Would you eat chocolate manufactured by a company that keeps getting prosecuted for false labelling?
People keep telling me I’m anti-vax, though I have been diligently avoiding the subject for years. I lost two friends this year over the matter (one because I’m clearly too stupid to be worth the bother, the other because she is) and a recent review of my first book noted how I “dismiss pretty much all modern medicine, especially vaccination”. The writer then devoted half of his review to correcting my misunderstanding. Thanks Dave!
The word appears twice in 190 pages (six times less than in the review), and the offending comment describes how “deaths from tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, diphtheria and whooping cough had fallen by around 90% before vaccination programs began”. The point isn’t developed as I wasn’t writing about vaccination, but if I’m going to be categorised as anti-vax regardless of what I write or who I cite, then maybe it is time to tackle the subject head-on.
I like to know what I’m putting into my body so I tend to read the labels in the supermarket, and often return things to the shelf if they contain ingredients like palm oil, for example. That doesn’t mean that I’m anti-chox. I’m not totally strict about palm oil anyway, I might eat a Malteser if it rolled my way — but I do have some questions I’d like answered before I roll up my sleeve for a dose of AstraZeneca.
Vaccines are a hotly contested area, with bad tempers and bad arguments in abundance, so this article will be scrupulously scientific and militantly anti-vex. We will read labels, court transcripts and journals, and you can come to your own conclusions. Some people may be inoculated already, with systems primed to respond quickly and aggressively to a probing question or unfamiliar suggestion; this intervention is contraindicated for them. Other readers should be safe — please report adverse reactions to the author or the authorities as appropriate.
The degree of controversy and strength of opinion on this subject is significant in itself, from a sociological perspective, but for now let’s start by being scientific, as is proper for matters of science. We will take the advice of the Father of the Scientific Method, Francis Bacon, by following the data rather than a theory, and the superstar philosopher of science Karl Popper by choosing testable hypotheses.
“Are vaccine manufacturers trustworthy?”, is a matter of opinion, not a matter of fact; we can’t do science with that. “Vaccine manufacturers tell the truth about their products”, however, is a hypothesis that can be tested against data and “falsified” if the data disagrees; this is how Popper defined a “scientific” hypothesis. “How much was GSK prosecuted for misleading the public in 2012?” yields a data point, so let’s start with that.
Back in June, Forbes reported on the nine companies leading the race for a Covid-19 vaccine — they were Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, CanSino Biologics, Sinovac and Novavax, while Merck also received a special mention.
GlaxoSmithKline’s fine for violating the False Claims Act in 2012 was $3bn, the largest in US history, and pertained to ten different drugs. The company was found guilty of not disclosing safety data — such as promoting Paxil for children while knowing that it causes suicidal behaviour — as well as making false statements concerning safety and claiming that drugs could treat conditions for which they hadn’t tested for. They were also prosecuted financial crimes including giving kickbacks to physicians, false pricing and defrauding Medicaid. The same corporation also paid $750 million in 2010 for knowingly selling twenty unsafe drugs, including an ineffective antidepressant and contaminated baby powder; they also fired their quality manager when she raised the issue with management. With a 2020 revenue of $44.27bn, fines like this are factored into GSK’s annual operations budget, along with $4.6 million on lobbying and undisclosed sums paid to panel members at organisations such as the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to favour their products.
Second to GSK is Pfizer which was ordered to pay a $2.3 billion fine in 2009, again for violating the False Claims Act with fraudulent marketing. The company “promoted the sale of Bextra for several uses and dosages that the FDA specifically declined to approve due to safety concerns”, and also illegally promoted three other drugs: the antipsychotic Geodon, the antibiotic Zyvox and the anti-epileptic Lyrica. Pfizer also misled parents about both the dangers and unapproved status of the meningitis drug Trovan during a trial in Nigeria in 1996 where eleven children died and many more were brain damaged. When this came to light, the multinational forged and backdated a letter of approval from a Nigerian Ethics Committee, which shows remarkable audacity. One of Pfizer’s former executives, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is currently directing Operation Warp Speed, the Center for Disease Control’s push to roll out a vaccine for Covid-19.
After Pfizer comes Johnson & Johnson with a pay-out of $2.2 billion for intentionally running “false, misleading, and dangerous marketing campaigns” that lead to babies being born exposed to opioids and causing “exponentially increasing rates of addiction [and] overdose deaths”. There was a conflict of interest here because the company had already invested considerable funds into developing and patenting their own strain of opium poppy (called Norman, which is not the name one normally associates with driving an opioid epidemic). Johnson & Johnson also has the distinction of paying two of the top ten largest fines in history. Perhaps there something fundamentally mendacious about the name Johnson (with apologies to Lynton).
The next largest offender is Merck, fined $950 million in 2011 for unlawful promotion after deliberately withholding safety information on various drugs including Vioxx, a painkiller linked to heart attack and stroke. Town records of Quebec revealed that residents were 67% more likely to have a heart attack in the two weeks after their first prescription. Would they do the same and mislead the public over a vaccine? The jury is still out on that, literally, ten years after senior scientists at Merck brought a case accusing their employer of mislabelling and falsely certifying their MMR vaccine. Merck markets it as 95% effective against mumps, while a 2005 study in Vaccine estimated it to be 69%. According to the whistle-blowers, the discrepancy is because they abandoned undesirable test results and added rabbit antibodies to human blood samples to make it appear more effective. Merck has also been prosecuted for Medicare fraud.
