BBC News: GlaxoSmithKline is seeking regulatory approval for the world’s first vaccine against malaria, after promising trial data showed that it cut cases of the often-fatal disease in African children.
The company has been developing the vaccine for 3 decades and plans to submit a regulatory application to the European Medicines Agency.
Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people every year.
Photo: Malaria infected mosquitoes (AFP)
The vaccine has only modest efficacy compared to other approved immunizations. And it’s a bit costly. But still, it has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives each year – which is great progress
The reason the Delta variant developed is that the US (at least, I don’t know the state of other first-world countries and their vaccine supplies) hoarded the vaccine unnecessarily, creating a fucking petri dish of the global south that literally anyone familiar with virology could tell you was a breeding ground for mutations. This was inevitable because of the way the countries that developed the vaccine went about distribution of the vaccine, not because of the vaccine itself.
Would also like to add that not releasing the patent of the vaccine was also a contributing factor. With countires unable to produce the vaccine for themselves and being completely at the mercy of pharma companies looking to make bank off the vaccine, it allowed Delta to reach the level it is at.
also re: covid vaccines, people have said this but places like India, Korea, etc are very very very good at medical research and India is the biggest distributor of vaccines. it is not “the us needs to give/donate Poor Countries medicines because they are too stupid to figure it out themselves” it is “the us copyrighted the ingredients of the vaccine and so nobody can make them outside of the country”
which is vastly more insidious than simply not performing charity
“I realized that I am super annoyed, and have been for a long time, with this idea that Bill Gates is some kind of ‘decent human being’ for so-called, ‘giving away’ his fortune. Because that is not what this man does, and a good human being is not what this man is. Bill Gates is a fucking monster. And so I just want to kind of explain why I have so many negative feelings towards Bill Gates.
With everything that’s going on right now with the vaccines, and the fact that most of the world can’t get them, can be traced directly back to that one man. Because back in 2020 when this all started, the world was cooperating. And I think we all remember this. The world was cooperating to study the virus. And scientists all over the world were sharing their findings to discover how the virus works, and they were developing methods for treatment and they were also developing these vaccines at an incredible speed. And they were doing this together in the spring of 2020.
And so by the end of the spring of 2020, the World Health Organization had created a global knowledge base, so that the vaccination effort could be a team effort instead of a competitive race. And their global knowledge base was called C-TAP (COVID-19 Technology Access Pool). And that’s when Bill Gates stepped in, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. What they did is, they created a separate process for managing the world’s COVID response. They called it the ACT-Accelerator (Access to COVID-19 Tools), which is a public-private partnership that included patent protections, so that the companies that figured out the tasks, treatments and vaccines, would be able to keep their discoveries to themselves, prevent other companies from copying them, and profit on vaccines as they sell them around the world. That was the goal of the ACT-Accelerator. It was a competition to the team building approach. So instead of cooperation, Gates sets up this separate thing for corporate competition, with the winners being rewarded with monopoly powers over our vaccines.
And so instead of the technology being figured out and distributed around the world, Gates’ brainchild organization instead created something called COVAX, which buys vaccines from the companies with the monopoly powers over the vaccines. And then they pass out some vaccines to poor countries around the world like a fucking cherry. But even the stated goal of COVAX has always been a weak one. They never intended to distribute more than enough vaccines to vaccinate any more than 20 percent of the populations of low and middle income countries. And they have totally failed to do even that. The vast majority of the vaccines would have to be fought for in the private market by the governments. And at the beginning of April 2021, 130 countries, home to over 2.5 billion people, hadn’t given out a single dose of a vaccine to anyone in their countries.
So, as a human race, I know that here in the United States all of us are able to get the vaccine. Like, great for us, right? But we are not the only humans here that are dealing with the virus. And as humans, we don’t have enough supply because only a handful of companies can [afford to] make the damn things. And Bill Gates is personally responsible for stopping other companies from having access to vaccine instruction manuals. Because that’s what they need. In fact, when the director at Oxford—which is where the science behind the AstraZeneca vaccine was figured out—when Oxford wanted to publish the instruction manual for their vaccine to the public domain for the world to use, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation used their power to pressure Oxford to instead sign an exclusive contract with AstraZeneca, which now has monopoly rights to that vaccine.
Bill Gates and those who are like him are designing global policy on vaccines, so that the private market decides who gets them. And that’s even when the institutions like the World Health Organization, that are generally on board as the administrators of the global economic system based on privatization of everything—even when those institutions are saying, “This is a global pandemic, and this is a time when we as humans should be making an exception to these rules, we should be sharing the technology to end this pandemic instead of putting patents and profits first.”—even when those institutions are saying that, Bill Gates has enough power as one man, to stop the world from doing it. This economic system has created oligarchs that are so rich and so powerful they can shape the fate of the entire world. And the way that that’s possible? Well, Bill Gates, as the founder of Microsoft, he fought politically to protect monopoly patents. This is something he has been a zealot about for the entire time he’s been in the public eye. He used his own patent protections over computer knowledge to become super rich when Microsoft had monopoly powers over their technologies. And then Bill Gates used his wealth to legally bribe politicians with campaign contributions, who then passed laws that created and continually expanded an economic system that funnels the world’s wealth to the richest people on earth. An economic system that funnels the world’s wealth TO HIM. He had so much damn money, thanks to this system, he got to like $150 billion dollars or so. He started a foundation that would spend his money on the things that HE wanted to spend it on. Billions of dollars. And people think that the sun shines out of his ass for this. Like, he’s some kind of noble human being, giving away his savings. But that’s not what this is. When you’re giving out money by the tens of billions, that’s government—just privatized. That’s society altering money. And the way Gates does it? He’s not funding food banks around the world. He’s chosen to use his billions to shape global health policy in a way that protects PATENTS. This insane economic system lets one dude control $150 billion dollars, and has created a situation where so much of our global health research is funded through him, that any organization or individual in the field that dares to challenge the Gates Foundation on drug monopolies will find themselves iced out of funding. And so everybody’s falling in line.
