{"id":162408,"date":"2020-06-08T12:01:04","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T11:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=162408"},"modified":"2020-06-07T06:48:46","modified_gmt":"2020-06-07T05:48:46","slug":"when-profits-and-politics-drive-science-the-hazards-of-rushing-a-vaccine-at-warp-speed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/06\/when-profits-and-politics-drive-science-the-hazards-of-rushing-a-vaccine-at-warp-speed\/","title":{"rendered":"When Profits and Politics Drive Science: The Hazards of Rushing a Vaccine at \u201cWarp Speed\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

4 Jun 2020 – <\/em>More than 100 companies are competing to be first in the race to get a COVID-19 vaccine to market. It\u2019s a race against time, not because the death rate is climbing but because it is falling \u2013 to the point where there could soon be too few subjects to prove the effectiveness of the drug.<\/p>\n

So says Pascal Soriot, chief executive of\u00a0AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company that is a frontrunner in the race. Soriot said on May 24th<\/sup><\/a>, \u201cThe vaccine has to work and that\u2019s one question, and the other question is, even if it works, we have to be able to demonstrate it. We have to run as fast as possible before the disease disappears so we can demonstrate that the vaccine is effective.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the disease is disappearing of its own accord, why throw billions of dollars at developing a vaccine? The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has already agreed to provide<\/a> up to $1.2 billion\u00a0to AstraZeneca and another $483 million to US frontrunner Moderna to develop their experimental candidates. \u201cAs American taxpayers, we are justified in asking why,\u201d writes William Haseltine in Forbes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Both companies have attracted billions from private investors and don\u2019t need taxpayer money, and the government\u2019s speculative bets are being made on unproven technologies in the early stages of testing. The profits will go to the companies and their shareholders, while the liabilities will be borne by the public. Vaccine manufacturers are protected from liability for vaccine injuries by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program<\/a> and the 2005 PREP Act<\/a>, which impose damages instead on the US government and US taxpayers.<\/p>\n

Long-term systemic effects including cancer, Alzheimer\u2019s disease, autoimmune disease, and infertility can take decades to develop. But the stage is already being set<\/a> for mandatory vaccinations that will be \u201cdeployed\u201d by the US military<\/a> as soon as the end of the year. The HHS in conjunction with the Department of Defense has awarded\u00a0a $138 million contract for 600 million syringes prefilled with coronavirus vaccine, individually marked with trackable RFID chips. That\u2019s enough for two doses for nearly the entire US population.<\/p>\n

COVID-19, like other coronaviruses, is expected to mutate at least every season, raising serious questions<\/a> about claims that any vaccine will work. A successful vaccine has never been developed<\/a> for any of the many strains of coronaviruses despite 30 years of effort, due to the nature of the virus itself. In fact vaccinated people can have a higher chance of serious illness and death when later exposed to another strain of the virus, a phenomenon known as \u201cvirus interference<\/a>.\u201d An earlier SARS vaccine touted as effective because it produced antibodies to the virus never made it to market because the laboratory animals contracted more serious symptoms<\/a> on re-infection, and most of them died. In reports from China and South Korea<\/a>, even people who have previously recovered from COVID-19 have become re-infected with the virus. If antibodies created naturally in response to the wild virus don\u2019t protect against future infections, the weaker vaccine-triggered antibodies won\u2019t work either.<\/p>\n

Researchers working with the AstraZeneca vaccine claimed success in preliminary studies because its lab monkeys all survived and formed antibodies to COVID-19, but data reported later showed that the animals all became infected<\/a> when challenged, raising serious doubts about the vaccine\u2019s effectiveness. But these concerns have not deterred the HHS, which is proceeding at \u201cWarp Speed\u201d to get the new technologies on the market.<\/p>\n

Fast-tracking Moderna\u2019s mRNA Vaccine<\/strong><\/p>\n

Biotech company Moderna, the US frontrunner, has been allowed to skip animal trials altogether before rushing to human trials. It has gotten fast-track approval from the FDA for its \u201cmessenger RNA\u201d vaccine, an innovation that has never been approved for marketing or proven in a large-scale clinical trial. The major advantage of mRNA vaccines is the speed with which they can be deployed. Created in a lab rather than from a real virus, they can be mass-produced cost-effectively on a large scale and do not require uninterrupted cold storage. But this speed comes at the risk of major side effects.<\/p>\n

In a 2017 TED talk called \u201cRewriting the Genetic Code<\/a>,\u201d Moderna\u2019s current chief medical officer Dr. Tal Zaks said, \u201cWe\u2019re actually hacking the software of life \u2026.\u201d As explained<\/a> by a medical doctor writing in The UK Independent<\/em> on May 20th<\/sup>:<\/p>\n

Moderna\u2019s messenger RNA vaccine \u2026 uses a sequence of genetic RNA material produced in a lab that, when injected into your body, must invade your cells and hijack your cells\u2019 protein-making machinery called ribosomes to produce the viral components that subsequently train your immune system to fight the virus. \u2026<\/p>\n

