The UK Covid-19 Inquiry’s Module 4 on Vaccines and Therapeutics, finally commenced on Tuesday 14 January with hearings scheduled to run through to the end of January.
The 6-Module Inquiry saw the significant delay of Module 4, which examines the development, procurement, regulation, and rollout of vaccines and therapeutics as part of the UK's strategy to combat Covid. Module 4 was provisionally scheduled to take place in the summer of 2024.
Currently, the Inquiry has cost the UK taxpayer over £161 million with a projection of total costs to reach £208 million, making it the most expensive in British history.
Critics have argued that the entire process has been “fundamentally biased.” In March of last year, a group of 55 professors and academics, led by Dr Kevin Bardosh, an expert in infection medicine at Edinburgh University and Prof Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford University, wrote an open letter to Baroness Hallett, the Inquiry chairman, to express their deep concerns that the Inquiry was “not living up to its mission”- to evaluate the mistakes made during the pandemic, and appears to have led to “predetermined conclusions, for example, to lockdown faster next time”.
Previously, I have reported on aspects of Module 1, such as the testimony of Dame Sally Davies, who was England's Chief Medical Officer from 2010 to 2019. She confessed that the full impact of lockdowns (including school closures) had not been considered and also acknowledged how it had “damaged a generation.” However, her admissions were promptly followed by a highly contradictory statement:
“It’s clear that no one thought about lockdown. I still think we should have locked down, although a week earlier.”
I have also raised important questions the Inquiry will never ask: why the UK government wasted £4 billion on the infamous Innova lateral flow test?
More bias than scrutiny
Module 4 seems to be cloaked in a veneer of superficial scrutiny, marked by a lack of impartiality and a tendency toward presumptions. For instance, in their open letter to Baroness Hallett, the 55-member group of medical professionals and experts wrote how preferential treatment had been given “to scientific advisers on SAGE, who have a vested interest in maintaining the justification for their policy recommendations. Very few scientists with an alternative position have been asked to testify…”
This pattern of preferential treatment has also been observed in Module 4. For example, certain independent experts who hold an alternative position were invited to give witness statements, such as:
Dr Rosamond Jones, retired Consultant Paediatrician, convenor Children’s Covid Vaccines Advisory Council
Dr Clare Craig, diagnostic pathologist, co-chair, Health Advisory and Recovery Team
Mr Nick Hunt, retired civil servant, Perseus Group
Dr Elizabeth Evans, retired doctor, CEO, UK Medical Freedom Alliance
However, none were commissioned to give oral evidence on Covid vaccine safety. In contrast, those who hold the established “safe and effective” position, such as Profs. Chris Whitty, Jonathan Van-Tam, Wei Shen Lim, and Jenny Harries, have been scheduled to testify at the Module 4 hearings.
Source: Module 4 public hearings timetable
Conflicts of interest
In the opening statement of Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the Inquiry, tasked with steering it towards a “meticulous examination of the facts and issues”, he made reference to the fact the Covid vaccines were fast-tracked through the MHRA’s approval process by “an expedited and flexible rolling review procedure.”
He then went on to claim: “The expert evidence commissioned by this Inquiry is to the effect that there was no reduction in the efficacy or safety of any of the vaccines, or the trials, as a result of this process.”
However, Mr Keith failed to mention that the expert evidence commissioned by the Inquiry came from the very experts (such as those shown in the table above) with notable “revolving-door” connections to the pharmaceutical industry and/or who have received significant funding from corporations, such as Pfizer, and/or from organizations with vested interests in Covid vaccines, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its spin-off, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Therefore, this raises the disturbing issue of conflicts of interest.
For instance, since May 2023, Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam has worked as a senior medical consultant for the Covid-19 vaccine maker, Moderna. Before his role as Deputy Chief Medical Officer, he joined the pharmaceutical industry as an associate director at SmithKline Beecham (now GSK) in 2000. Van-Tam was Head of Medical Affairs at Roche in 2001 and then went to work at Aventis Pasteur MSD as the UK medical director the following year.
In 2008, while Prof. Sir Chris Whitty was the principal investigator for the ACT Consortium at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), the institution received over $46.4 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In addition, Whitty has served on the interim board of CEPI.
The Covid-19 Chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccine and Immunisation (JCVI), Prof. Wei Shen Lim, who has also been called to give oral evidence at the Inquiry, was found to receive research funding from Pfizer.
The UK Covid Inquiry’s glaring bias and “whitewashing” of the facts and the issues-rather than meticulously examining them, has given rise to the People’s Vaccine Inquiry. My interview with Dr Clare Craig, one of the co-founders, can be watched here.
