Just a minor glitch in the narrative...
...which won't derail the vaccine gravy train from its path.
A few weeks ago, Dutch Member of the European Parliament Rob Roos reported on a hearing during which a representative of Pfizer representative “admitted” that they did not know about “stopping immunization” before their mRNA therapeutics hit the market. Given the context, it is obvious that Janine Small, Director of International Developed Markets, misspoke about “stopping immunization” and meant to confirm that the so-called vaccines were not tested towards providing (true) immunization nor stopping infection and transmission. Her next sentence, “We had to really move at the speed of science,” provides a gruesome insight into the priorities of the health sciences, big pharma corporations, and government regulators. The prevailing Twitter sentiment was to associate the “speed of science” with the flow of money — into the pockets of big pharma execs and stakeholders.
MEP Roos’ succinct video statement put the blame for the misinterpretation of the vaccines’ efficacy squarely on politicians. Above, I put the word “admitted” in quotes because COVID zealots were quick to emphasize that “Preventing transmission [was] never required for COVID vaccines’ initial approval” along with similar off-target write-ups. Whether they are just tone-deaf or intentionally mal-inform the public, the fact-checkers did their thing where they dispel an extreme or patently wrong interpretation of the statement in question. Here, Reuters and others refute the claim that the vaccine manufacturers were required to test their products for immunization. Yet that claim was never made. The actual concern among the clear-thinking is about the misunderstanding of vaccine efficacy by politicians and journalists, which led to unwarranted vaccination mandates, COVID passports, and severe discrimination of unvaccinated individuals around the globe. To dispute the validity of that concern would be silly, even for a fact-checker, given the lived experience of unvaccinated people during the last year-and-a-half.
That the end point of the vaccine trials was symptomatic COVID-19 (the illness), not infection with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) nor transmission nor hospitalization nor death was well-known to any unbiased observer since before December 2020. This unsuspecting geographer wrote about it on his faculty blog on 13 December 2020, citing the courageous Dr. Peter Doshi’s critical commentary in the British Medical Journal from 26 November 2020. In it, Doshi notes with respect to Pfizer’s 95% efficacy claim (my emphasis):
First, a relative risk reduction is being reported, not absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%. Second, these results refer to the trials’ primary endpoint of covid-19 of essentially any severity, and importantly not the vaccine’s ability to save lives, nor the ability to prevent infection, nor the efficacy in important subgroups (e.g. frail elderly). Those still remain unknown. Third, these results reflect a time point relatively soon after vaccination, and we know nothing about vaccine performance at 3, 6, or 12 months, so cannot compare these efficacy numbers against other vaccines like influenza vaccines (which are judged over a season). Fourth, children, adolescents, and immunocompromised individuals were largely excluded from the trials, so we still lack any data on these important populations.
Doshi also refers to an article by NPR science correspondent Joe Palca about the need for a nasal spray vaccine rather than an intramuscular injection if you wanted to prevent infection and transmission. That article is from 28 August 2020! Doshi himself had also written earlier about the inadequate vaccine trials. For example, on 21 October 2020, he cites Moderna Chief Medical Officer Tal Zaks stating “Our trial will not demonstrate prevention of transmission,” for financial and operational reasons. In other words, the gravy train was already moving at the speed of science.
Clearly, this was no secret, yet the manufacturers certainly did their part in misleading the public, as exemplified in Pfizer’s April 2021 press release claiming their product “was 100% effective in preventing COVID-19 cases in South Africa”.
Following in the footsteps of MEP Roos, another notoriously dissident MEP, Cristian Terhes from Romania’s Christian-Democratic National Peasants’ Party, obtained an admission from an EU bureaucrat that the European Commission was well aware of the limitations of the mRNA vaccine function. In the October 13 meeting of the “Special Committee on the COVID-19 pandemic”, Terhes questioned Wolfgang Philipp, Acting Director for Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority, about the mRNA product procurement. After celebrating the vaccines’ supposed success in reducing hospitalizations and deaths, Philipp nonchalantly said the following (my emphasis):
Now, if you want to have a vaccine that prevents transmission, perhaps by luck we could have got it, but it is not there yet. There is work going on in this direction but it is a completely different design of these vaccines.
Philipps explains the concern away by suggesting that a decision was made early in the pandemic to focus vaccine development on the prevention of severe outcomes rather than transmission. If true, this would just further illustrate the fear- and panic-driven pandemic politics of the last three years and the uncontrolled influence of the pharma lobby across the supposedly democratic and enlightened West.
Around the same time, MEP Terhes asked his Twitter followers for examples of “statements from or clips with public figures claiming that the COVID vaccines are stopping the transmission / spread of the virus” and received over 5,500 replies. Collections like this will contribute to the Library & Archives of COVID Excesses that will inevitably come to light. As Terhes tweeted, “Their lies and disinformation must be exposed!”
The statements by Pfizer’s Small and the EU’s Philipps reminded me of a glitch in the matrix, the matrix here being the dominant narrative about COVID-19 and the mRNA therapeutics. A similar glitch had occurred when the head of Bayer’s Pharmaceuticals Division, Stefan Oelrich, bragged about marketing the mRNA injections as “vaccines” rather than the “gene therapy” that they are. I don’t really think that these are glitches in “the matrix” but rather that different groups of people live in different cognitive layers with little substantial interaction. Physically, we share planet earth, but our collective minds seem to be drifting apart.