
Module 4 Vaccines and therapeutics, Day 2-4, 16-18th January
From HART member Dr Ros Jones
Day 1 revisited:
HART reported on the proceedings of the first morning here, particularly concentrating on Hugo Keith’s opening remark. Even there, it was obvious from his use of words such as “overwhelmingly”, “entirely effective” “beyond argument” in the opening remarks, don’t exactly suggest a balanced and open mindset to the findings of this Module.
UK MFA have covered in detail the opening remarks of the Core Participants from day 1 pm and day 2 am. One point highlighted was that “the representative from Clinically Vulnerable Families felt that it was to be regretted that children were not vaccinated SOONER and that it was a failure of the UK Government that under 5s were never vaccinated – as both of these measures could have protected clinically vulnerable people in families. He felt the JCVI was too cautious and too slow re authorising the jabs for children and that the impact on family members should have been considered as much as the impact of the jabs on the child. He also regretted the low uptake of the jabs in children. This is obviously in violation of fundamental principles of medical ethics as well as basic morality, that a child would be vaccinated and take on all the risk of the injection for the sole purpose of protecting someone else. It is sad to see that the morally bankrupt argument that it is acceptable to use children as human shields is still, regrettably, alive and well in 2025.”
Day 2: Ruth Rafferty (Scottish Vaccine Injury Group)
Moving to afternoon of Day 2, we saw Ruth Rafferty being questioned by Mr Keith: “Now, in your statements you have.. raised a vast number of points and issues spanning the technology of vaccines, the scientific foundations for them, their authorisation, their research and development, their delivery, in fact almost every aspect of vaccination and vaccines. Today I’d like you, however, to try to help us with expanding on those issues and those concerns that your members hold with a particular focus on the list of issues, the scope of this Inquiry, and this module. There are obviously all number of points and areas and issues that fall wildly outside the scope of this Inquiry and I don’t want to take time looking at those.”
Mr Keith cannot be held solely responsible for the scope or terms of reference of the Inquiry, but his remarks underline the fallacy running through the whole of Module 4, which is that it makes sense to look at the efficiencies of the rollout and the problems of access let alone ‘vaccine hesitancy’, without first looking critically at whether or not the vaccines were indeed SAFE or EFFECTIVE. However, the idea that such details are “wildy” outside its scope, illustrates the huge waste of time and money involved. Mrs Rafferty stood her ground and did raise the difference between process 1 (ie the purified synthetic vaccines used for the trials) and process 2 (the large scale production for the population rollout, using EColi production) in particular the variability between production batches for a so–called ‘biologic’. “What we have a problem with is the upscaled product. Because these are biologics, and because the process defines a product, if you change any little thing in the manufacture of a biologic, the temperature, the ingredients, where it’s made, you can get a different product. And there was concerns raised whether the upscaled product was comparable to the clinical trial product.”
She also raised concerns that “these are mRNA vaccines have never before been authorised for use in the public, and because they were brought out in such a massive scale, our concerns are that there wasn’t enough vigilance.” She highlighted for example one of their members who was “in hospital paralysed for months, and we discovered that she had the same diagnosis as a condition that appeared in the AstraZeneca trial. Had her doctors known that that had happened during the AstraZeneca trial, the trial was actually paused.”.
Mr Keith interrupted with, “Right, there’s a number of — and I perfectly understand that you hold those beliefs but there’s a number of assertions or observations made in the course of that answer which we haven’t got time to unpick now.” So the fact that the AZ vaccine trial was paused because of a case of transverse myelitis (even the BBC reported it so it must have been a FACT!!) has now become ‘beliefs’ and ‘assertions’.
UKMFA covered Ruth Rafferty’s testimony and also the excellent appearance by Kate Scott, from Vaccine Injured Bereaved UK (VIBUK). Again, it fell to these two women to try and raise the questions that the lawyers seemed reluctant to consider.
