I dislike writing this type of article for two reasons. First, that a need exists to have to write it, and second, for the fact that each time I do, it needs to be prefaced by a strong disclaimer. So, without further ado, the disclaimer. Please do not misconstrue the content below as an attack on Covid treatments designed to overcome the virus. The regulatory-approved Covid “vaccines” developed by various companies save lives, saved our medical services from almost certain collapse and allowed us to return more swiftly to a sense, at least, of pre-pandemic normalcy. But, are they really vaccines? More importantly, where does this leave patients affected by side effects?
The treatments developed in response to Covid were both necessary and bold. For many, these therapeutic mitigators (a far more accurate description than vaccine) were and are life saving, a part of humanity traversing its first modern global pandemic. This article isn’t about the medicines themselves, rather about how governments and health authorities chose to define them. It is about mandates, enforced legally, sneakily, or otherwise on the general population and how, in the aftermath of these mandates, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of patients, suffering from listed and unlisted side effects, are left with no where to turn. No recourse.
It is about regulatory authorities’ ethical and moral responsibility to these patients, many of whom do not possess the financial means to seek help for their conditions, and about who, ultimately, should bear the weight of the huge costs associated with compensation. It is a complex question, one that may well end up in our higher courts across the globe, as those who bear the onus, will attempt to shirk their responsibilities. Before I assign blame, for reasons I will be more than clear about, let’s first examine how we arrived here.
A time for firsts
The last two years has witnessed a lot of firsts, as the pandemic swept across the globe, crippling economies and upending our societies as it highlighted the fragile human ecosystem. We had built based on the flawed assumption that we were untouchable. SARS-CoV2 proved otherwise.
Two years and six months into the pandemic, the virus still confounds, mutating into, what fortunately appears to be, less and less virulent strains. More contagious, yes, but less deadly. A new “influenza” to add to the existing strains, but it’s a dangerous comparison to draw as Covid is proving far more debilitating in terms of it’s long term impacts on our bodies. How, where and why the virus stays on with some of us, is only now beginning to emerge. Long term after effects require, well, a long term, and it may take years to fully understand just how the SARS-CoV2 virus has affected us.
I started by saying we’ve lived through a lot of firsts since the pandemic made headlines in late December of 2019. Among those firsts was the development of multiple “vaccines” to address the virus. In reality these treatments, developed in record time, by Pfizer, Moderna, J&J have been mischaracterized as vaccines. They aren’t vaccines, not even if you stretch the definition of a vaccine.
What each of these companies had in fact developed where different versions of what proved, in many instances, to be a life saving treatment for individuals who developed severe Covid in response to contracting the virus. Particularly those individuals who lived with identified comorbidities. The new treatments reduced the risk of death for at-risk individuals and the aged by up to 90%. That’s a massive saving of life. Of equal import was the breathing space these treatments afforded our healthcare services around the globe.
Then, swiftly on its heels, came another first. Murmurings of enforcing these treatments on all members of the public. There was outrage or angst from almost every sector of society, so rather than issuing blanket mandates, governments turned to other means to enforce Covid vaccination. In strategies that medical historians will revisit, individuals had their freedom of movement, right to access and their employment held hostage in exchange for compliance. Natural immunity was ignored, an individuals state of health was ignored.
Everyone, governments decided, would be “vaccinated” with the new treatments and most members of the public complied, either from a sense of civil obedience or to ensure they could simply continue to function in society, earn a living, attend college, enter shopping malls or board public transport. The health benefit was evident – avoiding hospitalization or death. But, what was not evident were the potential side effects, many of which were still being explored.
In an ideal world, these new treatments would have simply achieved their desired goal, and either persisted in our bodies as part of our viral record, or disappeared along with the defeated virus. In reality, these treatments had, and still have, side effects, some of which are fatal. The argument that listed side effects impact a very small segment of the population has been rendered all but moot by scale. Inject billions and that small percentage grows into a much larger problem, millions in fact, as we show below. These affected patients face very real health challenges in the short term, and we can only pray that long term side effects that are yet to manifest are not significant in nature.
Getting a drug or vaccine approved for release to the public can take years and years of safety and efficacy testing and clinical trials. The reasoning is simple. Long term side effects take years to manifest, so in the interests of public safety, we wait out this period to ensure we aren’t endangering the public. It’s terribly frustrating; however, scientifically important.
Covid, or rather Governments responding to the virus globally, unilaterally decided to toss the historic scientific rule book. Emergency Use Authorization was granted off the back of shortened clinical trials and in less than a year Covid was under attack, from not one, but multiple treatments relying in some instances on novel delivery techniques that had, up till that point, been restricted to end of life patients. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Never before had we attempted to vaccinate entire populations and the scale and enormity of the task that lay ahead was enough to overwhelm even the most efficient of healthcare services. Perhaps, with hindsight, some politicians might argue they were oversold on the efficacy or safety of these new treatments, many not fully understanding that these vaccines were in point of fact not vaccines, but desperately needed treatments to reduce mortality. By late 2020, it was all really pretty irrelevant. Lockdowns, financial pressures, healthcare pressures and outcries from every corner of society for a return to normalcy threatened to unseat any regime that didn’t act, and act swiftly.
