There is currently a raging discussion going on in German-speaking new and social media about whether the leaked final redactions of the minutes of the Robert Koch Institute’s COVID-19 crisis group are in fact forgeries. At least one now ostensibly unredacted and highly publicised passage in the documents strongly suggests that they are.
The passage in question was highlighted by Aya Velazquez, the journalist to whom the documents were provided, in the July 23rd press conference that she held with two other German Covid-response critics.
It reads as follows:
EMA and Pfizer are considering whether they might skip the phase III trials and go directly to broad use, if the regulators decide to do this, then it [the authorisation process] could go quicker than 12-18 months.
The prior bullet-point in the minutes affirms that “normally” the authorisation process of a new vaccine is expected to take “12-18 months from the start of phase I”.
The passage clearly alludes to the authorisation process of what has come to be commonly known as the “Pfizer” COVID-19 vaccine, even though the actual developer and legal manufacturer is the German company BioNTech. The EMA is the European Medicines Agency.
But the problem with the passage is, above all, the date of the minutes in which it is included: April 15th, 2020. The passage is wildly anachronistic. There is no reason why Pfizer should have had any contact with the EMA on authorisation of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine so early.
Indeed, there is no reason why Pfizer would have had any official, direct contact even later. The applicant for the authorisation was not Pfizer. It was BioNTech. This is also the case for the application for full authorisation in the USA. But in the U.S., BioNTech, as a foreign firm, had to appoint a domestic agent and it appointed Pfizer to play this role. The company had no need for any intermediary in the EU.
But in any case, on April 15th, 2020, neither company would have yet had the occasion to discuss their long-term plans with the EMA. BioNTech had only registered its Phase 1 trial of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate with the EMA literally just the day before! See the entry from the EMA’s Clinical Trials Register below.
This registration will have been BioNTech’s first official contact with the EMA in the matter of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate. As indicated in the record, the trial was to be conducted under the aegis of the German regulatory agency, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI).
At this stage, the national regulator, the PEI was undoubtedly BioNTech’s principal interlocutor. According to BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin, he and his team first met with the PEI to discuss the company’s COVID-19 vaccine project more than two months earlier, on February 6th. (See The Vaccine, p.52.)
It is important to note that while BioNTech and Pfizer had concluded their COVID-19 vaccine collaboration agreement in mid-March, Pfizer was not involved in the German Phase I trial, which was registered with the EMA on April 14th and which began with the first vaccination of a human subject in Mannheim on April 23rd.
We do know that Sahin was in fact extremely concerned about accelerating the pace of the authorisation process. But it’s hard to imagine that in mid-April 2020 he was thinking so far ahead to the Phase III trials. Having not yet initiated the “first in human” Phase I trial, how could he even know he would get there?
But normal regulatory steps had to be skipped or somehow abridged for BioNTech even to be able to initiate its Phase I human trial in April. In particular, BioNTech had to be allowed to initiate the human trial without first completing a preclinical toxicology study on animals.
As discussed in detail here, the PEI in fact allowed BioNTech to do this, permitting the firm to start its human trial on the basis merely of an “interim” toxicology report before the final results were available. On Sahin’s account, BioNTech received the go-ahead from the PEI on April 21st. (See The Vaccine, p.173.)
It makes little sense for the RKI crisis team to have been discussing Pfizer and the EMA in the April 15th minutes. It would have made a lot of sense for them to be discussing BioNTech and the PEI. The RKI was surely being kept informed by its sister agency about the furious development of BioNTech’s vaccine project. (The two agencies bear roughly the same relationship as the CDC and the FDA in the United States.)
If not, Germany’s then Minister of Health Jens Spahn could have told RKI staff about it. In his April 1st, 2021 speech inaugurating BioNTech’s mRNA manufacturing facility in Marburg, Spahn said that he first met BioNTech CEO Sahin to discuss the company’s COVID-19 vaccine project “around 12 months ago”. This would take us to late March/early April.
The PEI is mentioned twice just a little further on in the same April 15th minutes, and the April 2nd minutes report that the PEI informed the RKI that a “clinical study will receive the authorisation tomorrow”. Curiously, the extant minutes do not tell us whose clinical study.
Other than in a November 11th quote from the British magazine Nature, Pfizer is never again mentioned in the 1834 pages of the 2020 minutes independently of BioNTech. All further references are to “BioNTech-Pfizer”, “BioNTech/Pfizer” and the like. BioNTech is often mentioned alone.