Day 3: Matt Hancock
On day 3, listening to ex-Secretary of State Matt Hancock produced no real surprises nor Hugo Keith’s line of questions. Both men, displayed absolute confidence that the vaccines were highly effective and responsible for getting us out of lockdowns. Mr Keith in his opening remarks to Mr Hancock said “By the metric of the need to protect at a population level against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the vaccine programme was in the provisional view of the Inquiry — no final decision has of course yet been made — an overwhelming success..So I want it to be made absolutely plain that your attendance here today is to help us address literally a handful of discrete issues, which arise out of both of those programmes, on which you can help us prepare for the next pandemic, and indicate ways in which improvements can be made, where they are capable of being made, and where also, lessons have been learned as to how well the job was done and therefore why it is necessary to embed some of those successes into the system”
With that glowing praise, Mr Hancock needed no more encouragement to talk up the benefits of the new ‘platforms’ which would enable development at speed. “So I have a very strong view, post-pandemic, that we need to have a vaccine available as soon as possible, and I think the goal of having a vaccine available to any reasonably expected pathogen within 100 days at scale is the right target.” Further, “because of the success of the vaccine programme but we must retain that learning and retain those capabilities and, indeed, strengthen them now in peacetime — is especially in the manufacture.”
Misinformation:
Towards the end of his time in the witness box, Baroness Hallett interrupted to ask him “What steps, if any, could the government take to try to counteract that misinformation? To which he replied “Yes, we did a huge amount of work on this”. It is not difficult to see where this is heading – we already heard on Day 1 that “We have asked a number of organisations, DHSE, NHS England and the UKHSA to explain how the UK government tackled mis- and dis-information and we will be looking at the work of the counter disinformation unit [CDU] and the rapid response unit. What did they do to address these real problems? We have obtained evidence from the social media platforms as to how the government interacted with them and we will be hearing from the permanent secretary at the DCMS on the process for identifying and acting on such material.” We have also seen the Inquiry secretary, Ben Connah, telling Sky News that, “The chair of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry will not hesitate to make recommendations about the use of social media and its role in spreading misinformation and disinformation around vaccines…In this module, we will be looking specifically at misinformation and disinformation and whether that led to vaccine hesitancy. If the chair, Baroness Hallett, thinks there are recommendations to be made about the use of social media, then she won’t hesitate to do that. She’s got a very broad scope and she’s determined to use it.”
Cross-examination
Mr Hancock got slightly more of a grilling from Professor Thomas, KC, on behalf of the Federation of Ethnic Minority Healthcare Organisations. He reminded Mr Hancock of his remarks that he referred to trade unions as being “unthinkingly against vaccination as a condition of deployment. They will have to answer for their rejection of care, science, and objective fact”. He then asked Mr Hancock “Well, isn’t it true that all the unions were doing in fact were raising legitimate safety concerns from frontline healthcare workers” to which Mr Hancock with his usual arrogance replied, “No, they were promoting illegitimate arguments. precisely because of their highest infection rates amongst those groups, they would have been the greatest beneficiaries of vaccination, and an anti-scientific approach helped to make it harder for those of us who were trying to save lives….I think the difference between us is that you make the point — you put forward that these concerns raised by the trade unions were legitimate. Actually, they were not legitimate because they weren’t based on science. The right position that the trade unions should have taken was to join in the efforts to reassure, support, and encourage vaccination for those who were meeting a lot of vulnerable people, and who could have had their own health safeguarded, and especially the health of those in their care safeguarded.”
Lucky for Matt Hancock, and indeed for any unvaccinated NHS staff, that he had already been caught with his trousers down (literally I’m afraid), so it was Sajid Javid who on Sky News Live, faced an irate Consultant Anaesthetist, Dr Steve James, who explained the small matter of naturally acquired immunity!
