The Covid Inquiry Doesn’t Understand Why the Vaccines Didn’t Work

I have previously commented on what I perceive as the shortcomings of the report on Module 2 of Baroness Hallett’s Covid Inquiry. The inquiry recently published its report on Module 4, focused on vaccines and therapeutics, and, with one or two minor exceptions, it demonstrates extensive ignorance of clinical medicine. Perhaps this is not surprising, as the lists of core participants and witnesses do not appear to contain any clinician with an understanding of immune-mediated disease.

There is much about process – the development of clinical trials, the introduction of vaccines – but its conclusions are subject to numerous errors and omissions. I have detailed my concerns here.

The structure of the inquiry is flawed, and fatally so because, as I have previously suggested, it has the wrong people asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. If you wish to explore the management of a disease, you need to involve, as key experts, those who manage that disease. You need to take advice from experts who understand the pathology of the disease. Yet the inquiry has failed to do this, and because it has misunderstood the disease commonly referred to as COVID-19 and what makes it fatal, it has led itself up a series of blind alleys. This is a combination of ignorance of historical precedent, a belief that clinical trials are essential, a belief that vaccines are the final answer and statistical ignorance.

It is not possible to plan for a plague that isn’t there. This is why any conclusions drawn from the management of the coronavirus pandemic may be invalid in changed circumstances. You do not sensibly develop plans to fight the next war on the basis of the last. Military examples of failure to understand this include the Maginot Line, the defence of Singapore in the Second World War and, more recently, the Ukraine conflict. That said, there was a pandemic management plan which should have been used for coronavirus, but it was discarded in panic. Lockdowns were never a part of it. So, as the inquiry has demonstrated that some of the responses to the pandemic were remarkably speedy, why waste effort until the effort is needed? Or why plan to cross a bridge when you don’t even know that there is one, or what type it is?

It is necessary to understand, when a plague does appear, why it may kill people and how many. This relies on real data and not estimates from modelling. If most people have a mild illness, but it is possible to identify the small proportion becoming seriously unwell and treat them, that may be all that is required. There is little point exposing an entire population to a vaccine if most of that population doesn’t need protection.

Changing definitions of interventions may be extremely dangerous. In the coronavirus scenario the two main ‘vaccines’ were actually gene therapy products, which category of preparations is subject to far stricter trialling because of additional inherent (if hypothetical) risks. Some of those risks predicted by sceptics have turned out to be true. Shortcuts in trials will result in missed safety signals. There were short cuts.

I recently sent some alarming material to the inquiry which, were it assessed, would have a profound impact on its conclusions.  But I was told it had finished collecting evidence and no more would be considered. What madness is this? If, as a result, its overall conclusions will be inaccurate but could be adjusted, does that not discredit the whole expensive process?

I won’t cover all my detail here but there are some stand-out issues.  

The inquiry states that there were “no clinically proven therapeutics”. This is untrue. The pathology was a cytokine storm, a massive and sudden overactivity of the body’s immune system, which has been recognised for years as a sequel to some infections. But no-one appears to have understood that. The correct treatment – steroids – was established long before this pandemic. I have used them myself in patients with a cytokine storm induced by bacterial sepsis. So why was it deemed necessary to trial that treatment, wasting precious weeks, even months? The only explanation is that those in charge did not understand the pathology. Sadly they had been told. By me. But they chose not to listen. Will they be prosecuted for negligence? Somehow I doubt it. The inquiry has failed to grasp this. It says: “A great strength of the UK’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was its ability to resist the understandable urge to treat patients without first establishing the efficacy of therapeutics through clinical trials.” Disease A causes a serious illness. There is established treatment. SARS-CoV-2 causes an identical serious illness. So this ability to resist the urge to treat patients is nonsense.

The development of a virally-induced cytokine storm (here we will call it Covid-CSS) is a response which is independent of the viral load. It either happens or it does not. Previous research has clearly shown that there is a genetic predisposition. Antivirals therefore are useless if the storm has developed. So are vaccines. The m-RNA vaccines are designed to make the body produce the viral spike protein which is the trigger for a storm, and as the quantity and duration of this production is highly variable (something that the abbreviated trials would not spot) there was a theoretical possibility that they would cause the very illness that they were supposed to stop. And so it proved. The AstraZeneca vaccine was quietly withdrawn when its serious side-effects began to occur. Yet its inventors still appear to be showered with plaudits.

There is no solid evidence that the vaccines prevented severe illness. The data suggesting this are confounded by the coincidental appearance of viral strains that were less immunogenic and the eventual introduction of effective treatment in the form of steroids. As vaccines can neither prevent nor treat a cytokine storm, the fall in mortality noted can only be due to the other two factors. So they were not effective, and they were not safe. Unconvinced? I had a short affair with AI, which might upset you. Coercion to be vaccinated was an affront to personal autonomy. As for giving the vaccines to children and young people, the risk of them developing Covid-CSS was vanishingly small. The risks outweigh the benefits, and granny would not be protected.

There is one recommendation in the latest report that is sensible: the need for post-authorisation monitoring. The inquiry makes reference to this, but it must be long-term. If, for example, you are looking for potential cancer induction it might be short because of vaccine contamination with oncogenic substances – a concern expressed previously on this site by Angus Dalgleish – but it may be long delayed.

The inquiry is strong on the examination of process, but weak on the justification of whether the process was at all necessary. I don’t think it was. What mattered, solely and simply, was whether those who developed Covid-CSS got treated promptly and correctly. When, eventually, they were, following a trial which was not needed and caused a delay in implementation, mortality dropped like a stone. Those who got infected with SARS-CoV-2 but did not develop Covid-CSS needed nothing.

My critique ends where it began: the expert witnesses listed in Table 4 do not include any experts on the therapeutics of CSS. Neither does the witness list in Table 5. Quite how the inquiry can adjudicate on clinical matters without input from relevant clinicians is beyond me.

Dr Andrew Bamji is a retired Consultant Rheumatologist and was President of the British Society for Rheumatology from 2006-8. He blogs here.