When a jab doesn’t work, just change the name [22/10/24]

IN THE name of pandemic preparedness, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is getting ready to take the world back to the future. Lord help us. 

All indications are that we are returning to 2009, the year in which a ‘mock-up’ influenza vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) was updated and deployed on the public for use against H1N1 swine flu. The updated vaccine was the now-notorious Pandemrix.

In November 2009 an NHS Wales Swine Flu Pandemic Weekly Report stated openly that, in preparing for a pandemic, ‘appropriate trials to assess the safety and the immune responses’ were carried out ‘on vaccines very similar to the swine flu vaccine’ (my italics). In those days, there was at least a modicum of informed consent when a ‘bait and switch’ occurred as it was publicly acknowledged that the authorised vaccines were only ‘similar’ to the tested ones. Not so, however, when it came to Matt Hancock and the MHRA’s Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine approval. 

And it’s the case again today. The idea of testing one version of a vaccine and jabbing another never went away.  On October 10, the FDA Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) met to discuss the ‘strain change process’ for the allegedly highly pathogenic H5 bird flu preparedness, in fact one of the most overhyped viruses in existence.

Jerry P Weir, the director of the FDA’s Division of Viral Products and adviser to the World Health Organization (WHO) on influenza virus vaccines and vaccine standards, whose department helps select the strains included in annual seasonal influenza vaccines, told the committee that ‘we are all . . . doing everything we can do to be as prepared as possible to shorten the time needed to get a vaccine to market‘. This means they’re testing similar ones again so that updated versions can then be made and rolled out quickly on the assumption they are equally effective. 

As non-mRNA vaccine manufacture typically takes six months, manufacturers are told in February/March of each year which seasonal influenza strains to target for the next winter flu season. When these seasonal vaccines miss a strain, pandemic flu vaccines are on standby to plug the gap. In fact a library of prototype pandemic influenza vaccines exists to address the ‘rapidly evolving’ bird flu menace which the VRBPAC committee was told entered North America in 2021. 

So far in this year’s winter flu hysteria season, the allegedly ‘highly pathogenic’ bird flu has been a damp squib. In the US, the year-to-date tally is a paltry 20 cases of human bird flu, yet the vaccines will be ready to roll when it’s turned into the next scariant and allegedly spreading asymptomatically. Fifty cases is the harbinger of doom, according to Professor Neil Ferguson’s infamous 2006 modelling of influenza pandemic prevention strategies, and should signal the start of mitigation measures to flatten the curve. It didn’t work for SARS-CoV-2, but any expectations that authorities have learned lessons leading to a revision of current dogma remain worryingly low.

Vaccine manufacturers are poised to cash in from government advance purchase agreements for hundreds of millions of doses should an influenza pandemic be declared by the WHO. Standing at the ready to turn on the pharma profit spigots once again are public health authorities, including the US Center for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the EU Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA). Funny so many are named authorities which, far from inspiring confidence in their pronouncements, has increasingly sinister overtones of enforced obedience to their diktats.

As well as the questionable ‘need’ for these vaccines, their effectiveness once again is doubtful.  A January 2024 Chinese review of real-world effectiveness of seasonal flu vaccines concluded it was ‘moderate’, varied substantially by demographic and by strain, and noted that the products had to be continuously reformulated due to the ‘dynamic and evolving nature of the virus’. Pandemic influenza vaccines, however, are reformulations for strains missing from these seasonal vaccines, yet the FDA says, ‘effectiveness [is] inferred from seasonal vaccine’. This is doublespeak for ‘they are equally useless but we’ll license them anyway because public health authorities are squawking about the sky falling in’. If they were financial products they’d carry a disclaimer saying ‘past performance is no guarantee of future results’; only with vaccines the often-dismal  past performance is a surefire guarantee of future results.

In July 2024, BARDA announced a $174million award to Moderna to develop mRNA pandemic influenza vaccines against H9N7 bird flu. These are not however currently part of US preparedness plans which are based on H5 vaccine candidates from CSL Seqirus, Sanofi and GSK for whom BARDA is funding phase 3 trials. 

The GSK vaccine being trialled is Adjupanrix which, as the European Medicines Agency (EMA) website shows, is a reformulated and rebranded version of Pandemrix, the mock-up vaccine deployed in 2009 and 2010 to six million people in Britain against H1N1 swine flu, and which had a higher level of adverse events than other H1N1 vaccines. Its death knell was the link identified in 2010 with an increase in the chronic neurological disorder narcolepsy, which afflicted dozens of children. The jab was withdrawn after doctors noticed a sharp rise in narcolepsy, which can cause sufferers to fall asleep suddenly at any time during any activity, among those who received it.

The link between the vaccine and narcolepsy was finally acknowledged by UK courts in 2015. As recently as December 2022, a Helsinki court ordered compensation to be paid to a group of Finnish patients who were found to have narcolepsy as a side effect of Pandemrix. 

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