Anna Morris steps up
The baton then passed to Anna Morris, KC for the Vaccine Injured groups. She pushed him to agree that injuries occurred and then asked about the post rollout pharmacovigilance, which produced the following response: “We came to see the pharmacovigilance system as effectively like a phase IV trial, as in you did the first three phases, got — reached formal clinical validation, did the rollout across the population, but we kept essentially measuring the effectiveness of the different vaccines all the way through. And that’s what led to the changes in the recommendations around the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, for instance, that came later, in I think March 2021, because effectively, we were measuring those responses. In order to get that data accurate, you need to make sure that adverse responses are notified.” Of course he was right that is was March 2021 when several European countries suspended AstraZeneca and then dropped it for all under 50s, but quite wrong in implying that the UK’s pharmacovigilance system (his area of responsibility) had changed their recommendations for use of AZ at that time – indeed, the MHRA continued insisting that there was no evidence of a problem. Indeed, Kate Scott for the Vaccine Injured Bereaved UK (VIBUK) had pointed out in her testimony the previous day that delays in recognition of adverse events such as Guillain Barre syndrome and Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopaenia (VITT) and hence alerts to the medical profession, led to avoidable delays in starting appropriate treatment.
Here is a Daily Sceptic article from Nick Hunt, author of the Perseus report, another group who like HART and UKMFA provided a detailed witness statement but was not allowed to present it at the Inquiry. He describes shouting at the TV the questions Anna Morris should have been asking Mr Hancock, all questions which he provided in his report.
Professor Heidi Larson, founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project
Following on from Mr Hancock, Hugo Keith turns his attention to Professor Heidi Larson, the Inquiry’s commissioned expert opinion, professor of anthropology, risk and decision science at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). “I founded the Vaccine Confidence Project in 2010, seeing a growing amount of questioning in different parts of the world, and what we do at the Vaccine Confidence Project is we do monitoring and trying to understand what’s driving that, and where it is in the world. It’s a global effort, but certainly we’ve been spending a lot of time in our work in the UK.” She also helped launch the Vaccine Confidence Index.
Vaccine hesitancy:
She and Mr Keith held the following semantic discussion about the term ‘vaccine hesitancy’. Mr K “And just on this point of the acceptability, there are some who say that one shouldn’t use the phrase “vaccine hesitancy”. Does anything turn on that, in your professional opinion?” Prof Larson, “I think the issue is not using the term “anti-vax”. I think hesitancy is a reasonable thing, can be a reasonable thing. If you’re a young mother with a first child and there’s a brand new vaccine, I think it actually is not — I understand hesitancy, but you don’t want it to stay as hesitancy.”
This was rather reminiscent of the BBC reality TV show ‘Unvaccinated’, in which mathematician Professor Hannah Fry assumed that the only reason for vaccine hesitancy was ignorance. Neither she nor indeed Professor Larson appear to have any concept that these vaccines might be causing more harm than good, let alone any knowledge of the now huge body of scientific literature to confirm exactly that. In Professor Larson’s view, it is quite ‘reasonable’ to hesitate as long as this is only for a day or two while you check out ‘trusted sources’, stop hesitating and go along to the vaccine centre.
Complacency, Convenience and Confidence (aka conspiracy)
She then discussed potential causes of hesitancy, namely the 3 Cs of complacency, convenience and confidence. Mr Keith “In no particular order, they may stem from physical access, getting to a vaccination centre, or mobility issues, or access to communication, linguistic problems, all the way across the range to the impact of institutional discrimination, believing that the state and the healthcare system doesn’t care, to issues about trust and misinformation?” Prof Larson: “it’s rarely all of those reasons and that’s why it’s important to try to understand which are the reasons, and to have a bit of empathy with maybe why they’re not getting their vaccine and help them get there.” Again the view that the only acceptable form of hesitancy is one that can be empathised with and overcome by resolving access difficulties.
The Vaccine Confidence Index
We were told that, “The Vaccine Confidence Index has four components: confidence in the safety of vaccines, confidence in the effectiveness, do they work; confidence in the — or the religious compatibility” The fourth question which she seemed to have forgotten is “are vaccines important?” There was a little aside about the historic high levels of vaccine uptake in the past, being temporarily dented by “controversies” over Pertussis vaccines in the 1970s and then MMR in the late 1990s (clearly due to misinformation!). Mr Keith volunteered, “And measles is a very dangerous disease, is it not?” to which Heidi Larson replied, “It’s very dangerous and it is the most infectious of all the childhood diseases.” She also interestingly said, “I think that particularly around new vaccines, whenever there’s a new vaccine or a new combination of vaccines, it’s not uncommon, and it’s — I think it’s reasonable to have questions when you have something new.” Well that’s big of her.
