How the media works for pharma
From "Spreading anti-vaxx myths 'should be made a criminal offence'" to a limited hangout on "The lives ruined by Covid jabs"
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
It is now more than five years since this article appeared in The Telegraph:
It should be made a criminal offence to spread anti-vaxx myths and the public should report offenders, the Royal Society and British Academy have said amid concerns that baseless fears over a coronavirus vaccine will damage uptake.
A rapid review on Covid-19 Vaccine Deployment has called for people to be inoculated against misinformation, which can spread rapidly on social media.
Several countries already have laws against disseminating information that is harmful to public health, and Singapore has recently carried out four prosecutions for coronavirus offences under its Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act.
Under the same legislation, companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are also legally required to correct or remove misinformation.
At the time, Professor Melinda Mills from the University of Oxford — the institution whose name was originally attached to the AstraZeneca covid vaccine…
…said it was critical to address genuine concerns about the vaccine while preventing misleading facts from spreading on the internet.
“This information can be really damaging, and it’s clever how they spread it through memes and memorable things,” she said. “These groups are very skilled. They feed on fear, that little grain of truth, and they amplify it.”
I wonder what Prof Mills now thinks about the spreading of fear in 2020.
She added:
“It’s not very interesting when the Government produces passive web pages that say vaccinations are safe. The “anti-vaxxers” turn everything into a show — they put out things that are engaging, that are visual to their members.
“Social media channels try to capture this misinformation, but they can’t get everything and so it’s important that the public can spot it so that they don’t share it. Most people aren’t bad, they just don’t realise they are sharing a whole load of misinformation.”
“Experts are concerned that uptake for a Covid vaccine will fall short unless more is done to address misconceptions on social media. Recent research has shown that around 36 per cent of people in Britain say they are either uncertain or very unlikely to be vaccinated against the virus.”
And also said that:
“There are real knowledge voids. The public thinks it takes decades to make a vaccine, so it has to be communicated that it is safe. There are always going to be side-effects, and that has to be acknowledged too.”
“Real knowledge voids”…
I doubt there were many people who thought it “takes decades” to make a vaccine. But plenty of us were aware that vaccine development normally takes many years. And that, by definition, medium-to-long-term safety testing could not possibly have been done in a matter of months. So we knew that anyone pretending that the products had been fully tested was not telling the truth.
For context, prior to 2020 I had generally trusted public health authorities. And I had actually been paying for an annual flu vaccine for many years. But when authority figures started appearing in the media stating emphatically that the covid vaccines were “safe and effective” any trust I still had in public health after the fearmongering of 2020 ebbed away.
It was no secret that there was, to say the least, not much precedent for the development any sort of useful vaccine against a coronavirus, let alone a “safe and effective” one. What was less well-known, but clear enough from published scientific papers, was that such products could potentially do a lot more harm than good.
It was also well-established that there had been serious issues before in relation to rushed vaccines. Anyone with an internet connection could easily have found out about what happened in the context of polio in the 1950s, swine flu in the 1970s, and swine flu (again) in 2009.
The authorities were open with us about covid vaccines having been developed within a matter of months. But it didn’t take a degree in marketing to work out that “Warp Speed” was essentially another way of saying “rushed to market”.
Nor was anybody hiding the fact that novel technology was being used. And yet we were being earnestly assured that the hastily-developed gene-derived injections were definitely safe.
It was also evident that some of the people who were promoting the covid vaccines were hardly free of conflicts of interest. And yet we were supposed to take these “experts” seriously when they told us that people who had gained naturally immunity from having covid still needed to take the shots.
Meanwhile, official figures were revealing that “the virus” to which Prof Mills refers wasn’t nearly so deadly as we were being told. Indeed the UK government’s Office for National Statistics numbers tell us that, before the “covid measures” were introduced, the total number of people dying was at or below normal levels for the time of year. Even though covid had been circulating for at least two months.
