Third vaccine fails within 15 weeks: then what? Never-ending jabs?
Hundreds of thousands of Australians descend on Canberra to say: NO
ATAGI refuses to recognise natural immunity in covid-recovered
Billions in taxes flow to Pfizer, Merck, Gilead, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline
It looked like a million people protesting in Canberra on Saturday saying “no” to forced injections, although corporate media said it was 10,000.
They came from everywhere on the Convoy to Canberra: central Queensland, Victoria, NSW; all furious with the government for coercing them into injecting a medical product they don’t want.
A third shot is now needed to qualify as “fully vaccinated” in Australia, despite mounting evidence that no vaccine at all is needed for healthy people under 50 or in those who have recovered from prior infection.
The move will force millions of Australians to take another covid shot to keep their jobs, boosting the profits of global pharmaceutical corporations.
In its announcement on Thursday, the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) again ignored natural immunity from prior infection, instead stating covid-recovered still needed all three injections.
Those who have recovered from covid have shown repeatedly in large and well-constructed studies that they do not need any further vaccination.
For studies and discussion on the long-lasting immunity from prior infection that ATAGI ignored, see: here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
ATAGI further said this applied to everyone over age 16, even though healthy teenagers suffer only mild illness from covid and do not need a vaccine.
The advisory group also changed its language from “fully vaccinated” to “up-to-date vaccination status”, leaving the door open for endless boosters in future as the third shot fails within 15 weeks.
Why is the Australian Government and its scientific advisers pushing unnecessary medication on people?
Pfizer has increased the sales outlook for its covid vaccine and oral pill Paxlovid to more than US$54 billion, Reuters reports.
The company no longer has to worry about selling covid products because the Australian Government does it for them. The company is sacking half its sales force.
The Australian Government used propaganda and coercion to force more than 94 per cent of over-16s to take the vaccines regardless of individual need, while pretending it is “not a mandate”.
The Federal Government outsourced enforcement to state governments who issued public health orders and changed licensing conditions to force people out of their jobs if they didn’t comply.
The public must now take three doses in order to keep their jobs, travel, visit loved ones in aged care or hospital, or even to research at a state library.
That means the vaccination is voluntary, the federal Department of Health says on its website.
This is not a euphemism, such as “collateral damage” for “civilian casualty”, it’s a lie. Working people have no choice because they are threatened with the permanent loss of their livelihood. A coerced decision is not “voluntary”.
Australia’s federal and state governments say they are acting on expert medical advice including from ATAGI, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and the Science and Industry Technical Advisory Group (SITAG) that advises on covid vaccine and treatment purchases.
So why do governments and advisers enthusiastically embrace policies that appear to benefit corporate profits over public health?
Who profits from forced covid medication?
Pharmaceutical giants Pfizer, Moderna, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Gilead and AstraZeneca all profit from Australia’s centrally planned covid market.
Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca provide the three vaccines from which, to date, Australians can choose.
Australia has also helped Big Pharma by removing cheap, safe competition from the therapeutics market.
The TGA banned doctors from prescribing Ivermectin in September.
Ivermectin is an extremely safe protease inhibitor used for more than 30 years against parasites, which has been shown by more than 75 separate studies to be helpful in early covid treatment.
The TGA seems to have ignored the evidence in favour of Ivermectin the same way ATAGI ignores natural immunity in covid-recovered.
Ivermectin’s patent has expired so anyone can make it. It produces no royalties for the company that invented it (Merck) and has a low profit margin.
A report by MTPConnect, a non-profit that fosters corporate ties to government, acknowledged last June there is no incentive for corporations to repurpose out-of-patent generics like Ivermectin.
New drugs are expensive to develop so corporations do not support the repurposing of a cheap alternative.
“Our system of biopharmaceutical innovation relies heavily on a ‘market exclusivity period’ for new drugs,” the report said.
“COVID-19 may illustrate critical market failures in drug repurposing.”
Expensive therapeutics: billions more in covid profit
The TGA has, however, approved the big-profit corporate therapeutics.
Merck has Molnupiravir, Pfizer has Paxlovid, GlaxoSmithKline has Sotrovimab, Roche has Ronapreve, and Gilead Sciences has Remdesivir.
These expensive drugs are patented so only the corporations that own the intellectual property can profit.
It’s difficult to find the Australian unit cost for these drugs, but an indication can be found in other developed-country pricing.
