Any student of pharmacy should be familiar with the thalidomide tragedy and most of the public are at least vaguely aware of this disaster. Thalidomide was a sedative that was found to be useful in preventing morning sickness in pregnant women. It was developed by the German company Chemie Grunenthal in 1954 and was introduced onto the market in the U.K. in 1958. However, doctors started to notice an increase in the number of babies being born with birth defects and, in December 1961, the Australian gynaecologist, Dr. William McBride published a short letter in the medical journal the Lancet highlighting his concerns that thalidomide might be responsible for these birth defects. At the same time, the German doctor, Dr. Widukind Lenz noted similar concerns and, in November 1961, warned Chemie Gruenenthal of his fears. The drug was withdrawn from the market at the end of 1961 but disputes over the question of whether thalidomide did or did not cause malformations went on for months. Chemie Gruenenthal continued to deny the teratogenic effects of thalidomide for years, but there was suspicion that this was not due to honest ignorance but in order to weaken the accusations against the company (see this extract from a lecture given by Dr. Lenz for details).
Why is this relevant to the withdrawal of the AstraZeneca Covid Vaccine? Well, as any good pharmacy student will also know, the thalidomide tragedy led to the formation of the Committee on Safety of Drugs (1963) which was set up by Sir Derrick Dunlop. This became the Committee on Safety of Medicines (1968) then the Medicines Control Agency (1989) and finally the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in 2003. The MHRA is the U.K. agency that monitors the safety of drugs and approves them for use on the U.K. market. It also monitors safety of medicines available to the public through the Yellow Card Scheme.
Prior to the set-up of the Commission on Safety of Drugs, companies could make drugs and sell them to the public without undertaking testing and without the drug formally being approved for use in patients. In 1968, with the introduction of the Medicines Act, medicines needed to be licensed before being introduced onto the U.K. market. Companies needed to show that they were safe for use in patients through proper testing (pre-clinical testing and clinical trials), quality testing and pharmacovigilance (post-marketing safety monitoring). The AstraZeneca Covid Vaccine, Vaxzevria, went through an accelerated version of this process and was deemed safe for use in patients on an emergency basis, with the first patient injected in January 2021.
Problems with any drug should be picked up through the Yellow Card reporting scheme. This scheme was introduced into the U.K. in 1964 in response to the thalidomide tragedy. The Yellow Card scheme allows healthcare professionals and the public to report suspected side-effects or adverse reactions associated with medicines, vaccines, herbal remedies and medical devices. The information gathered through the Yellow Card Scheme helps regulatory authorities, such as the MHRA to monitor the safety of medicines and to take appropriate regulatory actions (e.g. withdrawal of the medicine) to protect the public.
For vaccines, the number of reported side-effects tends to be fairly low (in the hundreds) and the number of deaths reported tends to be in single figures. These vaccines tend to mainly be given to babies and children as part of the standard vaccination protocol. The estimated reporting rate of side effects per 100,000 doses is around 10 for such vaccines (for example, see the 2009 report from MHRA).
With the outbreak of Swine Flu, a mass vaccination programme was introduced in the USA in 1976, but with severe consequences. Approximately 1 in 100,000 vaccinated individuals developed Guillain-Barré syndrome according to CDC figures, and several deaths were also reported; the vaccine was withdrawn from the market when these concerns became too obvious to ignore.
There are lessons we should have learnt from this incident and, as Richard Fisher pointed out in his BBC article in September 2020, we really should have looked at this past mass vaccination programme and been forewarned. If you rush out a vaccine for a mass vaccination programme, as a Government you are under a lot of pressure to fulfil your promise of vaccinating the population and people dropping dead is really quite inconvenient.
In the U.K., approximately 50 million doses of the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine were given to approximately 25 million people. The vaccine was mainly used between January 2021 and July 2021, with the Pfizer vaccine becoming the primary vaccine of choice from the summer of 2021. Up until the end of September 2022, the MHRA Yellow Card Scheme received 246,393 reports of adverse reactions to AstraZeneca vaccine, with a total of 873,051 reactions and a massive 1,314 suspected fatalities related to the vaccine (the data were nicely summarised on the U.K. column website). Approximately 1% of patients who received the vaccine reported side-effects and five suspected patient deaths were reported per 100,000 patients injected.
If we compare that to the Swine Flu fiasco, where the vaccine was withdrawn when 1 in 100,000 patients developed the serious side-effect of Guillain Barre syndrome, it might reasonably have been expected that, with five suspected deaths per 100,000 patients injected, either MHRA or AstraZeneca might have considered withdrawing the product.
Should AstraZeneca vaccine have been withdrawn sooner? The company voluntarily withdrew the product from the market this week (May 7th 2024). It cites commercial reasons for withdrawing the product – which is fair since it has hardly been used in earnest in the U.K. since the summer of 2021 – and the fact that it is probably not effective against any current strain of COVID-19, also fair. However, this still raises the question as to why, with unprecedented safety concerns relating to this medicine, was it not withdrawn earlier? The Yellow Card Scheme highlighted these concerns. I fear that Sir Derrick Dunlop would have been very disappointed that we still haven’t fully learnt the lessons from thalidomide. Like Chemie Gruenenthal, will AstraZeneca continue to deny the side-effects of its vaccine, or will it continue to plead ignorance in order to weaken the accusations against the company?