Were these the sort of “anti-vaxx myths” the spreading of which the Royal Society and British Academy wanted “to be made a criminal offence”?!
scientific publications on previous attempts to develop coronavirus vaccines…
the history of previous vaccine development
the normal timeline for the production of vaccines…
the fact that (as stated by the companies that made them) these vaccines used novel technology…
the conflicts of interest of public health officials…
official government all-cause mortality figures…
“Little grains of truth” that should not be “amplified”?
Anyhow, last week, in 2026, when even doctors and nurses have long since largely stopped taking covid shots, we had this from The Telegraph:
At first glance, it might look like progress.
Having been a dental nurse for more than a decade, Nikola Brindley was familiar with vaccination requirements for healthcare workers. So when she was asked to have AstraZeneca’s Covid jab in July 2021, she agreed without hesitation.
But within hours, Brindley was in A&E fighting for her life as an allergic reaction began to shut down multiple organ systems. “I collapsed on the doorway, and pretty much lost the ability to walk,” she recalls. “My husband rushed me to hospital, my heart rate had soared and I couldn’t speak. We were told that if I’d been 10 minutes later, there would have been nothing they could have done.”
Nearly five years later, the 36-year-old, who lives on the Isle of Man, remains profoundly affected. She lives with ongoing brain fog, chronic pain, headaches and gastrointestinal problems, and requires monitoring from a variety of specialists. Her worsening fatigue has left her requiring a wheelchair, while some days, she struggles to keep down food. Previously active and sporty, she is so disabled that her two children, aged eight and 11, have been certified as young carers.
“I genuinely thought that it was just going to be another vaccine,” she says. “Take it, get on with things. Instead, my life has been reduced to trying to manage symptoms every single day.”
But there are familiar limited hangout themes here. Not least the focus on one person. And discussion focused primarily on AstraZeneca’s product rather than the mRNA injections from Pfizer1 and Moderna:
The article continues under the heading The dark legacy:
Horrendous side effects represent the darker legacy of the Covid vaccine rollout, which, years on, remains a deeply thorny topic in public health.
And then, surprise surprise, we get to:
On the one hand, the jabs are widely credited with ending the very worst of the pandemic, with researchers estimating that the first year of the programme prevented somewhere between 14.4 million and 19.8 million deaths worldwide.
“Widely credited”… “Researchers estimating”…
That’ll be modelling studies. Computer models that start with the assumption that there is a deadly virus. And that the vaccine stops transmission of the deadly virus. And that the vaccines are safe.
It hardly takes a PhD in modelling to see that such assumptions will lead to the conclusion that, with billions of people having received the vaccine, millions of lives have been saved. And that, if the input numbers are tweaked, the number “deaths prevented” goes up and down.
And so we get headlines like this one (based on this study debunked here)…
…reported in the same newspaper, which openly takes £millions from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But there is simply no robust real-world data to justify such claims. Leaving aside whether the clinical trials were conducted fairly, they were in any case brought to a premature end, with the placebo group receiving the vaccine.
Moreover, there is a strong case to be made from careful study of all-cause mortality data that the “millions of lives saved” claim is actually an inversion of the reality of the covid era. Such a conclusion is consistent with e.g. this 2023 analysis of UK data from Emeritus Professor of Risk Norman Fenton.2
The recent Telegraph article also states that:
The benefits are writ large in official government statistics — in January 2021, as the rollout was beginning, there were more than one million confirmed Covid infections in the UK and 32,049 deaths.
“Covid infections”… confirmed by a test without a false positive rate, using a technique (PCR) which, in the words of its Nobel prize-winning inventor: “if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody”.
I find the above “benefits writ large in official government statistics” statement particularly ironic given that, only several months ago, the same newspaper reported that the UK government is “withholding data that may link Covid jab to excess deaths”:
It would surely be surprising if the government were withholding official statistics in which the benefits of covid vaccines were writ large…
The recent Telegraph article then turns to the drop in the monthly death toll:
A year later, despite the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, the monthly death toll had dropped to 8,100.
Despite the rapid spread of Omicron? Or because of it?
The notion of a flattening of the “cumulative confirmed covid deaths” curve from around the end of February 2022 is consistent with charts such as this:
But it is hardly surprising. The Omicron variant was first identified in November 2021, and, while it was more transmissible, it had an intrinsically lower case fatality rate.