AstraZeneca settled one lawsuit for $520 million for unlawfully promoting the schizophrenia drug Seroquel, and was fined $355 million in another for false and fraudulent claims regarding cancer drug Zoladex. The company also lost a case in 2016 for setting up bogus conferences and bribing doctors. AstraZeneca, like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Merck, ran trials with the notorious SFBC International, a 700-bed medical testing facility in a former motel. It was the site of a series of violations of the rights of the mostly poor Latin American immigrants, and subjects were threatened with deportation if they revealed details of the trials. After legal scandals on conflicts of interest, failing to properly inform test subjects, failing to protect the vulnerable and not allowing subjects to leave, directors changed the company’s name to PharmaNet Development Group. When Pharmanet was sold in 2011 the financial advisor was UBS, the biggest rogue trader in history.
The other companies on the list have not been busted for deceiving the public. Novavax has never been in a position to deceive the public, however, as in its 33 years of vaccine development it has never brought a vaccine to market. The company was on its last legs after high profile vaccine failures and associated stock crashes in 2016 and 2019, but in a stunning reversal of fortune it was awarded $1.6 billion by the US government, the largest sum to date, to develop a Covid vaccine. This smells a little fishy. The fact that board members have stopped pinning hopes on success, and stand to earn $101 million even if the vaccine fails, is so fishy that a pharma watchdog has voiced concern.
The two Chinese companies on the list, SinoVac and CanSino Biologics, have not been busted for lying. In the US and the UK, no one goes to jail or faces a personal fine when corporations deliberately mislead the public about the contents or safety of their products — the company simply subtracts the fine from their yearly revenue. China plays by different rules, however; fraudsters can sometimes be executed. Bribery is less serious, it seems. The CEO of Sinovac bribed the deputy director-general of the China Food and Drug Administration to help secure vaccine clinical trials and approval. The company is also being prosecuted for financial misdemeanours in a court in Antigua.
CanSino Biologics has only been listed on the stock exchange since March 2019, and perhaps has not had enough time to show its true colours. They haven’t even had time to proofread their website:
We apply our expertise across a range targets from antigen discovery, antigen overexpression, purification and formulation to proof-of-concept pre-clinical evaluation, production process development and assay development.
If a company can’t manage a decent translation into English, they may not be best entrusted with reverse transcription of RNA, but this doesn’t seem to matter. Nor does it matter that their Bill and Melinda-sponsored vaccine is yet to receive safety approval; they are testing it on Chinese soldiers anyway. Again, this doesn’t seem like responsible scientific practice.
Another of Bill and Melinda’s concerns is Moderna. There’s not much to say about Moderna, since the company has not released a single product in the ten years since it was founded. Shares traded at around $20 since it went public in December 2018 until mid-March 2020, when it announced favourable results for a covid-19 vaccine trial. Stock value then quadrupled over the next two months, adding billions to its value, and Moderna executives cashed in about $90 million — but no data was released.
Peer review is the gold standard of science, but here there is nothing to review. While this isn’t very scientific, manipulation of stock prices with unsubstantiated announcements of success is fairly standard practice at the interface between vaccinology and capital. Another of Bill and Melinda’s philanthropic concerns in the covid race is Inovio, which has a history of subverting science with this tactic of ‘publication by press release’. Inovio reported success in preliminary tests of a swine flu vaccine in 2009, an avian flu vaccine in 2013, an Ebola vaccine in 2014, a Zika vaccine in 2015 and a MERS vaccine in 2016. Each time the stock price spiked, and each time the vaccine in question was shelved. In February 2020, the CEO on Inovio announced that “we were able to rapidly construct our vaccine in a matter of about three hours once we had the DNA sequence”. Over the next few days the stock price rose by over 10%, and then another statement to the same effect the following month caused the price to quadruple. When a high-profile investor called for an investigation into the “ludicrous and dangerous claim”, the share price dropped from $18.72 to $5.70 in two days. The suit was filed on March 12, though presumably fortunes have been made already.
If Mars Incorporated had a record of misleading the public about the contents of its chocolates, or refusing to submit data it had gathered on its chocolates, or bribing officials about its chocolates, or (stretching the metaphor a little) if it had only ever produced failed chocolates, I wouldn’t be inclined to eat that Malteser. The pro-chox cohort may not care about what’s in their chocolates, that’s their business. It becomes my business if I am being compelled or encouraged to eat them or feed them to my children.
Of course, none of the above observations proves that vaccines are unsafe, that they contribute to autoimmune disease, respiratory infection and narcolepsy, nor that they cause outbreaks of polio or cases of yellow fever or measles. Nor have we discussed how often vaccines fail to confer immunity or how they compare with other forms of treatment. We haven’t considered how every single WHO mass-vaccination program has failed in its stated aim to eliminate its target, and what the consequences of these failures are. Nor have we begun to broach the beneficial activity of viruses, including how they protect us from other pathogens, shrink malignant tumours and confer other benefits. This was an initial injection of doubt to prime the system. Those other stories will be dealt with in subsequent boosters, which are not currently mandatory but highly recommended.
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More on C-19 here.
My book Science Revealed, while it doesn't have anything to say about vaccination, touches on many things including both inspiration and censorship in science.
