Vaccines: Potential Harms

Debate between Jonathan Lord and Andrew Bridgen

Tuesday 13th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jonathan Lord (Woking) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an interesting and important speech. In particular, he is giving a lot of detail about the Pfizer vaccine. Does he have similar concerns about other vaccines, and if so, will he be talking about those later in his speech?

[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 He will be well aware that many of us have had the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has effectively been withdrawn because of health concerns. Indeed, I will declare to the House that I am double-vaccinated with AstraZeneca, which has now been withdrawn.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.