It must be noted that the UK Covid Inquiry has granted certain vaccine injured groups Core Participant status in Module 4, such as: UKCVFamily, Scottish Vaccine Injury Group, and Vaccine Injured and Bereaved UK (VIBUK). Charlet Crichton, permanently injured by the Astra-Zeneca Covid vaccine she took while volunteering at a vaccination centre and founder of UKCVFamily, will provide oral evidence at the hearing set for Tuesday 21 January.
Co-founder of the People’s Vaccine Inquiry, Dr Rosamond Jones had this to say about the UK Covid Inquiry: “The Vaccine injured groups are there as core participants and we absolutely support their efforts to get recognition, proper compensation and most importantly access to treatment. But if the Inquiry team fails to hear any of the evidence of the ethical breaches, the lack of benefit and the mechanisms of harm as well as the systemic regulatory failures, then this medical catastrophe will simply repeat itself with the next scare.”
The Assertions of Mr Hugo Keith KC
A significant key failure of the UK Covid Inquiry has been its reliance on unsubstantiated claims. The opening statement made by Hugo Keith KC was peppered with them.
Assertion #1
“In the case of the United Kingdom Covid-19 vaccines [Pfizer, Moderna, Astra-Zeneca], the phase III trials were well powered trials of between 20 or so thousand to 43 or so thousand human volunteers. Equivalent, in fact, to other large-scale clinical trials required for the licensing of other vaccines.”
Fact:
Ms Brook Jackson, the former Ventavia (a Pfizer vaccine phase III trial contractor) regional manager turned whistle-blower blew open the lid on how the Pfizer clinical trials were actually conducted, a far cry from the “well powered” trials described by Mr Keith. Jackson shared her cache of evidence with the British Medical Journal, which exposed how Ventavia had committed fraud; put patient safety at risk, and engaged in cover-ups of errors during its management of Pfizer’s clinical trials.
In March 2022, I had the opportunity to interview Ms Jackson for Trial Site News, where she shared her shocking findings.
Further proof of the lack of integrity regarding the Covid vaccine trials is best epitomised by the fact the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wanted the public to wait until 2096 before they revealed all the clinical and non-clinical trial documents they relied on to authorise the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in December 2020. This begs the question: what were they hiding? Thanks to a lawsuit brought against the FDA, the trove of Pfizer documents was gradually disclosed but even as recently as December 2024, a further court order was made for their full disclosure. My investigations on Pfizer’s confidential documents has led to many damning findings.
FDA’s Forced Hand Drops Pfizer’s Bombshell Safety Document
First Look at Newly Released Pfizer Docs Part 1: Case Report Errors and Anomalies
First Look at Newly Released Pfizer Docs, Part 2: The 'not necessary' safety studies
Pfizer’s ‘Sensitive’ Document Reveals Alarming Facts about Trial Subjects
Pfizer’s Pregnancy Lactation Cumulative Review Reveals Damning Data
Assertion #2
“The UK clinical trial process is also overseen through audits and visits carried out by the MHRA, and each batch of medicine is examined by the MHRA’s laboratories independently of the testing carried out by the manufacturer.”
Fact:
In the MHRA’s response to my FOIA-request, the agency stated: “The independent testing does not verify the composition of the vaccine, rather it assesses key parameters that focus on biological quality of the product.”
The revelation of the MHRA’s shocking failure to verify the composition of the vaccines that has been (and continues to be) injected into the arms of the UK public, including pregnant and nursing women, and children- is egregious. Furthermore, the damning findings of DNA and SV40 contamination in the vials of Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccines discovered by independent scientists, such as Kevin McKernan and Phillip Buckhaults perfectly justifies why verifying the composition of each batch should have been essential. In response to these alarming discoveries, I asked the MHRA whether they intended to test the vials for this contamination. They dismissively wrote: “There are currently no intentions to test the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccine for the presence of fragmented DNA and SV40 enhancer.”
Assertion #3
“My Lady, because clinical trials can only study a finite number of patients over a defined period, rare or very rare adverse reactions are unlikely to be identified by those trials. The serious conditions for which there now exists published evidence suggesting an association with a Covid-19 vaccine were all either very rare, that is to say between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 100,000, doses; or even rarer, described in places as extremely rare, that is to say less than 1 in 100,000 doses, and a reaction or a condition that only occurs in less than 1 in 100,000 people will simply not be apparent in a clinical trial involving only 30,000 people. It will only become apparent when much higher numbers of people, for example, at a population level, are being vaccinated.”