Reuters reported last month the US Government pays US$700 for a five-day course of Molnupiravir.
Pfizer’s Paxlovid costs the US government US$530 for a 5-day course, while GlaxoSmithKline’s Sotrovimab cost US$2,100 for single course, Reuters said.
Ronapreve was estimated to cost £1,000-£2,000 in the UK, University of Cambridge research fellow Lara Marks wrote in The Conversation.
Gilead set its price at US$2340 for a single course of Remdesivir, a controversial therapeutic not shown to have much use beyond slightly shortening hospital stays.
The profit margin is enormous as Gilead only spends US$6 to make a six-day course of Remdesivir but sells it for US$390 per vial, NewsGP reported.
Remdesivir is controversial as researchers say it can reactivate herpes viruses that are “oncogenic” and can cause tumours.
Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt enthusiastically bought more of it in October.
Australia has been extremely trusting in supporting corporate covid products.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a deal to buy 300,000 courses of Molnupiravir before it was even reviewed by the TGA, taking Merck at its word that the drug is safe and effective.
But large pharmaceutical companies have a poor track record for being taken on faith.
Merck killed thousands of people with its anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx before it was taken off the market in 2004. The company paid US$950 million in fines to settle the Vioxx case with the US Justice Department in 2011, a case forgotten by the Federal Government.
Pfizer was fined US$2.3 billion for criminal fraud in 2009 over Bextra.
Recently, Pfizer was engulfed by scandal after a whistleblower revealed its covid trial subcontractor Ventavia had falsified data, unblinded trials, mislabelled specimens, failed to store the vaccines at the right temperature and failed to follow up adverse events fast enough.
Despite being warned of the lax oversight, Pfizer re-hired Ventavia for further trials - which critics again slammed for having serious design flaws.
The British Medical Journal reports Pfizer has not even released the raw data from its clinical trials for most regulators to scrutinise let alone for the public to see.
More data is coming soon, however.
A Texas judge has ordered the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release the documents submitted by Pfizer for emergency use authorisation in the US, with the first tranche of 55,000 pages due in weeks.
Pfizer subsequently made redline changes to its fourth-quarter earnings report warning of potential impacts from “further information regarding the quality of pre-clinical, clinical or safety data, including by audit or inspection”, ZeroHedge reports.
How much tax money is Australia giving these companies?
Australians are not easily able to see how much they are paying per dose for these high-profit products because it’s secret.
Australian prices are lower than other markets and if other countries find out they might also demand lower prices, Medicines Australia said in its November 2020 submission to a parliamentary inquiry into drug approval processes.
It is impossible to know if this is true without seeing the secret figures.
However, if confidentiality is challenged “in any way”, the corporations might delay Australia’s access to medicine, the submission said.
Aggregate figures are public - and they are stupendous.
In December Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt announced an extra $9.8 billion (on top of previous spending) would go to covid vaccinations, medicines and tele-health.
“More than $12 billion have (sic) been invested over five years to distribute and administer COVID-19 vaccines to eligible people around Australia, including more than $8 billion related to vaccines and booster doses,” he said.
Imagine the health benefit if some of this were spent eliminating sugar from processed foods to reduce obesity.
The US Centres for Disease Control found more than 78 per cent of 148,494 adults hospitalised with covid from March to December 2020 were either overweight or obese.
Low-profit strategies, however, have not been heavily promoted during covid unlike corporate vaccines.
Big power for Big Pharma
Global drug giants including Pfizer, Moderna, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen (Johnson & Johnson), Roche, Bayer, Gilead and AstraZeneca all have influence in Australia’s medical industry.
They cultivate relationships with governments, regulators, universities, non-profit organisations, think tanks, medical research institutes and hospitals.
They organise through industry group Medicines Australia where all the biggest firms are Class 1 members.
The Medicines Australia board includes top bosses from Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Pfizer.
Federal and state governments want industry growth and encourage close ties with pharmaceutical corporations.
In 2015, the Federal Government started MTPConnect, a non-profit designed to foster corporate ties to government and research.
Until December, MTPConnect was headed by former Pfizer director Dan Grant.
Global pharmaceutical companies influence medical research culture in their favour by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on medical trials at universities, hospitals and medical institutes.
In 2019 a total of $1.4 billion was spent on clinical trials, of which three quarters is paid by corporations who sponsor about a third of all trials in an attempt to commercialise intellectual property, according to MTPConnect.