The “vaccines” were the obvious panacea.
Now, 18 months later, most of the planet has been vaccinated, with some patients having received multiple doses and boosters, often from differing companies (something I’ll address below). Most recent WHO estimates put current global treatments at around an eyewatering 11,655,356,423 vaccine doses that have been administered. To understand how this extrapolates in real terms to people who’ve experienced side effects, lets take figures quoted by Pfizer themselves. In their initial trials, 0.6% of candidates aged 18 and older experienced a serious adverse reaction to the vaccine.
In fairness, companies have a hard time distinguishing which serious adverse events (SAE’s) are as a result of the medication being administered and which are just normal run of the mill events that would have impacted someone anyway. Control groups indicate just how often this happens. In the same trial Pfizer reported 0.5% SAE’s in their control group (placebo administered).
To quote their clinical trial, “The proportions of participants who reported at least 1 serious adverse event were 0.6% in the vaccine group”. Let’s half that figure and be conservative. Extrapolate it to the number of vaccinated individuals above, assuming that adverse events are as common among the other brands of vaccine. It works out at around 35 million people, who have potentially experienced one serious side effect or another. It’s a staggering figure.
In Europe alone, where Pfizer has administered 611 million doses, this would account for 1.8 million individuals (0.35%) who’ve experienced a potential serious adverse event. Scale is everything.
Accountability, Pharma and Government
In terms of the vaccines, limited accountability exists for the pharmaceutical industry. In almost all instances, access to the treatments meant governments shouldering lengthy legal waivers that have effectively render pharmaceutical companies immune to any fallout (read side effects) experienced by patients. You can understand the desire of the companies to protect themselves, given the scale of treatments. One look at that figure above from the WHO and you can imagine the scale of liability had things gone wrong.
It may also explain why the industry was eager to have these new treatments sold under the “vaccine” label as the vaccine industry boasts rigorous legal precedent to virtually indemnify manufacturers against any legal action.
Sadly, for a small sector of the global population that received the vaccines, things have gone wrong. In some instances fatal blood clots have claimed lives, heart conditions have affected healthy teenagers, some patients have suffered perhaps irreversible hair loss, the listed side effects are numerous and vary from vaccine to vaccine, further complicating the issue of who is to blame. The use above of the term “small” is again only relevant when measured against the global population. Tens of millions of people tend to become statistically insignificant when you’re dealing with billions.
The approved use of multiple vaccine brands in a single patient has further muddied the water. If you’ve had vaccines administered from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, whose to say which vaccine caused you to experience side effects. The more delayed the onset of symptoms, the more difficult it becomes to impart blame to a single manufacturer. Proving these treatments are to blame for a new wave of disease or a particular condition becomes even more complex if you lack a control group (unvaccinated) for comparison, something that will prove more and more challenging as vaccination rates rise globally.
What is not open to debate however, is that almost all patients suffering from conditions directly ascribed to the administration of a Covid vaccine, face an uphill battle on almost every front.
Healthcare and its providers are reticent to lay the blame for conditions at the door of treatments that were heralded as life saving. Eroding the public’s confidence in the Covid vaccines can be a death knell for any medical practitioner. We are still reliant on the Covid vaccines, a dependency that will continue no doubt for the foreseeable future, and the fact that follow up shots (boosters) are not being utilized, even in at risk populations, is worrying. Creating fear in the public’s mind is frowned on, both within and outside of the industry. The publicly acceptable narrative (which seeks to minimize the risk of adverse events) must be preserved at all costs.
Ignorance within healthcare as to the potential side effects of the vaccines and how these manifest in patients is also still an issue. More needs to be done to educate doctors, enabling them to accurately diagnose Covid vaccine related conditions. It’s an unenviable task, given that the medical sector is not in possession of any long term data from the original trials. We’re learning on the fly here, far from ideal in clinical terms and definitely not helpful for patients.
The VAERS system, active within the US for reporting adverse events, is possibly the most flawed system created by the NIH. Instead of limiting the systems input to trained medical professionals, anyone can access it, casting more than a little plausible doubt on the data’s integrity. The tool is in desperate need of an overhaul to legitimize the data it provides. Healthcare providers now have access to new codes through ICD 11 to identify Covid vaccine side effects, so by extension, repurposing VAERS doesn’t seem like a huge reach.
For some individuals, they are fortunate enough to have health cover. Many patients don’t and they are the ones who stand to lose the most. Currently, they have absolutely no options on the table other than to live with or die with, depending on the severity, the vaccine related conditions that have afflicted them. Consider the following for a moment.
