The scandal of the unacknowledged harms from Covid vaccines shows that lessons from Primodos have still not been learned, a former Government Minister has said.
Speaking in the House of Commons debate on the ongoing Primodos scandal, Esther McVey, a Conservative MP and Co-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Pandemic Response and Recovery, said that the drug regulator the MHRA continues to miss the vast majority of harms from drugs and the system continues to fail the victims. Here’s a transcript of her speech.
How distressing it must be for the women and families harmed by Primodos that they are still having to fight nearly five decades on. Their road to justice has been long and cruel, and it is shameful that we (MPs) find it necessary to debate this again. How can it be that the Primodos families are still not being properly supported and compensated after all the evidence that has been presented?
Sadly, Primodos is not an isolated case, and we have seen many examples over the years of our regulatory bodies failing to keep patients safe from new medicines and medical devices. In 2013, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) listed 27 medicines that had been withdrawn on safety grounds. The average time they were on the market was 11 years. I wonder how many times we will allow history to repeat itself. There have been reports and reviews calling for reform, and back in 2004 the Health Committee undertook an inquiry into the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. It noted, of drug companies, the “closeness that has developed between regulators and companies”, which had “deprived the industry of rigorous quality control and audit”.
It also highlighted “the MHRA’s poor history in recognising drug risks, poor communication and lack of public trust”.
In 2020, Dame June Raine, the Chief Executive Officer of the MHRA, stated that her agency had transformed itself from watchdog to enabler, so I ask: has anything improved in the intervening 20 years since the Health Committee inquiry? I fear not, and I think the time has come for another inquiry of similar scope and depth, only with more robust outcomes. That is what we want — robust outcomes.
In 2020, the independent medicines and medical devices safety review, ‘First Do No Harm‘, found that Primodos, sodium valproate and pelvic mesh had all caused “avoidable harm”. The review showed that patients had been let down, and it called for significant reforms of the MHRA, due to its mishandling of safety concerns. The review was clear that there is “gross under-reporting” of suspected adverse reactions and that “systems are both too complex and too diffuse to allow early signal detection”.
That theme keeps coming up, and in a recent meeting of the APPG on pandemic response and recovery we heard from Professor Carl Heneghan, who described widespread problems with the reporting of adverse drugs and device reactions, which continue to be a major cause of hospital admissions. As many as 98 out of 100 adverse drug reactions go unreported.
The APPG, of which I am a Co-Chair, was told that the MHRA is running a system that is too slow to act and is beset by conflicts. Failure to act now will only lead to more harm. We also heard from the solicitor Peter Todd who was acting for 43 individuals who suffered blood clots as a result of the AstraZeneca vaccination. He described how the Government’s vaccine damage payment scheme is operating poorly and failing to help those who have been injured. Not only is the current system unable to protect patients from harm, but it is failing to look after those who have already been harmed.
Three years on from Baroness Cumberlege’s landmark review, the Government has not fully implemented its recommendations. In particular, we are still waiting for redress schemes to be set up to meet the costs of additional care and support for those who were harmed by Primodos, sodium valproate and pelvic mesh. Why has that not been done?
Jacob Rees-Mogg, another ex-Government Minister, also contributed to the debate, wondering why even when scandals occurred decades ago, the present Government so often seems reluctant to face up to the errors made in the past and implement the recommendations of inquiries.
The case before us seems so remarkably straightforward that it is impossible to see why there is such a stick-in-the-mud attitude from the Government, though perhaps less so from the pharmaceutical companies, because they know that they are culpable and, ultimately, deserve a financial liability. Why can I be so confident of that link? There seems to be one very striking fact, which was revealed by Jason Farrell in the important work he did for Sky News: the drug was used in South Korea and Germany as an abortifacient. It was used to procure abortions. What is a drug that will do that doing to a baby? It is causing harm. That is so straightforward. We have heard already that Primodos contained 40 times the amount of hormone in a contraceptive pill. It also contained 13 times the amount of the morning-after pill. It is so clear and self-evident that harm has been caused, and therefore responsibility must be laid at someone’s door. We know from today’s debate where those doors are.