Moreover, there was a significant decline in the number of covid tests carried out around that time.3 So there would have been fewer deaths labelled as “confirmed covid” in any case.
Stepping back, the inconvenient truth is that the fantasy of “millions of lives saved” just doesn’t fit with big picture data such as that above. Leaving aside the fact that many “covid-19 deaths” were actually non-covid deaths with a dubious positive covid test result, it is difficult to discern any significant effect during 2021, “the year of the vaccine”.
Moreover, there remain obvious questions in relation to all-cause mortality:
For example, why did a lot more people aged 25-49 die than expected in 2021?
It does not help to build trust or establish the truth of what has happened when the government is still “withholding data that may link [the] Covid jab to excess deaths”.
The Telegraph article then turns to Sir Munir Pirmohamed, professor of pharmacology and therapeutics at the University of Liverpool, who says:
The development and deployment of the vaccines was the important turning point in the pandemic… This allowed society to open up, and had a major impact on reducing hospital admissions and deaths.
It’s a line we hear a lot. But I wonder to what extent the credentialed people saying such things have actually looked closely at the evidence. As far as I am aware, there is no robust evidence for what he says. And the reality is that the society that “the vaccines allowed to be opened up” never needed to be shut down in the first place.
Moreover, in relation to the University of Liverpool, I am reminded of Dr Andrew Hill who was (emphasis added):
…set to publish a meta-analysis for the World Health Organization (WHO) on the remarkable effectiveness of a repurposed drug in treating the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).
However, instead of urging physicians to try the safe and effective drug, Hill concluded in his paper: “Ivermectin should be validated in larger appropriately controlled randomized trials before the results are sufficient for review by regulatory authorities.”
This complete turnaround did not go unnoticed, and Dr. Tess Lawrie confronted him in a Zoom video conversation that was recorded and featured in a documentary.
Lawrie, the director of a medical consultancy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Bath, England, was able to get Hill to admit that his non-profit sponsors, Unitaid, pressured him to alter his conclusion regarding the use of ivermectin.
Unitaid is a “global health agency” funded by vaccine promoters like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They committed $120 million of their funds to an expensive ivermectin competitor manufactured by Merck, called molnupiravir. Some scientists warned that the genotoxic drug could cause viral mutants and worsen the pandemic later.
Moreover, the University of Liverpool was found to have received $40 million from Unitaid just four days before the publication of Hill’s study.
As ever, following the money explains a lot.
The spin from The Telegraph in 2026 continues:
Yet while the vast majority of the 50 million people in the UK (and in other nations) who received Covid vaccines experienced few or no ill effects, there are those like Brindley, who either suffered serious harm or, most tragically of all, lost their lives.
But I am reminded, for example, of US attorney Aaron Siri recently commenting on data from the US CDC’s vaccine monitoring safety system where people could write about what happened to them:
It looks like there’s about…
1 in 1,300 individuals… in… this first-few-day period [after covid vaccination] reported experiencing Bell’s palsy [facial paralysis]
1 in 906 individuals reported disturbances in their normal menstrual cycle
1 in 450 individuals apparently reportedly experienced shingles
1 in 160 individuals reported tinnitus or ringing in the ears, which can be a devastating life condition
1 in 143… reported heart palpitations
And this is just based on the initial few days apparently... Once we have all of the first… six weeks of their reports, these numbers might go higher.
I think this is reflective of why the CDC fought so hard [for this data not to be released]… because this is probably the best reflection of what the true safety profile is
If those figures — which are based on real world data merely for the first few days after covid vaccination — were translated to 50 million people in the UK, the number of people affected in the UK would be would be:
~38000 experiencing Bell’s palsy
~55,000 with disturbances in their normal menstrual cycle
~111,000 individuals reporting shingles
~310,000 individuals reporting tinnitus
~350,000 reporting heart palpitations
It is also worth bearing in mind that, in lots of studies and papers, people who have received a covid vaccine are counted as “unvaccinated” for the first 14 days after injection.