In many ways, the vaccine almost behaves like an RNA virus itself except that it hijacks your cells to produce the parts of the virus, like the spike protein, rather than the whole virus. Some messenger RNA vaccines are even self-amplifying\u2026. There are unique and unknown risks to messenger RNA vaccines, including the possibility that they generate strong type I interferon responses that could lead to inflammation and autoimmune conditions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As noted in Science Magazine<\/a>, RNA that invades from outside the cell is the hallmark of a virus, and our immune systems have evolved ways to recognize and destroy it. To avoid that, Moderna\u2019s mRNA vaccine sneaks into cells encapsulated in nanoparticles, which aren\u2019t easily degraded and can cause toxic buildup in the liver. A lab-created self-amplifying virus that evades the cell\u2019s defenses by stealth sounds inherently risky. In fact \u201cstealth viruses<\/a>\u201d are classified as \u201cbioweapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

While long-proven, cheap coronavirus treatments with decades of safety testing are being described as dangerous and unproven for treating COVID-19, no one seems to be looking at the risks of the novel vaccines being rushed to market as the only viable alternative for getting the economy back to work.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why the Need for Haste?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The argument originally advanced for fast-tracking a COVID-19 vaccine was that the magnitude of the pandemic required shutting down the whole economy until a vaccine was found. But earlier dire projections have now been heavily revised downward. The 3.4% coronavirus mortality rate put forward by the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) at the start of the pandemic was downgraded by the CDC<\/a> in May to between 0.2% and 0.3%, less than one-tenth the original estimates. The computer-modeled projection of 2.2 million US deaths issued by Imperial College London in March, which triggered shutdowns<\/a> across the United States, has also been found to be \u201cwildly\u201d overblown. In fact researchers writing in the UK Telegraph on May 16th<\/sup><\/a> called it \u201cthe most devastating software mistake of all time.\u201d They wrote that \u201cwe would fire anyone for developing code like this\u201d and that the question was \u201cwhy our Government did not get a second opinion before swallowing Imperial\u2019s prescription.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here is a chart<\/a> of the actual death rate from COVID-19 in Sweden, which did not lock down its economy, versus the rate projected by the Imperial College model without lockdown:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Sweden has actually fared better than many industrialized countries that did lock down their economies. As of June 5th<\/sup><\/a>, Belgium, the UK, Spain and Italy, which all locked down, had more deaths per million than Sweden; while France, the Netherlands, Ireland, the US, Switzerland and Canada all had fewer. Sweden was in the median range. Other researchers have found no correlation between lockdowns<\/a> and COVID-19 deaths.<\/p>\n

In other news from the CDC, on May 23rd<\/sup> the agency reported<\/a> that the antibody tests used to determine whether people have developed an immunity to the virus are too unreliable to be used.<\/p>\n

But none of this seems to be dimming the hype and the deluge of investment money being thrown at the latest experimental vaccines. And perhaps that is the point of the exercise \u2013 to extract as much money as possible from gullible investors, including the US government, before the public discovers that the fundamentals of these stocks do not support the hype. If we need seven billion doses of the vaccine before life can return to normal, <\/strong>as Bill Gates contends<\/a>, the profit bonanza is enormous; and there is no need for vaccine manufacturers to proceed with caution, since the government will pick up the tab for vaccine injuries.<\/p>\n

Moderna: A Multibillion-Dollar \u201cUnicorn\u201d That Has Never Brought a Product to Market<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moderna in particular has been suspected of pumping its stock price<\/a> with unreliable preliminary test data. On May 18th<\/sup> its stock jumped by as much as 30%, after it issued a press release announcing positive results from a small preliminary trial of its coronavirus vaccine. After the market closed, the company announced a stock offering aimed at raising $1 billion; and on May 18th<\/sup> and 19th<\/sup>, Moderna executives dumped<\/a> nearly $30 million worth of stock for a profit of $25 million.<\/p>\n

On May 19th<\/sup>, however, the stock rocketed back down, after STAT News questioned<\/a> the company\u2019s test results. An antibody response was reported for only eight of the 45 patients, not enough for statistical analysis. Was the response significant enough to create immunity? And what about the other 37 patients?<\/p>\n

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the results a \u201ccatastrophe\u201d for the company. He wrote<\/a> on May 20th<\/sup>:<\/p>\n

Three of the 15 human guinea pigs<\/a> in the high dose cohort (250 mcg) suffered a \u201cserious adverse event\u201d within 43 days of receiving Moderna\u2019s jab. Moderna \u2026 acknowledged that three volunteers developed Grade 3 systemic events<\/a>, defined by the FDA as \u201cPreventing daily activity and requiring medical intervention.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moderna allowed only exceptionally healthy volunteers to participate in the study. A vaccine with those reaction rates could cause grave injuries in 1.5 billion humans<\/a> if administered to \u201cevery person on earth\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A volunteer named Ian Haydon buoyed the markets when he appeared on CNBC<\/a> to say he felt fine after getting the vaccine. But he later revealed that after the second jab, he got chills and a fever of over 103\u00b0, lost consciousness, and \u201cfelt more sick than he ever has before<\/a>.\u201d And those were just the short-term adverse effects. The long-term degenerative effects won\u2019t be known for years.<\/p>\n

