Brownstone Institute
The Media Ignored the Parliamentary Debate on Vaccine Safety
From the Brownstone Institute
On Monday, there was a debate in the UK Parliament on Covid vaccine safety. Cast into shadow by a storm of reporting on the appointment of the UK’s latest Prime Minister, it received virtually no mainstream press attention. This is unfortunate, as the issues it raises – about the scale of adverse vaccine reactions, excess death trends, potential breaches of medical ethics, and regulatory capture – are deserving of both airtime and urgent investigation.
In the UK as elsewhere the scale of adverse reactions from the Covid-19 vaccine is bitterly contested. The Parliamentary debate was no different – on the one hand Elliot Colburn (MP) repeated the orthodoxy that serious adverse events were “incredibly rare” and that such events as are reported are “typically mild, with individuals usually recovering within a short time;” whilst others cited evidence which casts doubt on that official narrative.
Sir Christopher Chope (MP) pointed out that other data sets have put risks much higher than the “12 reports per 1 million doses” pinpointed by Colburn as the Pfizer-suspected myocarditis reporting rate – “The Paul Ehrlich Institute is the German regulator responsible for vaccine safety,” he explained, before noting that on 20 July 2022, “…the institute confirmed that one in 5,000 people was seriously affected after a vaccination.”
These concerns were echoed by Andrew Bridgen (MP) noting that “…[a] study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, included 7,806 children aged five or younger who were followed for an average of 91.4 days after their first Pfizer vaccination. The study showed that one in 500 children under five years of age who received a Pfizer mRNA…covid vaccine were hospitalised with a vaccine injury, and one in 200 had symptoms ongoing for weeks or months afterwards.”
One does not have to subscribe to a particular view of which of these data sets are more accurate to recognise that there are now at the very least serious questions to be asked and answered about the scale of adverse reactions. As Chope noted in relation to the German data, it “is serious information coming from the regulator of a country that is highly respected for the quality of its healthcare.” The same could be said of the well-documented analysis carried out by the Floridian health department indicating an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males aged 18 to 39 within 28 days following mRNA vaccination. These are not baseless concerns from a radical fringe; they are significant issues raised by respectable scientific and health authorities.
The continued refusal of the UK Government and the arms of the State to countenance let alone embrace a transparent review of the Covid vaccine rollout feels increasingly illegitimate the longer it continues, as too does the failure to discuss let alone investigate the cause of the well-documented rise in excess deaths.
As Bridgen asked, “What is the Government’s analysis of the excess deaths that we are suffering in this country, across Europe and in the Americas? Even a casual glance at the data shows a strong correlation between vaccine uptake and the excess deaths in those regions. Surely we must have an investigation. Tens of thousands more people than expected are dying. This is really important, and if we do not get it right, no one will believe us, and trust in politicians, in medicine and in our medical system will be lost.”
The other key thread running through the debate was that, however many lives the vaccine rollout may have saved, unanswered questions remain from a medical ethics perspective. “Why was vaccination extended to the whole population? I do not think we have ever had a completely satisfactory answer to that question,” asked Danny Kruger (MP), before adding “I ask it again, because my concern is that extending the vaccination programme became an operation in public persuasion—an operation in which dissent was unhelpful or even immoral, and an operation that justified the suppression and even vilification of those who raised concerns.”
Likewise, said Kruger, “I worry about whether we can say that consent was fully informed in all cases,” before adding “Throughout, there has been misinformation in favour of the vaccine,” referencing the now highly discredited official line that the vaccine was 95% effective, and that it would stop transmission.
Nowhere are the ethics of the vaccine rollout murkier than in relation to children, where the perceived lack of benefit relative to risk is most pronounced. Again Kruger stuck his neck out in a valiant attempt to shine light: “…we had the notorious claim by Professor Chris Whitty that even though the vaccine brought no benefit to children, children should be vaccinated to protect wider society…again, [this] feels like a profound break with medical ethics.”
The significance of these comments cannot be overstated: Parliamentarians from the governing Conservative Party are now expressly acknowledging that the Government’s authoritarian policy on the Covid vaccine rollout, combatting of vaccine hesitancy, and suppression of legitimate dissenting voices may have breached key tenets of medical ethics.
One of the consistent features of the last two years has been the tendency of vaccine evangelicals to dismiss anyone questioning the rollout as fringe anti-vaxxers – a lazy, vicious slur, designed to delegitimise serious debate.
And yet during this week’s Parliamentary debate, elected representatives appeared guilty of the same ideological laziness, Elliot Colburn (MP) dismissing out of hand Sir Christopher Chope’s question as to whether he had seen Oracle Film’s “Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion.” Many would maintain that in the context of a debate specifically on vaccine safety, Chope’s was an eminently reasonable question, and yet Colburn’s answer –
“I have not seen that publication, although I have read a lot of the significant amounts of material that have been shoved through my constituency office door by a large number of anti-vax protesters, who have flyposted my office on no less than a dozen occasions, and intimidated my 18-year-old apprentice and the people who live above my constituency office. Given that the content of that literature includes climate change denial, moon landing denial and so on, I am inclined to ignore it completely.”
