Vaccines: Potential Harms

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Bridgen]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Those who feel that they have been damaged by the vaccine should of course have the full support of their elected Members of Parliament and the NHS. Only a couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by a journalist from a major news outlet who said that he was being bombarded by calls from people who said that they were vaccine-harmed but unable to get the support they wanted from the NHS. He also said that he thought this would be the biggest scandal in medical history in this country. Disturbingly, he also said that he feared that if he were to mention that in the newsroom in which he worked, he would lose his job. We need to break this conspiracy of silence.

It is instructive to note that, according to pharmaco-vigilance analysis, the serious adverse effects reported by the public are thought to represent only 10% of the true rate of serious adverse events occurring within the population. The gold standard of understanding the benefit and harm of any drug is the randomised controlled trial. It was the randomised controlled trial conducted by Pfizer that led to UK and international regulators approving the BioNTech-Pfizer mRNA vaccine for administration in the first place.

Contrary to popular belief, that original trial of approximately 40,000 participants did not show any statistically significant reduction in death as a result of vaccination, but it did show a 95% relative risk reduction in the development of infection against the ancestral, more lethal strain of the virus. However, the absolute risk reduction for an individual was only 0.84%. In other words, from its own data, Pfizer revealed that we needed to vaccinate 119 people to prevent one infection. The World Health Organisation and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges have previously stated and made it clear that it is an ethical responsibility that medical information is communicated to patients in absolute benefit and absolute risk terms, which is to protect the public from unnecessary anxiety and manipulation.

Very quickly, through mutations of the original strain—indeed, within a few months—covid fortunately became far less lethal. It quickly became apparent that there was no protection against infection at all from the vaccine, and we were left with the hope that perhaps these vaccines would protect us from serious illness and death. So what does the most reliable data tell us about the best-case scenario of individual benefit from the vaccine against dying from covid-19? Real-world data from the UK during the three-month wave of omicron at the beginning of this year reveals that we would need to vaccinate 7,300 people over the age of 80 to prevent one death. The number needed to be vaccinated to prevent a death in any younger age group was absolutely enormous.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing this debate to the House. It is a very important debate that we should be having. He is talking about the relative risks for different cohorts of the population. He will remember that, when the vaccine was first announced, the intention was that it would be used only for those who were vulnerable and the elderly because, as he says, the expectation was that the benefit to younger people was minor. Does he agree that it would be helpful for the Minister to explain to us why the original advice that the vaccines would be rolled out only for the older population, and would not be used for children in particular, was laid aside and we ended up with the roll-out for the entire population, including children?

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Bridgen]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Clearly this is related to all mRNA vaccinations. He will be well aware that many of us have had the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has effectively been withdrawn because of health concerns. Indeed, I will declare to the House that I am double-vaccinated with AstraZeneca, which has now been withdrawn.

Ministers may understandably wish to defer the responsibility for a decision such as withdrawing vaccines from the population to regulators such as the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, or in America the Food and Drug Administration. Historically, when undertaking the approval of any drug, the regulators ultimately end up relying on the summary results from the drug companies in their sponsored trials, where the raw data is kept commercially confidential. Furthermore, the MHRA has a huge financial conflict of interest, receiving 86% of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry it is supposed to regulate. In effect, we have the poacher paying the gamekeeper.

In a recent investigation by The BMJ into the financial conflicts of interest of the drug regulators, the sociologist Donald Light said:

“It’s the opposite of having a trustworthy organisation independently and rigorously assessing medicines. They’re not rigorous, they’re not independent, they are selective, and they withhold data.”

He went on to say that doctors and patients

“must appreciate how deeply and extensively drug regulators can’t be trusted so long as they are captured by industry funding.”

Similarly, another investigation revealed that members of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation had huge financial links to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation running into billions of pounds. Ministers, the media and the public know that the foundation is heavily invested in pharmaceutical industry stocks.

Unfortunately, the catastrophic mistake over the approval, and the coercion associated with this emergency-use authorisation medical intervention, are not an anomaly, and in many ways this could have been predicted by the structural failures that allowed it to occur in the first place. Those shortcomings are rooted in the increasingly unchecked visible and invisible power of multinational corporations—in this case, big pharma. We can start by acknowledging that the drug industry has a fiduciary obligation to produce profit for its shareholders, but it has no fiduciary obligation to provide the right medicines for patients.

The real scandal is that those with a responsibility to patients and with scientific integrity—namely, doctors, academic institutions and medical journals—collude with the industry for financial gain. Big pharma exerts its power by capturing the political environment through lobbying and the knowledge environment through funding university research and influencing medical education, preference shaping through capture of the media, financing think-tanks and so on. In other words, the public relations machinery of big pharma excels in subterfuge and engages in smearing and de-platforming those who call out its manipulations. No doubt it will be very busy this evening.

It is no surprise, when there is so much control by an entity that has been described as “psychopathic” for its profit-making conduct, that one analysis suggests that third most common cause of death globally after heart disease and cancer is the side effects of prescribed medications, which were mostly avoidable. Because of those systemic failures, doctors often receive biased information, deliberately manipulated by the pharmaceutical industry, which exaggerates the benefits and the safety of their drugs. Furthermore, the former editor of The BMJ, Richard Smith, claims that research misconduct is rife and is not effectively being tackled in the UK institutions, stating:

“Something is rotten in…British medicine and has been for a long time”.