Fifteen university- and hospital-based institutes were involved in 1329 clinical trials during 2019, an MTPConnect report revealed.
Research trials create a financial relationship between the corporations and universities/institutes.
Australian university medical faculties, seeking research funding and prestige, encourage close “strategic partnerships” with corporate pharma.
In 2018, the University of Western Australia’s biomedical researchers co-authored studies with more than 40 different industry partners, mostly pharmaceuticals, including Bayer, GSK, Roche and Pfizer.
“Many of these outputs resulted from industry funded investigator-initiated research projects,” the university said.
Adelaide University’s medical faculty works with the pharmaceutical industry and state/federal governments both directly and through its hospital research institutes.
Most major universities sell themselves as a “partner of choice” for industry to encourage research funding growth.
Successful individual academic careers also depend on industry approval for future success, funding grants.
Working inside companies and building trust with them is key, the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Medicine respiratory researcher Daniela Traini says in an article on the university’s website.
This fosters a widespread academic culture favourable to Big Pharma.
A report by MTPConnect on repurposing drugs acknowledged that corporate expectations can filter down to research academics.
“Academic researchers might be expected to simply choose the more promising drugs, new or repurposed. But in practice there is pressure even on them to discover drugs that will create funding streams for their institutions,” the report said.
Too big to say “no” to?
Australia is dependent on large pharmaceutical corporations to supply the products that the health system depends on.
In Pfizer’s submission to the Senate Select Committee on Covid-19, the corporation noted it supplied 53 of the 78 essential medicines used for intensive care patients during covid, and was the sole supplier for many of them.
In the same submission it urged the government to “maximise the uptake” of vaccines and to encourage more vaccines for adults - expanding demand for its product.
Huge power is wielded by the global pharmaceuticals and the Federal Government listens to them.
In its November 2020 submission to parliament, Medicines Australia complained Australia pays too little for drugs, and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) doesn’t value it’s corporate products highly enough.
“Key examples include vaccines”, the submission said, and “full value of medicines needs to be captured”.
The PBAC is an independent body that evaluates pricing of new medicines that the government then buys for the public Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
In September last year, the Federal Government agreed to a new trial in which Medicines Australia gets to exchange information with PBAC during a drug submission, giving it more influence with this body.
It also gave Medicines Australia the right to nominate a representative to the Medical Services Advisory Committee which assesses new treatments for public funding and advises the Health Minister, again giving the corporations more access to decision makers.
The TGA regulates pharmaceutical products and is part of the federal government’s Department of Health - but its funding comes from industry.
The TGA’s annual budget is about $165 million, it says on its website, with costs predominantly recovered from manufacturer fees.
It must be difficult to deny a respected company permission to sell a product after making them pay millions of dollars to assess it.
ATAGI provides vaccine advice to the government, and its members are required to declare their interests.
If they lead any vaccine studies they must not vote on that vaccine, similar vaccines, or any vaccine made by the company funding their research.
We don’t know the deliberations of ATAGI’s internal meetings where the members discussed the covid vaccines. The Health Department released meeting minutes in response to a Freedom of Information request - but they are heavily blanked out by censors.
It’s difficult to know, but it appears as though an echo chamber has developed in which universities, institutes, government, media and the pharmaceutical industry all reinforce each other’s enthusiasm for corporate products as if cheerleading “for science”.
Good policy depends on a healthy separation of government and industry, so legislators serve only the interests of the public.
It’s worth remembering a vignette from history.
In 1911, the Cuyamel Fruit Company hired a mercenary army to install a military government in Honduras that was friendly to their business.
It happened again in Guatemala, 1954, only this time the company didn’t hire its own mercenaries. Instead, the United Fruit Company manipulated cold-war fears so that US President Eisenhower sent in the CIA to install a pro-business junta for them - for free.
It is from here we get the term “banana republic”.
Corporations learnt long ago how to manipulate governments to serve their interests.
It happened in Australia in 2004 when foreign spy agency ASIS was asked to divert resources from investigating the Jakarta embassy bombings to bug the government of East Timor during maritime boundary negotiations, for the benefit of Woodside Petroleum and its joint venture partners.
They wanted to extract gas from the Greater Sunrise field in the Timor Sea without spending money on building a gas plant on East Timor’s southern shore to process it.
Now it appears that it’s happening again.
Correction: 09 March 2023 - corrected TGA budget link, old link went to a productivity commission report instead of the TGA website.
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