaccine, for people over 50 […]”

It was incontrovertible then that the COVID-19 injections trials were still young and ongoing. By definition, long-term data on harms and benefits was unavailable. People aged 50 or below were at very little risk of severe COVID-19 disease. The uncertainty about harm did not warrant the administration of the injections to these people. Back then, there was not a hint of the lie of vaccines preventing transmission, and hence of the necessity of vaccinating younger people to save granny’s life. The UK Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) kick-started the programme based on these reasonable principles.

In January 2021, we opened the first vaccination centre in my town. The Oxford-AstraZeneca injections were on the tables. Not long after, the COVID-19 vaccination guidelines changed. In February, the JCVI started to sneak in age groups below 50 on their priority list. It was shocking. Here, solving to the harm/benefit equation would take much more thinking, and time with patients at the vaccination table.

First observational evidence of harms

During my non-working hours, I was probing through news and clinical research outlets. Back in 2020, I found a UK government internet tool, still today unknown to most clinicians: Qcovid. By inputting a plethora of an individual’s demographic details and past medical history, anyone can calculate the chances of that individual’s risk of death and hospitalisation from COVID-19. I started using this with the person at my table as part of a discussion on the suitability of the vaccine.

But, Norwegian news about AstraZeneca serious blood clotting events in the younger population were trying to surface through the mud that UK eminent detractors and fact checkers were spreading. AstraZeneca was approved in Norway on 29 January 2021, and shortly thereafter discontinued there on 11 March 2021. In six weeks the Norwegians had had enough harm to decide to take the AstraZeneca vaccine off their market. How could we, instead, be plodding on? It was no relief for me the reassurance from the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) that they had not found a “safety signal” – what a misnomer!

I began sending to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) rapid responses to articles that were promoting the safety of AstraZeneca for all people – the BMJ is one of the few journals which has allowed some level of debate around COVID-19 injections. In the first, I criticised the poor work the MHRA was doing. Norway had stopped injecting AstraZeneca due to its harms after only having injected 120,000 people. In the UK we had reached 20 million and were continuing, blindfolded.

Also, it was back then that I requested to the MHRA the full COVID-19 injection adverse reaction data set. In my previous post, I started recounting how this request became a still ongoing saga.

My FOI battle against the MHRA to get the adverse drug reaction data for the COVID-19 injections

The 3-minute vaccine consultation

The vaccination centre had to operate at speed. We were expected to deliver up to 1,500 vaccinations a day: eight tables, one nurse and one administrator at each table, for 10 hours with one 30-minute break. That makes 3.04 minutes per vaccination: “warp speed”. I felt it was bizarre that everyone attending the centre for their vaccination saw this as laudable efficiency. For me, it was pressure to vaccinate without consideration for the individual sitting beside me.

I was the “15-minute nurse”. I never had anyone of my colleagues telling me to be quicker. But I did get the occasional ironic remark about me “chatting away” with people at the table. One key feature of my table? It had the highest rate of vaccine refusal.

Yet, it was still a small rate, despite a large number of younger and healthy people attending. I was struggling to bring myself to vaccinate those who did not seem concerned by our analysis of personal COVID-19 risk and potential harms of AstraZeneca. For most younger healthy people this analysis would boil down to “should not have the vaccine”. The noise about the COVID-19 vaccines that the media were spreading with the support of eminent and influential doctors was still reverberating in my patients’ ears. It was masking the clinical rationale screaming out: “vaccine not appropriate!” But, I do believe in freedom of choice. What right did I have to point an individual’s decision towards a direction that I believed to be correct? “We are all individuals, we are all different”.

The COVID-19 vaccination programme has killed the concept of individualised care and has infantilised the adult individual

In frustration at reading an article on the BMJ promoting AstraZeneca for all, I wrote again to the journal. On 6 May, the BMJ published my rapid response containing a harm/benefit analysis for the AstraZeneca injections in healthy people aged 40 and below. It showed harms greater than benefits. In there, I also advocated for the MHRA to prohibit AstraZeneca in those below 40 years of age. The day after, the JCVI advised against the inoculation of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 injections to healthy individuals in that age group. To this day, the MHRA gives thumbs up to AstraZeneca for 18+ year-old people, as does the European Medicines Agency. In any case, then I thought that a degree of evidence-based public health policy had prevailed. I thought that now I could sleep well. I was wrong.

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Harms reprise

By May 2021, our centre had switched to Pfizer injections. But, the partial victory on AstraZeneca did not solve my two clinical dilemmas.

First, the individuals at my table were getting younger and younger. Most of them were healthy, some very fit. Often their motivation for having chosen vaccination was the spectre of the COVID passports. I would explain to a young man the increasing number of myocarditis and pericarditis reports. I would share with them my analysis of the harm/benefit of the Pfizer injections. To young women, I would explain the lack of reproductive system data in humans. But, with the talks of vaccine passports, often our discussion could not breach through the thought of the social restrictions they might endure without vaccination. A losing battle for every conscientious clinician, and a source of constant frustration for me.

Driving back from the vaccination centre in the summer of 2021 I took this “traffic information” photo (not an illegal action: I used a dash cam). Seeing it gave me stomach cramps. It has become for me the symbol of all that is wrong with the COVID-19 vaccination programme.

In the usual desperation, I sent to the BMJ the Pfizer analysis I had done, which appeared as a rapid response at the end of June 2021. What I found frightening at the time was that the data for that analysis was available, albeit relegated in a difficult-to-find supplementary appendix, in the original Pfizer trial report on COVID-19 vaccination in younger people. Why none of the eminences and influential speakers were picking up on the same data? I was and am not an eminence or an influential speaker. The Daily Sceptic’s Vaccine Safety Update in July 2021 picked up my dejected analysis in the BMJ, and that was it. I felt, once again, as if I was trying to shout in a nightmare, and not being able to do it.

That same month, vaccination centre managers started doing staff risk assessments. When it came to my turn, questioned "are you vaccinated?" I gave my usual formulaic: "Prefer not to say". It was, and it is, my business. Shortly thereafter, I had a chat with my director of services to ease me out of the centre. I was needed back in the community as urgent community response senior charge nurse. The service has a first-class and busy team. Attendance at the vaccination centre was dropping. I had done my work there. I obliged.

Set free from tyranny

Since all those events, I have been trying to make sense of the nightmare that year has been. I have worked to arrive at some conclusions, at some justifications for all that has happened in the name of COVID-19.

I hope that at my vaccination table I provided, for those that were still able to hear the balanced message, an escape from the COVID-19 coercion. I hated injecting those who, despite the vaccine being far from clinically indicated for them, were adamant to have it, whatever their reasons. If I had not been there, someone else would have injected them anyway. Sure, if all nurses and doctors in the world had stood up together against medical tyranny, things would have taken a different course. But, dear reader, how likely was it to ever happen? There is not an example in history when everyone has stood up together against any malevolent force. I was there to help those who were ready to break free and needed a sound reason to do it. I was there for those who could be strengthened by our mutual understanding, compassion, and therapeutic relationship. They ended up knowing that they could endure marginalisation and criticism in the name of free, informed choice.

I remember how, after our quarter-of-an-hour chat, the expression of each one of those patients would turn into one of realisation that they did not have to get vaccinated there and then. They had the rationale and hence the strength to refuse vaccination. They could go back home or to work to think for themselves about what they had discovered about their true need for vaccination. And, whatever the consequences, to even decide to remain, there I say it, unvaccinated.