This is an astonishing dismissal coming from an elected Parliamentarian – disrespectful to those who have suffered serious adverse reactions as a result of the vaccine and outright dangerous in its presumed intent of stifling debate in, of all places, the debating chambers of the UK Parliament.
At many points during the debate the degree of Establishment disinterest, bordering on wilful blindness, underlined: “The Government seems to be in denial about the risks of these vaccines,” noted Chope, with Kruger adding, “I am a member of the all-party parliamentary group on covid-19 vaccine damage…The APPG looks at vaccine injuries, and we had what I think was our first meeting last week in a Committee room in Portcullis House. I am afraid there were only a tiny handful of colleagues there, but well over a hundred members of the public attended, which is not the usual story for an APPG.”
Both the lack of any mainstream reporting of this debate – arguably an abject failure to hold the Government to account as should be a core role of a free press – and the refusal to investigate the underlying concerns are deeply regrettable. The Covid Public Inquiry in the UK will consider the vaccine rollout process, but it is not apparent that it will question vaccine safety – this seems unlikely in the current climate of suppression – and in any case the timescales for that inquiry run into years. This is far too long in the context of a medical intervention which continues to be marketed and rolled out nationwide.
In all of this there are unanswered questions about the role and independence of key regulatory bodies in the UK. As Danny Kruger (MP) summed it up, “I mentioned that the MHRA is funded by the pharmaceutical companies that produce the drugs and vaccines that it regulates. There might be some universe in which that makes sense, but this is not it.” That sentiment will be shared by the many of us who have watched, aghast, as foundational rubicons of medical ethics have been crossed, seemingly in pursuit of nothing more noble than the Prime Minister’s vaccine rollout ‘success’ statistics and Pfizer’s bottom line.
One does not have to agree with all of the points made by the MPs, and one does not have to dispute the fact that the vaccine rollout saved lives, to understand that questions raised by elected politicians in this debate – around the scale of adverse events, potential breaches of medical ethics and regulatory capture – are serious. They are all the more so given the context: far from being solely a historical event, the booster programme and rollout continues, including to children whom parents, medical professionals, and indeed Government Ministers, owe a special duty of care.
In the UK Parliamentary system Select Committees of MPs play an important role in holding both the private and public sector accountable to Parliament and thus, in some small way, to the people of the UK. With powers to call witnesses to attend and to require difficult questions to be answered, and with legal protection from retaliatory actions and political pressures, a Select Committee hearing may be the forum of last resort for this controversial politically-charged issue to be probed.
The last Select Committee hearing for the pharmaceutical industry took place in 2005. It concluded that lax regulatory oversight had contributed to an industry whose influence was out of control and plagued by practices “which act against the public interest.” Another hearing is overdue.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Anthony “I represent science” Fauci can now stand beside Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon in the history books as someone who received the poison pill of a preemptive pardon.
While Nixon was pardoned for specific charges related to Watergate, the exact crimes for which Fauci was pardoned are not specified. Rather, the pardon specifies:
Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong – and in fact have done the right things – and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated and prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.
In other words, the dying breath of the Biden administration appears to be pardoning Fauci for crimes he didn’t commit, which would seem to make a pardon null and void. The pardon goes further than simply granting clemency for crimes. Clemency usually alleviates the punishment associated with a crime, but here Biden attempts to alleviate the burden of investigations and prosecutions, the likes of which our justice system uses to uncover crimes.
It’s one thing to pardon someone who has been subjected to a fair trial and convicted, to say they have already paid their dues. Gerald Ford, in his pardon of Richard Nixon, admitted that Nixon had already paid the high cost of resigning from the highest office in the land. Nixon’s resignation came as the final chapter of prolonged investigations into his illegal and unpresidential conduct during Watergate, and those investigations provided us the truth we needed to know that Nixon was a crook and move on content that his ignominious reputation was carve d into stone for all of history.
Fauci, meanwhile, has evaded investigations on matters far more serious than Watergate. In 2017, DARPA organized a grant call – the PREEMPT call – aiming to preempt pathogen spillover from wildlife to people. In 2018 a newly formed collaborative group of scientists from the US, Singapore, and Wuhan wrote a grant – the DEFUSE grant – proposing to modify a bat sarbecovirus in Wuhan in a very unusual way. DARPA did not fund the team because their work was too risky for the Department of Defense, but in 2019 Fauci’s NIAID funded this exact set of scientists who never wrote a paper together prior or since. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with the precise modifications proposed in the DEFUSE grant submitted to PREEMPT.
It’s reasonable to be concerned that this line of research funded by Fauci’s NIAID may have caused the pandemic. In fact, if we’re sharp-penciled and honest with our probabilities, it’s likely beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a consequence of research proposed in DEFUSE. What we don’t know, however, is whether the research proceeded with US involvement or not.
Congress used its constitutionally-granted investigation and oversight responsibilities to investigate and oversee NIAID in search of answers. In the process of these investigations, they found endless pages of emails with unjustified redactions, evidence that Fauci’s FOIA lady could “make emails disappear,” Fauci’s right-hand-man David Morens aided the DEFUSE authors as they navigated disciplinary measures at NIH and NIAID, and there were significant concerns that NIAID sought to obstruct investigations and destroy federal records.