It has also been brought to my attention by a whistleblower from a very reliable source that one of these institutions is covering up clear data that reveals that the mRNA vaccine increases inflammation of the heart arteries. It is covering this up for fear that it may lose funding from the pharmaceutical industry. The lead of that cardiology research department has a prominent leadership role with the British Heart Foundation, and I am disappointed to say that he has sent out non-disclosure agreements to his research team to ensure that this important data never sees the light of day. That is an absolute disgrace. Systemic failure in an over-medicated population also contributes to huge waste of British taxpayers’ money and increasing strain on the NHS.

[Danny Kruger]

My hon. Friend is being very good with his time. I just want to call his attention to some research, since I chair the all-party parliamentary group for prescribed drug dependence. He refers to the waste of money; there is £500 million being spent every year by the NHS on prescribed drugs for people who should not be on those habit-forming pills, causing enormous human misery as well as waste for the taxpayer.

[Andrew Bridgen]

I thank my hon. Friend for making a point that only reinforces the items in my speech that the public need to know. I thank him again for his support.

We need an inquiry into the influence of big pharma on medications and our NHS. That is been called for many occasions and by some very influential people, including prominent physicians such as the former president of the Royal College of Physicians and personal doctor to our late Queen, Sir Richard Thompson. On separate occasions in the last few years those calls have been supported and covered in the Daily Mail, The Guardian and, most recently, The i newspaper.

We are fighting not just for principles of ethical, evidence-based medical practices, but for our democracy. The future health of the British public depends on us tackling head-on the cause of this problem and finding meaningful solutions. In 2015 a commentary by Richard Houghton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, suggested that possibly half of the published medical literature “may simply be untrue”. He wrote that

“science has taken a turn toward darkness”,

and asked who is going to take the first step to clean up the system.

That first step could start this evening with this debate. It starts here, with the vaccine Minister and the Government ensuring in the first instance an immediate and complete suspension of any more covid vaccines with their use of mRNA technology. Silence on this issue is more contagious than the virus itself, and now so should courage be. I would implore all the scientists, medics, nurses and those in the media who know the truth about the harm these vaccines are causing to our people to speak out.

We have already sacrificed far too many of our citizens on the altar of ignorance and unfettered corporate greed. Last week the MHRA authorised those experimental vaccines for use in children as young as six months. In a Westminster Hall debate some weeks ago, I quoted a report by the Journal of the American Medical Association studying the effect of the covid-19 mRNA vaccination on children under five years of age. It showed that one in 200 had an adverse event that resulted in hospitalisation, and symptoms that lasted longer than 90 days.

As the data clearly shows to anyone who wants to look at it, the mRNA vaccines are not safe, not effective and not necessary. I implore the Government to halt their use immediately. As I have demonstrated and as the data clearly shows, the Government’s current policy on the mRNA vaccines is on the wrong side of medical ethics, it is on the wrong side of scientific data, and ultimately it will be on the wrong side of history.

--- Later in debate ---

[Maria Caulfield]

I will not. I have just three minutes to respond to the many points that my hon. Friend made.

It is important to put on the record that all the vaccines used in the UK are safe, and we have some of the highest safety standards in the world, with the MHRA globally recognised for requiring high standards of safety. I have worked in clinical research, and I can say categorically that the data is not hidden from the public or the MHRA; it is inspected rigorously and can be reinspected at any time.

Each of our covid vaccine candidates is assessed by a team of scientists and clinicians on a case-by-case basis, and it is only once a potential vaccine has met robust standards of effectiveness, safety and quality that it is approved for use. That is the case for all medicines, not just covid vaccines. Extensive data shows that the vaccine is safe and highly effective in reducing the deaths that we sadly saw during the pandemic. That does not end when the vaccine is approved; surveillance of vaccines continues, as it does with any medicine, and any adverse reaction is recorded on a regular basis. That does not stop following approval.

My hon. Friend talked about the yellow card reports. Those have been in place for many years. Anyone who has a side effect from any medicine can make a yellow card report. When I was first starting out in nursing, that was a physical yellow card; it is now online. Anyone can submit any suspected adverse drug reaction. The MHRA will collate and review them, and it has in the past gone on to suspend the licence of a medicine if it has concerns. That is something that it can do for any vaccine, including any covid vaccine.

The nature of the yellow card reporting system means that some reported events are not always proven side effects. A side effect can be reported; the MHRA will then go and look to see whether it is actually related to that medicine, and there is a list of probabilities of how likely it is that the side effect is related to that medicine. There is comprehensive surveillance to alert us to any unforeseen adverse reactions to vaccines and to enable us to act swiftly when required.

We know that there are some circumstances where individuals have sadly experienced harm with a possible link to a vaccination. I recognise how difficult that is for those individuals and their families. We have put measures in place to monitor any possible side effects and to commission further research that will help us better understand how to diagnose and treat those who have suffered or continue to suffer any ill effects from a covid-19 vaccine. That is the case for any medicine—even with a simple medicine such as paracetamol, people can get side effects—and that is why every medicine that is prescribed and dispensed has a patient safety information sheet listing the most likely side effects and encouraging people to report any that may not be included.

[Danny Kruger]

Will the Minister give way?

[Maria Caulfield]

I will give way quickly, because I have only a couple of minutes.

[Danny Kruger]

I am grateful. The Minister’s predecessor had asked the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation to review the evidence behind the decision to roll out the vaccine to children. Can she update the House or write to us to explain where that review has got to? Does she agree that the JCVI should be looking at the vaccination of children?