Your government legally forced, cajoled, bullied or shamed you into accepting the vaccine. If you don’t agree with this statement I suggest you consult government workers, policemen, firefighters and frontline staff whose jobs were threatened by one simple statement. Vaccinate, or resign. I suggest you speak to people whose access to their workplace, schools and other public spaces was revoked, pending the production of a vaccine certificate. Bullying tactics from governments to afraid to resort to legitimate and open legal enforcement in the event things went wrong.
Governments engaged in these tactics knowing full well they had insulated the manufacturers against any claims arising from harm. They did this, knowing full well that the trials for the treatments they were mandating were far from conclusive or complete. I was recently vaccinated in the Philippines after already having contracted Covid. Part of the process involved signing a waiver that indemnified the government against all claims stemming from the administration of the vaccine. Ironic, considering the government’s insistence on vaccination with a product they were ensuring the public was absolutely safe.
Almost all governments globally were and are in the same boat and how they choose to respond now to a growing problem may well determine their futures.
Doing right by Joe Public
So to recap, countries are now faced with countless “vaccine victims”. People who have reacted negatively to, or in the worst instances, died from the administration of the Covid vaccines. Many of these individuals were coerced into taking the treatment. Given the choice, some may have declined, but policies advocated and initiated by governments globally left them with no choice. Vaccinate or be excluded from society. For this segment of the population, their current condition leaves a particularly bitter aftertaste.
Of course many did what they considered to be their civic duty and happily volunteered themselves at clinics across the globe to be vaccinated. No mention was made of naturally acquired immunity, no distinctions were drawn between the at-risk and healthy segment of the population. Everyone was encouraged to get vaccinated with a treatment that did not reduce the risk of transmission or infection, it simply reduced the risk of death. And obviously, here too, patients encountered side effects.
An ethical government, seeking to repair and restore credibility in both its healthcare systems and scientific community would at this point hold up its hands and extend an olive branch. At the very least, blanket coverage to those individuals whose health may have been compromised by the vaccines. Failure to act now will have long lasting implications for almost all of society and without much thought, I can suggest a few consequences right off the cuff.
- Hugely expensive and protracted legal battles will ensue, with class actions filed on behalf of the affected. In the US for instance, legally mandating any form of EUA drug is in direct contradiction to existing FDA and Federal guidelines. The issue is also highly politicized and will at some stage be weaponized for political gain.
- The cost to healthcare systems will in many ways emulate the burdens placed on them by the pandemic. Vaccination continues unabated across the globe and it is not unrealistic to expect patients encountering adverse reactions to exceed 50 million or more in number. This is another pandemic, one of our own creation.
- The cost to the labor markets in terms of manhours lost couldn’t come at a worse time, considering the fragility of economies across the globe. 12 months down the road, we may find ourselves in a position where funds to assist this group are simply not available, as talk or recessions and stock market implosions permeate the media.
The perfect storm
Coupled to an emergent and growing “long Covid” group, vaccine victims present a self created challenge to the medical industry and our societies. We have an ethical obligation to ensure these patients receive access to care. Any other course of action will leave the industry and the power bases that wield it, looking yet more callous and disassociated from their patients and electorate.
More importantly, as we spread across the planet in ever increasing numbers, living in closer and closer proximity to each other and our food sources, the next pandemic could be just around the corner. Add global warming to the mix and the associated melting permafrost threatens us with a new source of pathogens, frozen in the soil for thousands and thousands of years. Pathogens that could potentially prove far more damaging than Covid.
Trust and a blind belief in governments, scientists and healthcare systems has been eroded, some would suggest irreparably. Our failure to address current issues within healthcare that affect millions will not escape the watchful eye of the public. Round 2 in our challenge against global pathogens may turn out to be the decisive round if we do not get our act together now.
And please, let’s stop calling these important treatments vaccines. They are, in the words of a colleague, therapeutic mitigators, . Reducing hospitalization or death is an incredible feat of medicine. We honor this scientific achievement by calling them what they are – breakthrough treatments that mitigate a clear and present viral danger. I’ll leave you with an extract from the Vaccine Alliance to consider, directly from GAVI itself. Bold added for emphasis.
Vaccines differ from other medical drugs in two important ways. The first is that they are designed to prevent disease, rather than treat it. They do this by priming a person’s immune system to recognise a specific disease-causing bacteria, virus or other pathogen. This “memory” can last years, or in some cases for life, which is why vaccination can be so effective, stopping people from getting sick rather than waiting until disease occurs.
Gavi Website, gavi.org
A far cry from the method of action of current Covid “vaccines” which are designed to mitigate symptoms that develop as a result of a serious Covid infection. Life saving yes, a vaccine? Absolutely not.