I have great sympathy for the Minister who is to respond, because there is an extraordinary, peculiar tendency of Government — one I do not understand as a Back Bencher and did not understand in Government — to cover up the mistakes of long-since-passed Administrations. We have seen it with Hillsborough, the infected blood scandal and even with thalidomide. There is no doubt an almost endless list. I do not understand it — it is not the current Administration at fault. They have done nothing wrong; some were not even born — the Prime Minister was not — when the scandal started. Yet again and again, Governments and the bureaucracy will not open up, allow the real truth to come out and follow the evidence that was so brilliantly and clearly put by Baroness Cumberlege in her report.
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“..elderly and vulnerable people should be protected if they want it,..”
How? If masks don’t work, tests deliver wrong results, SD is just voodoo made up on the fly and staying inside and stopping socialising kills them too?
It was and will always be: let it rip and
stop trying to play God (with OPM, of course).
Indeed. One could also speculate that frightening the life out of the elderly (almost literally) did them a great deal of harm, keeping them separated from their loved ones (whether voluntarily while at home or by force by not allowing care home visits) caused great loneliness and despair, leading to physical decline. Leaving care homes shortstaffed by allowing those testing ‘positive’ to stay home for weeks on end and then losing staff when they refused to be part of the dangerous vaxx experiment must have led to deaths, as did jabbing people in poor healthy anyways, with the knowledge that people over 80 do not produce significant numbers of antibodies, meaning the whole vaxx campaign was pointless for the very elderly and probably only worsened their health (which may well have been the point, of course).
A friend in Spain was telling me how in the beginning he and his family had been terrified of infecting his gran, who was 90 when this started. How they had spent Christmas dinner with the younger people sitting by the open window of the kitchen, waving to granny across the room. As time went by and granny had reached 92 she told him to pack in the nonsense. She said, quite rightly, that she was 92, if her time had come, it had come and that she didn’t care to live longer if it meant she could not hug and kiss her loved ones (the Spanish are big on physical contact).
Frightening the old was despicable.
It really was. They had pretty much convinced people over 70 that if they got infected, they were almost definitely going to die. This despite the fact that early data from China showed that, even though the elderly were far and away those at greatest risk, the vast majority survived.
They also never made a distinction between elderly living at home and elderly living in care homes, where people are in essence sent to die and the average length of stay is between 6 to 18 months. That alone would have made an enormous difference to people’s state of mind.
Both my parents died in care homes, already suffering from advanced dementia with low quality of life. They both died of pneumonia I think, and possibly the triggering infection might have come from me or my kids or the staff – it seems to me the alternative, which would have been to stop visiting them, stop them mixing, and for them to be attended by staff wearing hazmat suits, would have been far far worse than their eventual fate.
I will never, ever forgive the government for the way my 94 year old father in law died. Deaf, and suffering from Altzheimers, he was imprisoned in a care home after a stay in hospital. He was kept in solitary confinement (he never had covid) and they lost his hearing aids, so he could not even lip read because all mouths were masked. We were not allowed to visit him. However, they allowed us to watch him crying via Zoom. He must have thought he was in hell, death was a release from such cruel conditions.
I will remain angry about it for the rest of my life, and I find it hard to be civil to anyone employed by the NHS as I still regard them as keen players in this theatre of horrors.
Totally agree
I would feel exactly the same in your position. It’s the 3 Cs for all of the medical/healthcare sector that has seriously boiled my p*ss throughout; Cowardice, complicity and cruelty. Nasty, nasty organization, the NHS. Unrecognisable from when I was employed with them, and the atrocities they committed ( whilst happily being hailed as heroes and martyrs ) against the vulnerable in their care is entirely unforgivable.
A truly gruesome story. They basically tortured him to death by systematic passive aggression. All in the name of compassion.