By May 22nd<\/sup>, Moderna\u2019s stock was down by 26% from its earlier high, making its 30% rise on a misleading press release look like a \u201cpump and dump\u201d scheme. On CNBC on May 19th<\/sup>, Jacob Frankel, a former Securities Exchange Commission lawyer, said Moderna\u2019s stock offering on the heels of hyped news was the type of action that would draw scrutiny by the SEC, and that it could have a criminal component.<\/p>\n

Dual Use? Another Look at Moderna\u2019s mRNA Vaccine<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moderna\u2019s stock has more than tripled this year, taking it to a market cap of over $22 billion. STAT News called it \u201can astonishing feat for a company that currently sells zero products.\u201d Many of the companies actively developing COVID-19 vaccines have longer and more impressive track records. Why the keen interest in this \u201cunicorn\u201d startup that went public only in 2018 and has no record of market success?<\/p>\n

Moderna\u2019s stock first shot up after the World Health Organization announced on February 24th<\/sup> that the world needed to prepare for a global pandemic, collapsing stock markets everywhere. In a well-timed press release the next day, Moderna announced that testing of its vaccine on humans would begin in March, rocketing its stock price up by nearly 30%<\/a>. Mega-investors made tens of millions of dollars in a single day, including BlackRock, the world\u2019s largest asset manager, which made $68 million<\/em> just on February 25th<\/sup>. BlackRock was called \u201cthe fourth branch of government<\/a>\u201d after it was tasked in March with dispensing up to $4.5 trillion in Federal Reserve credit through \u201cspecial purpose vehicles\u201d established by the Treasury and the Fed.<\/p>\n

Moderna has other friends in high places, including the Pentagon. Several years ago, Moderna received<\/a> millions of dollars from the Pentagon\u2019s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Perhaps the fact that Moderna\u2019s mRNA vaccine is a \u201cstealth virus\u201d riding in on nanoparticles to evade the cell\u2019s defenses explains DARPA\u2019s interest in the technology. DARPA was behind<\/a> the creation of both DNA and RNA vaccines, funding their early research and development by Moderna and by Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc.<\/p>\n

In a 2010 document titled \u201cBiotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens<\/a>,\u201d the US Air Force acknowledged that it was studying \u201cgenetically engineered pathogens that could pose serious threats to society,\u201d including \u201cbinary biological weapons, designer genes, gene therapy as a weapon, stealth viruses, host-swapping diseases, and designer diseases.\u201d In December 2017, over\u00a01,200 emails\u00a0released<\/a> under open records requests revealed that the\u00a0US military is now the top funde<\/a>r behind the controversial \u201cgenetic extinction\u201d technology known as \u201cgene drives.\u201d As investigative reporter Whitney Webb observed<\/a> in a May 4th<\/sup> article, \u201cthese genetic \u2018kill switches\u2019 could also be inserted into actual humans through artificial chromosomes, which \u2013 just as they have the potential to extend life \u2013 also have the potential to cut it short.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biowarfare is forbidden under international treaty, but the army\u2019s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick says its investigations are to \u201cprotect the warfighter from biological threats\u201d and to protect civilians from threats to public health. Even assuming that is true, are the army\u2019s technicians proficient enough to tinker with the genetic code without hitting a kill switch or two by mistake?<\/p>\n

The military is thinking about war, the pharmaceutical companies and investors are thinking about profits, the politicians are thinking about getting a vaccine to market so the country can return to work, and even the regulators are bypassing proper safety tests in the rush to get the entire global population vaccinated. That means it\u2019s up to us, the recipients of these novel untested GMO vaccines, to demand some serious vetting before the military shows up at our doors with their prefilled RFID-chipped syringes some time later this year.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Ellen Brown is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>, an attorney, founder\/chairperson of the\u00a0<\/em>Public Banking Institute<\/a>, and author of thirteen books including\u00a0<\/em>Web of Debt<\/a>,\u00a0The Public Bank Solution<\/a>, and\u00a0<\/em>Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age<\/a>.\u00a0Her 300+ blog articles are at\u00a0ellenbrown.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 ellenbrown.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4 Jun 2020 – More than 100 companies are competing to be first in the race to get a COVID-19 vaccine to market. It\u2019s a race against time, not because the death rate is climbing but because it is falling \u2013 to the point where there could soon be too few subjects to prove the effectiveness of the drug.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":104717,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[244,271,1879,1829,1868,530,289,744,401,710,1937,1864,1102,723,304,1447,1956,1880,1957,339,124,1836,75],"class_list":["post-162408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-china","tag-community","tag-compassion","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-cuba","tag-economy","tag-empathy","tag-environment","tag-health","tag-lockdown","tag-pandemic","tag-public-health","tag-research","tag-science","tag-science-and-medicine","tag-semen","tag-sharing","tag-sperm","tag-trade","tag-united-nations","tag-who","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}