Discussing confidence in childhood vaccines, Prof Larson then went on to say, “There was a real negative hit on confidence during the pandemic for the childhood vaccine… for the perceived importance of vaccine for children, the perceived safety, and effectiveness, dropped from being over 90% before Covid to being 70, 72%. That’s a very significant drop in public confidence for childhood vaccines.” But of course, never a thought for why pushing a totally novel technology onto children for a condition they weren’t likely to get, would induce a very sensible protective response in most parents and would make them very distrustful of those who were advising such a reckless course of action.
Back to Misinformation and Disinformation
Mr Keith then turned to the topic of misinformation and disinformation. Q “It may seem blindingly obvious, but during the pandemic, Professor, were there many different ways in which dis- and misinformation emerged?” A. “Yes, there was an explosion of mis- and disinformation”. Q. “And no doubt fuelled or accelerated by, of course, the Internet?” A. “Yes, and social media, and I think there’s another really important thing to think about with that: the explosive spread of mis- and disinformation, and that’s the fact that during Covid or pre-Covid, most people, particularly in the hesitancy — or in people who were in groups who had issues or had questions, were those who were specifically looking for information on vaccines.” Again, given the censorship and buy-in of the MSM, the only place to look for extra information was on Social Media.
They then discussed the fact that uptake initially was quite high but then slowed down in April 2021. Prof Larson largely attributed this to getting to younger age groups who felt less threatened by covid, and indeed the fact that ‘case numbers’ were dropping in the spring. “but there was a pretty dramatic change, which is not typical pre-Covid, around with young, like, 18- to 24-year-olds. That took a different trend that was totally different than before Covid.” The information coming through from Europe about deaths of young adults from brain blood clots was obviously completely irrelevant or indeed the collapse of some young athletes with cardiac arrests on the pitch! Or was that misinformation too?
It was with Heidi Larson that Clare Craig and I were asked to share our statements. I agreed, perhaps naively thinking that if she read even half of the scientific concerns about lack of either safety or efficacy, it might help her understand why for example 90% of parents of primary school children were not merely hesitant but indeed rejected the covid vaccines altogether.
But at the end of one hour and forty three minutes, neither Professor Larson nor Mr Hugo Keith had considered whether ‘hesitancy’ regarding taking a covid-19 vaccine might actually be a life-saving decision.
The full transcript for day 3 is here and YouTube here.
A snippet from Day 4:
Lord Alok Sharma, previous Business Secretary, said of the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, “seeing some of the testimony on the impact film for this module, I certainly think there is a case for us to look again at both eligibility criteria but also perhaps to look at the quantum of money that would be made available through this mechanism..That’s obviously for the future. Just to be clear.” So no thought on his part of lowering the 60% disability threshold let alone raising the maximum amount paid to the Covid-vaccine-injured. Supporting documents showed “Our current estimate is driven by three main factors: Exposure; Probability and average claim size… It has reduced very significantly from the initial estimates at the time of the BioNTech/Pfizer negotiations, ranging from £75bn to £300bn. We now estimate for the contingent liability figure in a reasonable `worst-case scenario’ to be £1.7bn.” Their calculation was based on “the average pay-out from the narcolepsy side effect of the Pandemrix vaccine (the most severe side effect from the historical data) and the probability of a side effect with the same level of incidence as ITP from the MMR vaccine in children (the most commonly occurring severe side effect). We are therefore using the most extreme evidence we have available.” Unfortunately for the unsuspecting British public, it would appear that these are gross underestimates, both in terms of severity and of frequency.
Other news:
The Bad News
To depress you, the government are now busy implementing the recommendations from Module 1, but we are not convinced that the recommendations were based on a correct interpretation of the facts.
The Good News
But to cheer you up, Esther McVey and colleagues were busy speaking in Westminster on the failures of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). The debate covered a wide range of issues from Primidos to breast implants, from vaginal mesh to squeaky hip joints, from SSRI antidepressants to the Covid vaccines, the common link being the failure of the MHRA to carry out its regulatory duties. YouTube coverage is here.
The debate ended with “Resolved: Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) continues to need substantial reform.”