The Telegraph article goes on to state that:
There are no official statistics on how many people were impacted in this way [i.e. suffered serious harm or died]. However, data from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) indicates that the numbers are not insignificant. While these reports are not proof of the Covid vaccines causing serious harm and death, in the UK, as of February 24, there had been:
194,403 serious reports linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine (and 1,532 with a fatal outcome).
126,535 serious reports linked to the Pfizer vaccine (and 920 with a fatal outcome).
31,339 serious reports associated with the Moderna vaccine (and 102 with a fatal outcome).
“Not insignificant”…
According to p6 of this Harvard study commissioned by the US government, “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”.
“Not proof”…
I wonder evidence The Telegraph would accept as proof of the Covid vaccines causing serious harm and death. And why the bar for such proof is so high, while the bar for proof that the vaccines worked is so low.
On the plus side, the article does go on to acknowledge that:
Authorities in Japan and South Korea have officially recognised a wide range of cases of vaccine-induced harm, from heart inflammation to sudden hearing loss, and have compensated tens of thousands of people accordingly… [but] it is a very different story in the UK, where patients like Brinkley describe a near-impossible fight to obtain any kind of financial support.
But as to the question of why some people experienced such serious adverse reactions, we are back in limited hangout territory:
The most high-profile form of harm has been the cases of vaccine-induced thrombosis with thrombocytopenia (VITT), or blood clots, a side effect mostly commonly linked to AstraZeneca’s shot.
There is acknowledgement of other types of harm:
Cardiac issues — particularly myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the lining around the heart) — have also been linked to the vaccines, and appear to have been more common than VITT. Thousands of such cases, spanning recipients of all three Covid jabs, have been reported to the MHRA — including several hundred fatalities… Others, like Brinkley, experienced various autoimmune reactions that damaged different systems in the body…
But no mention of mRNA…
And apparently:
…it remains a mystery why people [have] experienced autoimmune reactions which have left them chronically unwell.
I am reminded of these posts:
On the plus side, there is at least some acknowledgement that:
Many have lost jobs due to their disabilities…
And that compensation is hard to come by:
Brindley says that when she applied to the UK’s Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS), she was informed that while decision-makers agreed she had suffered vaccine harm, she wasn’t considered sufficiently disabled to qualify for compensation. “Even though this has been completely life-changing, they’ve got this fixed scale where you have to be classed as at least 60 per cent disabled, and I’m apparently not regarded as disabled enough, which is quite poor really,” she says.
But there is no reference to the fact that, since 2021, the number of people claiming disability benefits has risen sharply in both the UK and the US.
The limited hangout concludes with more from Prof Pirhohamed:
Pirmohamed agrees that lessons need to be learned from cases of adverse events when it comes to the design of future vaccines. “If you are vaccinating millions of people, rare adverse events will occur, such as VITT,” he says. “We need to learn from these types of adverse events, and heed the lessons for future vaccine development, so that we can pre-empt, predict and prevent.”
“Rare adverse events”…
The last word in the Telegraph article goes to pharma spokespeople.
Pfizer:
Patient safety is paramount and we take any reports of adverse events very seriously…
I wonder what e.g. Maddie de Garay would say about that.
AstraZeneca:
…regulators around the world consistently state that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks of extremely rare potential side effects.
Regulators who take most of their funding from pharmaceutical companies…
Meanwhile, ethical doctors who spoke out about covid vaccine harms which are now widely acknowledged are still being hounded out of medicine:
Related:
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Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else) homepage
Some posts, including a version of this one, can also be found on Unexpected Turns
Revealing Faith: Seeing and believing the revelation of God
The Big Reveal: Christianity carefully considered as the solution to a problem
NB the “Pfizer vaccine” is in fact owned by the German company BioNTech which earns far more from global sales of the vaccine than Pfizer
Prof Fenton concludes:
With a minimal set of conservative and reasonable assumptions we estimate that, since the end of Dec 2020 approximately 16,000 people in the UK have died directly from covid vaccines…
With respect to the additional number of those who may have died indirectly following serious adverse reactions, we have estimated 35,000 in the UK…
See p13 of the UK government report at that link