The complete RKI files in the versions provided to Aya Velazquez are available here. German observers quickly spotted that the leaked versions are not in fact identical to the official versions that had been previously released in redacted form to the journalist Paul Schreyer and then published, in already somewhat less redacted form, on the RKI website. (See here, for instance, for one comparison.) Whole passages from the previous release are in fact missing from the leaked version (and at least one of those passages, incidentally, contains redactions) and the language is not the same in others.
Aya Velazquez explained the discrepancies by noting that she herself had received multiple versions of the documents from her source as Word docs and had selected those “closest” to the versions on the RKI website to include in the originally posted PDFs. She has, in the meanwhile, also posted these Word documents.
But, as critics have noted, a Word document can be altered at will. Some of the critics claim that metadata shows modifications being made – presumably by the Robert Koch Institute itself – well into 2024. In any case, what is the point of keeping minutes if they are going to be altered ex post? If the RKI created multiple versions of the crisis group minutes, what does it even mean to speak of an authentic version anymore?
Stop Press: Robert gave an interview to Jay Bhattacharya on his YouTube channel a couple of weeks ago that you can see here.
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And when attending a gathering in Australia, with a Victorian Liberal MP among others, a group of black shirted “Nazis” turned up, confronting the women.
Because of this, the MP’s own party is trying to expel her; every media outlet has branded the group “Nazi sympathisers”.
So, our conservative party is trying to expel a woman MP whose crime is attending a rally to fight for the rights of women to not be exposed to naked men in toilets, gaols, etc, or in sports, and that is considered to be “Nazism”.
Can someone explain to me what I’ve missed?
I suspect that just like in the UK, politicians, judges, senior police ranks etc are all drawn from the same liberal elite clique. The colour of rosette they wear when it’s time for an election is the only difference.
Groupthinkers like this usually wear the same colour rosette
How can anyone expect the liberal elite clique to change tack when it is not in their career interests to do so? Besides, the liberal elite clique are far more fearful of the displeasure of the Left than the centre Right. The former are active, well organised, well funded, committed and successful in driving their agenda. The latter are disorganised, poorly funded, rarely if ever politically active and invariably find it easier to yield than fight their corner.
They get away with it because they can, and the police are effin useless. Even if they weren’t useless, they’d be on the wrong side.
One thing. The majority of young people supporting woke, trans ideology are girls.
Trans ideology is not the anti-women movement it is being portrayed to be.
Having said that, the world’s biggest and strongest lobby, the feminist lobby, seem to be having the most success at pushing back trans ideology.
My money.is on the feminists winning this one. They outnumber the trans and they have so much more experience self victimising.
In my opinion you have a chip on your shoulder about womens’ rights and Feminism as a whole, and your responses are getting rather predictable. Feminism has sought the political, economic, personal and social equality of the sexes.Of course, equality does not and has never meant ‘the same’, just as 2+2=4 the way 3+1=4. Different but equal. As a principle I would think Feminism is difficult to argue against,The radical outliers of the Feminist movement do not represent the whole well at all, and in many cases do a great dis-service to us all, regardless of sex. If you only look to them to decide what Feminism is, you will not see the deeper difficulties the radical trans movement poses to women.
Hear hear, regarding your entire post! It’s like if people judge all Muslims by the tiny minority who like to go around wearing suicide vests and blowing up civilians in crowded places. Utterly idiotic, nonsensical and shows a great deal about the bigotry the uninformed and ignorant person continually insists on spewing. And you’re spot on, there is certainly a chip there, as evidenced by the predictability we’ve all come to witness. I just scroll on by now. Some people are just pathological lost causes.
So true
Well said
“The majority of young people supporting woke, trans ideology are girls.”
You may well be right but where do you get that info from?
Assuming true, any theories as to why this might be?
My pet theory – women are nicer than men, less disagreeable, and wokeness attracts people who want to feel and be seen to be “nice”.
How about After 78 years of relentless German-bashing, Nazi has turned into a general expletive which means nothing but Someone of whose loathsome opinions I really disapprove of? With loathsome meaning different from mine.
Rona taught me that 80% of the sheeple are morons.
Transgender fascism has simply confirmed the above.
Mentally ill perverts, sick whackjobs, chromosome-DNA-mitochondria denying half wits.
Witch hunt indeed.
If Posie was Black, Muslim, or spouting Rona gibberish, she would be left alone.
So now the new witch is the normal, white, heterosexual female?
The Enlightenment –> To the Age of Stupid. Straight. Red. Line.
I said the same in my comment on the linked article. Imagine if a similar mob had done this to a speaker calling for taking in unlimited refugees for example…
Love the last line.Ferdlll. Puts me in mind of Clemenceau’s quote: “America; the only country to have gone from barbarism to degeneracy without the usual interval of civilisation.” And getting truer by the day.