Fact:
The alarming results of an independent secondary analysis of Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna’s clinical trials by Fraiman et al., published in August 2022, directly contradict the statement made by Mr Keith KC. Serious adverse events were evidently apparent in the Covid vaccine clinical trials.
Fraiman et al.’s results showed: “Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest of 10.1 and 15.1 per 10,000 vaccinated over placebo baselines of 17.6 and 42.2 (95 % CI -0.4 to 20.6 and -3.6 to 33.8), respectively…The Pfizer trial exhibited a 36 % higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group…The Moderna trial exhibited a 6 % higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group.”
The co-authors declared: “The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. These analyses will require public release of participant level datasets.”
Their call for full transparency of Covid-19 vaccine clinical trial data have fallen on deaf ears; the participant level datasets have never been released by the vaccine manufacturers. In fact, even the drug regulators (MHRA, FDA, EMA) themselves do not have these critically important participant level datasets. They simply rely on the summary data, clinical study reports, and other documentation provided by the vaccine manufacturers. Raw data is the cornerstone for any objective scientific analysis. Failure to disclose this data shows a clear case of the pharmaceutical companies simply “marking their own homework” that has been rubber stamped by the regulators- no questions asked.
Assertion #4
“Manufacturers are required to submit a number of documents and a great deal of data and information to the MHRA. They provide safety surveillance data, the submission of UK as well as non-UK individual case safety reports, periodic safety update reports, risk management plans, and what is known as post-authorisation safety study protocols..”
Fact:
My in-depth analysis of the FOIA-released Periodic Safety Update Reports (PSURs) submitted by Pfizer/BioNTech to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) makes disturbing reading. The PSURs reveal a litany of serious adverse events, including death that were routinely dismissed as “not related to the vaccine” by Pfizer’s investigators and the regulator. These confidential reports were not made available to the public and were only released after a group of European medical professionals made persistent FOIA-requests to the EMA.
EMA’s failure to pull COVID 19 jabs even though risk-benefit balance nullified
The Tragedy of the Child Deaths: EU’s 3rd damning vaccine safety report, Part 2
Assertion #5
“In addition, there are a number of important elements to how the MHRA operated its post-authorisation surveillance system. Again, it is not necessary to set them out in detail in the opening, but these four pillars, as they were known, comprise, firstly, the Yellow Card scheme through which the MHRA scientists and clinicians examined the process by which professionals and the public could report any suspected side effects or adverse drug reactions.”
Fact:
In my interview with computational biologist Dr Jessica Rose, who has extensively analyzed safety data related to Covid vaccines, she discussed major concerns about data manipulation or skewing of safety signals in the context of pharmacovigilance. She raised a critically important observation in connection with the MHRA’s Yellow Card system. In late 2022, she observed and notable alteration in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Specifically, over 100,000 foreign data set reports, linked to the MHRA Yellow Card system, had crucial fields erased, including free-text narratives, symptom descriptions, chronic conditions, and diagnostic details. The removal of these fields obscured specific safety signals for myocarditis, neuropathy, and pulmonary embolism. The purge occurred at the request of the European regulators.
Source: Dr Jessica Rose’s substack
This begs the questions why was this request made?
Furthermore, in June 2023 a MHRA FOI-released report, in response to a request made by retired civil servant Nick Hunt of the Perseus Group, revealed how the agency was so flooded with Yellow Card adverse event reports for Covid vaccines that its statistical analysis was skewed and safety signals were buried. Hunt wrote in The Daily Sceptic, “First, it is evidence that potential safety signals for the Covid vaccine (and other vaccines) were being missed as the number of Covid vaccine Yellow Cards quickly mounted. Secondly, the Commission on Human Medicines seems to have just meekly accepted MHRA’s report and recommendations (here) without asking any probing questions – such as what about the missed signals, can signals still be missed, what are other regulators doing? Thirdly, it should have been (but wasn’t) a reminder to MHRA that it should also actively follow-up individual fatal and serious Yellow Card reports and not rely so heavily on statistical analysis.”
Part 2 coming soon.
Thank you. Also worth a look is Biologyphenom substack giving incredible coverage of Scottish and UK COVID inquiries
Thank you for your work and yes another shout out for Biologyphenom, both of you are much appreciated as well as others :)
I wonder how much of this happened globally and who is the list of people that allowed this ‘environment’ for it to happen…..the why is a little more obvious…..
https://substack.com/@scottishcovidinquiry/note/c-86527473?r=rgsg&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action