Such obstructive actions did not inspire confidence in the innocence of Anthony Fauci or the US scientists he funded in 2019. On the contrary, Fauci testified twice under oath saying NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research of concern in Wuhan…but then we discovered a 2018 progress report of research NIAID funded in Wuhan revealing research they funded had enhanced the transmissibility of a bat SARS-related coronavirus 10,000 times higher than the wild virus. That is, indisputably, gain-of-function research of concern. Fauci thus lied to the American public and perjured himself in his testimony to Congress, and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has referred Fauci’s perjury charges to the Department of Justice.
What was NIAID trying to preempt with their obstruction of Congressional investigations? What is Biden trying to preempt with his pardon of Fauci? Why do we not have the 2019 NIAID progress report from the PI’s who submitted DEFUSE to PREEMPT and later received funding from NIAID?
It is deplorable for Biden to preemptively pardon Fauci on his last day in office, with so little known about the research NIAID funded in 2019 and voters so clearly eager to learn more. With Nixon’s preemptive pardon, the truth of his wrongdoing was known and all that was left was punishment. With Fauci’s preemptive pardon, the truth is not yet known, NIAID officials in Fauci’s orbit violated federal records laws in their effort to avoid the truth from being known, and Biden didn’t preemptively pardon Fauci to grant clemency and alleviate punishment, but to stop investigations and prosecutions the likes of which could uncover the truth.
I’m not a Constitutional scholar prepared to argue the legality of this maneuver, but I am an ethical human being, a scientist who contributed another grant to the PREEMPT call, and a scientist who helped uncover some of the evidence consistent with a lab origin and quantify the likelihood of a lab origin from research proposed in the DEFUSE grant. Any ethical human being knows that we need to know what caused the pandemic, and to deprive the citizenry of such information from open investigations of NIAID research in 2019 would be to deprive us of critical information we need to self-govern and elect people who manage scientific risks in ways we see fit. As a scientist, there are critical questions about bioattribution that require testing, and the way to test our hypotheses is to uncover the redacted and withheld documents from Fauci’s NIAID in 2019.
The Biden administration’s dying breath was to pardon Anthony Fauci not for the convictions for crimes he didn’t commit (?) but to avoid investigations that could be a reputational and financial burden for Anthony Fauci. A pardon to preempt an investigation is not a pardon; it is obstruction. The Biden administration’s dying breath is to obstruct our pursuit of truth and reconciliation on the ultimate cause of 1 million Americans’ dying breaths.
To remind everyone what we still need to know, it helps to look through the peephole of what we’ve already found to inspire curiosity about what else we’d find if only the peephole could be widened. Below is one of the precious few emails investigative journalists pursuing FOIAs against NIAID have managed to obtain from the critical period when SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have emerged. The email connects DEFUSE PI’s Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Ralph Baric (UNC), Linfa Wang (Duke-NUS), Ben Hu (Wuhan Institute of Virology), Shi ZhengLi (Wuhan Institute of Virology) and others in October 2019. The subject line “NIAID SARS-CoV Call – October 30/31” connects these authors to NIAID.
It is approximately in that time range – October/November 2019 – when SARS-CoV-2 is hypothesized to have entered the human population in Wuhan. When it emerged, SARS-CoV-2 was unique among sarbecoviruses in having a furin cleavage site, as proposed by these authors in their 2019 DEFUSE grant. Of all the places the furin cleavage site could be, the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 was in the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein, precisely as proposed by these authors.
In order to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS-CoV, however, the researchers would’ve needed to build a reverse genetic system, i.e. a DNA copy of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses in having exactly the fingerprint we would expect from reverse genetic systems. There is an unusual even spacing in the cutting/pasting sites for the enzymes BsaI and BsmBI and an anomalous hot-spot of silent mutations in precisely these sites, exactly as researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have done for other coronavirus reverse genetic systems. The odds of such an extreme synthetic-looking pattern occurring in nature are, conservatively, about 1 in 50 billion.
The virus did not emerge in Bangkok, Hanoi, Bago, Kunming, Guangdong, or any of the myriad other places with similar animal trade networks and greater contact rates between people and sarbecovirus reservoirs. No. The virus emerged in Wuhan, the exact place and time one would expect from DEFUSE.
With all the evidence pointing the hounds towards NIAID, it is essential for global health security that we further investigate the research NIAID funded in 2019. It is imperative for our constitutional democracy, for our ability to self-govern, that we learn the truth. The only way to learn the truth is to investigate NIAID, the agency Fauci led for 38 years, the agency that funded gain-of-function research of concern, the agency named in the October 2019 call by DEFUSE PI’s, the agency that funded this exact group in 2019.
A preemptive pardon prior to the discovery of truth is a fancy name for obstruction of justice. The Biden administration’s dying breath must be challenged, and we must allow Congress and the incoming administration to investigate the possibility that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID-supported research caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky US-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is an outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false storyline that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under the law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Republished from RealClearHealth
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