It’s called ‘bullying’, plain and simple. The gang gets off on feeling empowered and goad each other on. It’s a tribal ‘Lord of the Flies’ thing.
It’s a pity there appeared to be no sane folk at the gathering to support/aid Ms Keen.
Disturbing though these scenes are, is there not a common factor linking them back a decade or two? Or even centuries? That factor is the bullying of dissidents in attempt to get them to comply with the party line, or “consensus”. Twenty years ago if you were working in an academic environment and expressed the slightest doubt about the issue of the day, you would find your life made uncomfortable, miserable and would wind up either leaving voluntarily or being defenestrated. The issue of the day mutates: twenty years ago it was “global warming”, ten years ago it was “reparations for the Slave Trade”, two years ago it was the persecution of the covid-sceptics and today it is gender identity. Centuries ago it was the Spanish Inquisition or Salem. The difference is superficial, concerning whether the soup is literal or metaphorical, and details of the heretics’ opinion, and the dress-code of the inquisitors. If anybody says that the Earth is warmed by the Sun and not by the oxidation of carbon, or that gender is set at conception, they will be excommunicated. The commonality runs deep, the message being “comply or be crushed”.
This is where woke ideology leads.
As Elon Musk observed:
“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.”
The rent a mob nasties turn up at the behest of the state to infiltrate & function as a useful tool to legitimise the woke mob’s cries of far right/na$i & the bile which they spew against whomever is standing up against the mob.
Every group which threatens the blob is at risk of being infiltrated by the blob.
I guess the BBC would call this A mostly peaceful witchhunt conducted by the innocent victims of a well-known hateful extremist. Ye shall know them by their fruits.
I just finished writing an email to friends and family describing how [a certain country that the Daily Sceptic seems not to like very much] found anti-Christian woke /CRT/ trans ideology unacceptable, degenerate and perverted … and considered the West to be doomed. I then clicked into today’s DS and found the first two articles amply describing how people with orthodox Christian views are today’s heretics for ideological zealots (woke being the new religion for both fanatics and the STATE (+ THE WHOLE OF THE WEST ) it would seem.
I then received a TikTok video of Nigel Farage amply describing in the EU parliament 8 years ago how it was going to cause war war with Russia in Ukraine. “Have you taken leave of your senses?” He asked.
The vilification of good, truthful people is one of the most disturbing features of life today.
I leave you with an image of Vice President Biden shaking hands with Prime Minister Putin in 2011…. rejecting, nevertheless, Putin’s proposal of visa-free travel in order to foster better relations.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-biden-idUSTRE7293LQ20110310
I have it on good authority that Putin was once anxious to repair relations with the west – even to the point of joining NATO. All that is now gone and the West has been consigned to what the Russians would probably describe as ‘the intellectual and spiritual dustbin’. They are looking elsewhere for sanity.
I have it on good authority that Putin’s stooges blurt about again planting a red flag on the Reichstag in Berlin and reconquering and renslaving the Germany that’s rightfully theirs. To which I reply “Good luck, chaps! You have only about 1120 more miles to go and this time, you’re not allied with all of the world but have to rely on your own merits and abilities.” And we know how that ended in 1917.
Thats horrendous, these people deserve to be on the periphery of a society, spores.
The fruits of Ardern’s labours.
So what was the point of International Womens Day?
”And what is Parker’s crime? What did this witch do? ”
She took on the role of stating that ”the Emperor is not wearing any clothes” and of course this whole thing relies on everybody accepting the ludicrous and preposterous proposition that mammalian male and female are interchangeable.
In a way the people protesting against this lady are pitiable stooges of the insidious and horrendous racket that is working to undermine our society and destroy any sense of living in a rational and reasonable world.
“Put 100 women and 10 men on a deserted island and in 100 years you will have a thriving community of men, women, boys and girls.
Put 100 Trans women and 10 men on a
deserted island and in 100 years you will find
the skeletons of 110 men.”
Like it
I might borrow that one. Very good.
Does the mob’s behaviour have anything to do with the behavioural characteristics resulting from living at the arse end of the world with sheep and rugby vying for the nation’s attention?
Imagine plod’s reaction if this were a BLM rally and a bunch of goose steppers showed up with whistles and megaphones and tomato soup. They’d have been kettled, assaulted and banged up in swift order. But waive a tranny flag and of course it’s all good. I hate the 21st century mostly because there’s nothing I can do to change this insanity.