Media
reports suggest GSK, the British based pharmaceutical giant, are close to producing 1 billion doses of a coronavirus vaccine booster in 2021. Little is known about the ingredients of the vaccine, at least in the mainstream media.
GSK have merged with the French multinational pharmaceutical company, Sanofi.
Between them, GSK and Sanofi have paid out $5,063,939,512 in violation fines, GSK paying
$4,422,266,058 (billion) whilst Sanofi come in at
$641,673,454 (million)
GSK, who rolled out the Pandemrix vaccine for the last global pandemic, are set to make a pretty penny if they and Sanofi can get the coronavirus vaccine booster past the regulators - this process has been made easier for them due to global drug regulators giving drug companies a rapid path by allowing them to bypass animal testing.
Animal tests are a critical step in vaccine and drug development. Normally, a new vaccine can take anything between 5 to 20 years to develop before it can be made available to the public. Animal tests are carried out to determine safety and efficacy at preventing the disease in question. Regulators, such as the MHRA in the UK and the FDA in the US, usually require that a manufacturer shows a product is safe in animals before it goes into people.
This from the European Medicines Agency:
"The regulatory workshop was held virtually on 18 March 2020 in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It brought together delegates from 17 different countries, representing more than 20 medicines regulatory authorities globally, as well as experts from the World Health Organization and the European Commission, to share their views on the development of vaccines against COVID-19. The meeting was co-chaired by EMA and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)."
The summary report of that meeting can be found
here.
Pandemrix: The Swine Flu Vaccine
Research published in the BMJ in
2013 suggested a possible link between the swine flu vaccine given to children in the UK and Europe during the epidemic in 2009 and 2010 and a rare condition called narcolepsy, which causes people to fall asleep suddenly without any warning and at any time of the day.
A further report, also published in the BMJ in
2018, asked the question, 'Pandemrix vaccine: why was the public not told of early warning signs?'
In 2019, an Irish woman, Aoife Bennett, 27, who received the Pandemrix vaccine in school in 2009 as part of a state campaign against swine flu. sued the government after developing narcolepsy shortly after receiving GSK's Pandemrix. The case was settled for an undisclosed amount of compensation to the victim.
This from
The Guardian:
"Bennett told RTE on Wednesday that she was active and athletic until being vaccinated in December 2009. About two weeks later the side-effects began, she said. “Things changed very drastically.” She felt “like a sloth” and became fatigued, disoriented and prone to collapse.
"She expressed dismay that it took seven years of legal proceedings to obtain compensation.
"The defendants in the case were GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, the health service executive, the minister for health and the health products regulatory authority, formerly the Irish medicines board."
Further, in 2017, the UK high court rejected a British government appeal to withhold payments to dozens of British children who developed the sleeping disorder after swine flu vaccines. Six million people in Britain, and more across Europe, were given the Pandemrix vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline during the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic, but the jab was withdrawn after doctors noticed a sharp rise in narcolepsy among those receiving it.
It all seems pretty clear then that GSK's Pandemrix vaccine caused narcolepsy in some who were administered it. A way to keep such news at bay is to make settlements with those who file lawsuits.
When we look into the Swine Flu pandemic, we can see similarities into what is panning out today in 2020. The same questions should be asked about the safety of any potential Covid-19 vaccine and we shouldn't have to wait until people suffer a severe adverse reaction to it as we did with the GSK's swine flu vaccine.
Incidentally, what do GSK have to say about their product, Pandemrix, causing narcolepsy? Well, only yesterday, in efforts to convince the public that there will be no problem with their new vaccine for Covid, they claimed its previous flu pandemic vaccine, (Pandemrix)
which used some of the same ingredients as Covid-19 vaccines currently under development, was
not linked to a rise in cases of the sleep disorder narcolepsy.
This from
RTE:
"A spokesman for GSK said the "science has moved on" since concerns were raised about links between narcolepsy and its H1N1 vaccine, called Pandemrix, which was developed during the flu pandemic 10 years ago.
"He said evidence now suggests the link is to the H1N1 flu virus itself, not the vaccine.
"In a statement to Reuters, the company said available scientific data suggest that "the rare occurrence of narcolepsy during the 2009/10 flu pandemic was triggered by the body confusing a protein in the wild type H1N1 flu virus with a human protein relevant in regulating the sleep cycle."
In 2010, The
Daily Mail, a British newspaper, reported on how Drug firms cashed in on scare over swine flu. Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, who at the time was head of health at the Council of Europe, branded the swine flu pandemic as
'one of the greatest medical scandals of the century.'The 2010 Daily Mail article, which is like a version of Groundhog day playing out, also highlights how Sir Roy Anderson, a scientist who advised the UK Government on swine flu outbreak, held a £116,000-a-year post on the board of
GlaxoSmithKline.
One of the current Covid scientific advisers to the UK government, Patrick Vallance, is the former head of GlaxoSmithKline's vaccine division.
Déjà vu anyone?
Finally, although I cannot prove the authenticity of the claims in a video that was recently uploaded to YouTube, an independent journalist claims he has recently been contacted by a GSK whistleblower who told him vaccines trialled out on women contained an antigen that was shown to cause a 97% increase in infertility. The antigen also allegedly makes men sterile.
The video has since been removed by YouTube but can still be accessed
here.
Bob Fiddaman