— words can’t really express what I’d like to be saying here —
“ However, they allowed us to watch him crying via Zoom.”
That is desperate poetry, with a real emotional punch, as indeed are many of your other words.
Possibly the only way that the majority of people will ever feel the outrage against the lockdowns, vaccine mandates etc. is to have their heartstrings pulled. Emotion beats reason hands down when it comes to changing peoples’ minds.
Can you imagine a music video using lines like that? And think of the visuals of some of the perpetrators…
How horrible my heart goes out to you. Makes you weep it really does. These people are just disgusting. As you say unforgivable absolutely unforgivable.
To borrow from JK Rowling, they missed Point Zero – There was no pandemic. FACT CHECK – TRUE.
And lest we forget, the corrupt WHO deliberately changed the definition of what a pandemic was just before the swine flu was declared as one, and muppet Mogwai even took a flipping vaccine for it, because I was very green and pro-vax back then, what with working in health care and all. But the swine flu did not result in massive numbers of deaths nor was it novel because some people evidently did have existing cross-immunity to it. The parallels with Covid are uncanny. But in that regard I think swine flu was a sort of ‘dummy run’ for the WHO and Big Pharma ( and all associates ) because what they learnt was that they needed a fraudulent test and one hell of a PsyOp to really make it impactful and work to their advantage, and boy did they succeed on a global scale! Pure chuffing manipulation and underhand shananigans from start to finish and look where we are now.
”Since 2003, the top of the WHO Pandemic Preparedness homepage has contained the following statement: “An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in several simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.”6 However, on 4 May 2009, scarcely one month before the H1N1 pandemic was declared, the web page was altered in response to a query from a CNN reporter.7 The phrase “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” had been removed and the revised web page simply read as follows: “An influenza pandemic may occur when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity.” Months later, the Council of Europe would cite this alteration as evidence that WHO changed its definition of pandemic influenza to enable it to declare a pandemic without having to demonstrate the intensity of the disease caused by the H1N1 virus.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3127275/
Indeed. What I find so depressing is that as much as people are starting to wake up to the folly and evil, very few seem to me to have grasped what I believe to be the case – there was no pandemic, just a bad flu season that we should have just blustered through like every other bad flu season. The idea that covid was different or special is cemented in now, and I won’t live to see it let go of.
I saw a tweet the other day by that quack Hotez, pharma shill and vaxx pimp supreme. He was whining that the opening weeked of Barbie/Oppenheimer would result in moviegeddon, being huge (huge I tell you, huge, enormous) superspeader events – and we would never know, because no one was testing anymore.
Do these f-wits even read and understand their own words? A huge superspreader event we would never know about suggests there is nothing to know. If thousands of people start dropping dead in the next few weeks (bar having another round of boosters), we would definitely know. If no one is dropping dead and the hospitals aren’t filling up, then there is nothing to know. And that passes for a medical expert?
COVID was always the disease that’s extremely dangerous to everyone except those who actually got it. Nobody ever really questioned this patent insanity.
They still don’t. Most people I know are triple vaxxed, and they know I’m not. They ask me if I’ve had covid. I answer that I have no idea (never tested) but that I’ve had a few bouts of a flu like illness in the last couple of years and given that, if covid exists, most people must have had it at least once by now, so I expect I have had it once or twice. Not once has any of them expressed astonishment that I am still alive and in better health than they are, or asked me whether I was/is worried about covid. Some friends recently asked “oh, so how did you travel?”.
Well can you imagine if we’d had a PCR test for flu for the last 10 years, and mass testing for it was just routine and encouraged, the WHO would be declaring ”pandemics” as an annual event! We’d be dab hands at this lockdown and mask business by now, and our countries would have gone to sh*t economically, as well as health and social-wise, a long time ago as a result of these draconian and abusive measures. The success of the PsyOp ( and subsequent death jab uptake ) was always heavily dependent on the tests, the latter being the key to the governments’ totalitarian abuses of human rights, civil liberties and their crimes against humanity.