Dr. Maggie Cooper is a pharmacist and research scientist.
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you will own nothing and be happy.
You mean you will own nothing and we will be happy!
No. You own nothings, and they will be happy.
This was news to me and is quite concerning in that regard:
https://www.unz.com/article/the-great-taking-how-they-plan-to-own-it-all/
All intended – not a bug, but a “feature”.
The big tell that something is amiss is that companies would adhere to a stricter regulation than the one required by the government. Voluntarily.
That doesn’t make any sense in an economically rational world.
Nuts, but not explained.
BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street…
Yes, but why? It doesn’t serve their economic interests I don’t think. If it does, it’s not clear how.
And if it doesn’t, then why? It’s not because they want to save the planet or even think the planet needs saving. That much we do know.
I can make plenty of insinuations myself, but actual proper explanations, I have yet to see any.
If ordinary people cannot get mortgages, the sellers won’t be able to sell at the price they want without expensive modifications, so if they have to sell it’s going to be cheaper, Black rock etc will pick up at a song, likewise they will pick up the property of those who cannot afford mortgage payments on top of the increased net zero energy costs. They will then do mass cheapo fit outs to comply, and rent back the homes to the masses. They will probably securatise the business on the basis of guaranteed rental stream ever increasing.
In short they get richer and richer, they squeeze the renters, and what’s the alternative?live on the streets.
Its just the old public house model but transferred onto the housing market with the assistance of the Government.
My thoughts too.
Communists don’t believe in private ownership of property.
Didn’t there used to be a conspiracy theory that bankers run the world?
Neo Feudalism….. Max Kaiser warned of this a decade ago..
He was bang on right
A certain set of bankers rule the world…. Rothchilds the Bank of International Settlements….. The loan sharks that lend to all the central banks….. Jews.
And this story demonstrates the problem with the modern world in a nutshell: governments can pull the plug, but the wicked power games continue, outsourced to banks, corporations, supranational organisations such as the UN, and quangos doing the bidding of people such as Larry Fink, Klaus Schwab and the late Maurice Strong!
Governments know this and the Tories do a year before an election. In essence, the Tories are telling a much cheated-on wife that they’ve changed their ways, only to have secretly organised a mass transfer of funds out of the joint bank account and divorce papers to be served the day after an election victory.
Good analogy. ————” The whole aim of practical politics is all about scaring the populace with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary and therefor clamouring to be led to safety”. —–Climate Change is simply the latest hobgoblin. But one of the scariest, and we mostly are all scared stiff. ——So much easier to manipulate a scared stiff public.
“Thousands Face Being Unable to Get a Mortgage Under Bank Net Zero Rules”
So the mortgage lenders are in receipt of information that is being deliberately withheld from the public. Now I wonder what that is?
Reminds me of something I was reading about recently, and how property rights were slowly taken from securities. There is a free book around called the Great Taking. Perhaps this is an attempt to remove property rights from properties. Or at least make it really difficult to sell or buy property. People who are well off might think they are OK, but i doubt it in the long run.
The removal of property rights is exactly what I was thinking of. It starts with the insidious EPC. Some older properties, solid walls, probably cannot get to EPC ‘C,’ so they will be deemed unsaleable.
Next, or even alongside heat pumps, no heat pump – unsaleable.
What a nice way to steal wealth and property. Perhaps the banks know this is coming.
The encouraging thing is Heat Pumps are failing, and E cars, one electric car kidnapped its driver and went for a 50MPH cruse.
I suggest people watch the video from Ivor Cummins, with a free download by a financier who suggests this ‘Reset’ has been planned since the 1960s. Video; The Great Taking.
So-called “conspiracy theorist” Gary Allen was covering similar ground back then. See his book “None dare call it conspiracy”.
Take this 1968 article about “‘Liberal’ Racists” and see how familiar some of the situations and issues are:
https://archive.org/details/negroes-what-liberal-racists-never-mention-by-gary-allen-american-opinion-march-1968-pp.-27-40
That book as been mentioned a few times, like in 180 Degrees & Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler by A C Sutton. O must get that book. Problem is, we all could be reading these books in some sort of Gulag.
“Banks are sticking to green pledges that will see thousands turned down for mortgages if they don’t spend a small fortune making their homes more energy efficient, despite Rishi Sunak saying the public should not be burdened with the cost of Net Zero.”
I think the word ‘despite’ is doing a lot of work here. Everything that spews forth from Thunderbird puppet Sunak’s mouth is a sticky half digested lump of bread & circuses.
We are gripped by the balls. The Green Red Eco Socialist pincer movement of pretend to save the planet technocrats are pressing down on us from every angle. There is no escape. We are like Patrick McGoohan in the sixties TV show “The Prisoner”. —-We are all in the climate change gulag.
I am not a Number….I am a free man!