Indeed. Respiratory viruses of the type we’ve lived with since time immemorial will not go away, and we just need to accept that and keep on living with them – with the emphasis on living, as opposed to a living death. Even if all the lockdown lunacy “worked” to some degree, the suspension of normal life for billions for anything longer than 1 day per millenium is far too high a price to pay for any “lives saved”.
Yes, agreed. If anything there was a ‘pandemic’ of mass hysteria whereby everybody took leave of their senses and forgot what a flipping immune system was! I’m going to stick my neck out and say that there will never be any truly *novel* virus that could prove dangerous to people globally because everybody, depending on where you live, will always have immunity to something, and all you need is a functional immune system to not die from whatever lurgy you’re exposed to anyway. Oh and there’s the small point of governments/health authorities not depriving people of antibiotics and other known early treatment options that undoubtedly would have saved countless lives. It was all deaths resulting from iatrogenesis and democide.
This is evidenced by the fact that there are now more excess deaths in any country from 2021> than when we were exposed to their super-deadly, novel virus and had no miracle vaccine in 2020, and that those deaths ( and disabilities, inc heart damage ) are, worryingly, mostly taking place in people not even making it to the end of their natural life spans ( unlike the average age of death for somebody dying *from* Covid ), so people of working age and kids. You just cannot make this stuff up. A virus so deadly that people aren’t dying until they’re elderly and a vaccine so effective and safe you can still get Covid repeatedly and you won’t live long enough to draw your pension! Only in Clown World would such an absurdity make any sense.
It’s possible that a new plague might emerge that is dangerous enough to warrant drastic action, but unlikely we’d need to force people to take precautions, and equally unlikely any of them would do any good.
But that would likely only happen locally and never spread to be a global threat, just due to the fact a pathogen cannot usually be highly virulent and highly transmissible. Same goes for anything from a gain of function lab. It could cause havoc locally but a worldwide deadly pandemic is just the stuff of Hollywood movies in my opinion. The thing wouldn’t get very far if it killed its hosts so I anticipate in the future nothing worse than any flu we have already experienced. The WHO are trying their best to conjure things up though aren’t they? And they’ve had a few damp squibs, such as monkey pox and marburg recently, to name just two, though I did read about ‘shrew flu’ in China the other day. Molehills and mountains… And somebody might have to wake me up when this super-deadly haemorhagic fever thingy hits, with an IFR of 40, because I’ve got big expectations for that one. They’re really hyping it up! lol
Yes none of it seems very realistic.
Dr Mike Yeadon is firmly of the same opinion Mogs.
But that would likely only happen locally and never spread to be a global threat, just due to the fact a pathogen cannot usually be highly virulent and highly transmissible.
It absolutely can, at least in the right conditions. When the so-called black death wandered through Europe for the first time at the speed of the means of transportation back then, it would kill up to 80% of the people living in each settlement it reached within days.
I should have thought it obvious I’m referring to modern times, as in *the future*, where ‘The Black Death; Part 2’ is hardly likely to occur, what with medicines and sanitation being actual realities now.
The “Black Death” is one of those events that, when looked at more closely, is much more complicated than we have been taught. It also went on for decades (supposedly) in waves. It was pre-dated by strange weather patterns, rain and poor harvests meaning that the population would be weak and vulnerable to sickness. One person I spoke to about this thought that yellow (cadmium?) dyes from the East were responsible for poisoning people.
Finally it was such a long time ago that any evidence must be patchy. I think it is still unproven that the fleas were to blame.
Indeed – one theory I heard was that it was at least two different illnesses as historical records evidence completely different symptoms, one with Ebola-like haemorhagic symptoms, the other with more respiratory/pneumonic symptoms. Reflecting, as you say, preceding chronic health debilities.
I think you are referring to Dengue fever which is spread by mosquitos not person to person.
The first time someone gets dengue they feel pretty rotten stay at home and recover in a few days. The second time again can feel pretty awful and may need to be in hospital for repeated tests to make sure there platelet count doesn’t drop to low.
The third time quite often people are admitted to an icu for ntensive monitoring but can recover.
There isn’t a fourth time.
It really pisses me off the crap that is spoken in the west and the fearmongering about dengue. Yes it can be serious the third time but nowhere near the hype that is put out.
Indeed. I can remember some very bad ‘flu seasons. I think one was in the late 60s where so many people were sick everywhere became very quiet(empty shops, empty trains, etc), and my father (who never caught it) was, for some time, the only person in his office. Can’t remember any fuss being made.
Hong Kong flu, 1968, killed between 1 and 4 million, also flu in 1958 killed about the same. World population was much smaller then too.
And the NHS and the country at large weren’t shut down for Hong Kong Flu. Funnily enough there were no social media and 24hr rolling news back then either. Coincidence??
Indeed this was a key factor
I think a really important part – after two abortive attempts, 2004 and 2009 – was Don’t call it influenza. That’s too familiar to too many people for widespread panicking. It must be something verbally associated with a reportedly really bad illness many people still remember but something new and entirely different at the same time, to utilize mankind’s natural xenophobia. Eh voilà — Sars 2.0 aka Sars-CoV2 was born.
I think that is why Monkey Pox failed to make much impact. With such a silly name, it was not taken seriously.
…and the fact that it readily morphed into monepox, thus truly reflecting its origins!!!
15.Covid only exists in the mind.
Rebecca Harris: Shut up, you idiot.
Daily Skeptic: Yer, Shut up you idiot.
The testing point is missing a major argument. I remember at the beginning that some people were pointing out that a pcr test is so specific, it would pick up fragments of the virus, meaning not only that someone might not be infected, but also that it could be picking up fragments of an infection from months before. This was ignored or set aside as conspiracy (of course).
Little attention was paid to the announcement by CDC bimbo Walensky at the end of December 2021 that there was no need to test negative on a pcr test after being in isolation, as a person could test positive for up to 3 months after infection. In other words, they knew all along that a positive test for someone who was ‘asymptomatic’ (what we used to call ‘not sick’) was meaningless, yet countries threw billions of dollars, euros, pounds away on those garbage tests and forced people to be incarcerated on the basis of utter nonsense. This goes beyond whether or not the tests were accurate or not – outside of someone actually presenting as ill, they were utterly pointless.
People who are ill, by and large, tend to take to bed. Testing without symptoms = pointless. Testing while ill = equally pointless, they will have already infected people prior to symptoms and if already ill, how about going old-school and – gosh – treating them for their illness?
Testing, and getting a positive result without feeling ill = skivers charter!
And don’t forget the financial opportunity created for some organisations. They won’t be publishing the balance sheets for that lot. That said, it might have had a negative cash flow for some. E.g. the dentists surgery I go to had (earlier this year) an online symptom questionnaire specifically for Covid-19, with a list of about 10 items and a yes/no tick box for each one. It had a timeframe of about 4 weeks before. As it happened, I did have a fairly benign respiratory attack just before then; I think they would have cancelled my appointment if I’d selected “yes” for that lot – but it was outside the time limit so I said “no” to all of them. Nothing was mentioned on arrival. It all appeared normal there in early Spring.
One of the horrors of our time is that things don’t have to age well. They don’t even have to make sense from one moment to the next as long as the narrative has a hypnotic quality. Look at the mysterious disappearance of the Skripals and how completely that left the public consciousness. This is no consciousness at all it is a population captured by the images on the wall. Not surprising given that we are dealing with a hundred year old scientifically-crafted propaganda model that has had immense resources at its disposal, not just in terms of money but also darker insights gained in evil circumstances.All of the nastiness that went on in the post war era needs to be laid bare.
“Thankfully, there is now the investigative team at BBC Verify to rescue the truth from future pandemic propagandists!”
Yeah right!