Right now he’s basically using his fortune to act as a volunteer lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, and he’s been doing this since 1999. He’s using his personal billions—wealth beyond what many governments have—to protect the profits of multinational drug companies, while being branded a hero for donating some drugs to poor countries, to charity wash the entire racket: “Oh he’s giving away all his money! He’s giving away 95 percent of his wealth” … at $150 billion dollars, if he gives away 95 percent of it, he’s still keeping over $7 billion dollars for himself. This guy is a selfish mother fucker. It’s NOT charity. It’s not charity what he’s doing. He’s shaping global policy. He’s governing on his own. His fortune, via the Gates Foundation, stopped the world from sharing information about AIDS treatments two decades ago. And now he’s pulling the same shit with the COVID technologies.
Now this dynamic is being challenged in the World Trade Organization—as it should be—where more than 100 countries, more than half the world is trying to force companies like Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna, to give them the instructions so that they can make their own vaccines and get this pandemic over with. And Moderna is a perfect example of the privatization of government funded science. Because the mRNA technology that is central to the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines? That’s been in development since 2016. It’s not new, even though we’re acting like this was invented in the last year. It’s not. They’ve been working on it for years. But it’s an invention of the National Institute of Health, which is otherwise known as OUR GOVERNMENT. So allowing obscene prices and profits for pharmaceutical companies, that did not lead to the research and development that created that amazing technology. It was our tax money that did it. It was our government that did it. We should all be patting ourselves on the back for that because we are the ones who funded it. It wasn’t Moderna, and it wasn’t Pfizer. It was us. The government scientists were working on a vaccine with Moderna for a different Coronavirus, MERS, when they got the information about the COVID virus. And so they were able to quickly tweak the technology they were already working on for 5 years. They gave the instructions for those tweaks to Moderna, and then Moderna did the work of cooking the recipe. But the mRNA technology? THAT’S OURS.
And on top of that, I’ve read every COVID related law, from start to finish. Every word. And starting in early March, 2020, our congress poured billions and billions of our tax money into vaccines. We paid for the raw materials, the clinical trials, we paid for all the renovations needed at the Moderna facilities to make all this happen. Moderna didn’t take on the risk. We taxpayers did. But when the Trump administration signed the contracts with Moderna to be the chefs of the vaccines, they didn’t require Moderna to share the recipes. And so they aren’t sharing. And the Biden administration so far, has sided with the Trump administration and the drug companies, and is refusing to support the effort to lift the patent protections on the vaccines that WE paid to invent. The Biden administration has all the leverage and legal authority it needs to tell these greedy companies, Moderna in particular, to share what we gave them for the good of the world. But instead, the Biden administration is dancing around the edges, choosing instead to donate doses, like a bunch of AstraZeneca ones that we just had stored in some closet somewhere. “Oh we’re donating those! Aren’t we great?” They want to funnel billions of our tax dollars to COVAX, that Gates inspired organization that buys vaccines from the monopoly drug companies, and passes them out to the poor. It’s all charity. But the problem is the monopolies. The problem is requiring the entire world to get the vaccine from these handful of chosen companies, and the ones that can’t afford it have to depend on … charity.
Laura Sibley who took this image is part of a team from Royal Holloway, who are developing novel vaccines using bacteria (similar to ones that are used in probiotic drinks).
The vaccines they are creating are cheaper than normal vaccines, easier to produce and have no chemicals in them, making them suitable for diseases affecting developing countries. There are many diseases that need vaccine development, including tuberculosis, which kills around two million people per year, and is one of the diseases that they are focused on.
Laura stumbled across the ghostly vision in a study looking at TB vaccine distributed in lung tissue, work which in the future could help to protect people against TB infection.
Hey guys, gals, and those who are both, neither or somewhere inbetween. I’ve heard there’s a legend that if you go to a mirror after midnight, but before three in the morning and chant “vaccines are real, my disabilities are valid, and wearing a mask helps stop the spread.” Karen will jump out of the mirror and try to sell you essential oils and peddle some pseudoscience about carbon dioxide poisoning in masks while her unvaccinated son (who has polio) asks if you have games on your phone.
Lock the kids up…do not sicken everyone. You have no right to impose your beliefs against vaccination on the rest of society.
If you don’t see it this way…advice…leave this country. Go to someplace where ignorance and stupidity are bliss. America is NOT such a place. We lose ours, you will lose yours.
M.A.
Dear M.A.,
Though you have not specified which children you’d like to lock up, based on the news, I’m assuming your message is related to a recent outbreak of measles in California and the news that a percentage of kids in Jewish day schools in California are not vaccinated.
From the tone of your email you are obviously very upset with what’s going on, but you are also misinformed. There is no Jewish law against vaccinations. In fact, most rabbis are probably strong supporters of them.
The other thing about measles is that it resets your body’s memory of other diseases. So all those times you’ve gotten sick? Your body’s memory cells no longer remember those illnesses, so even if you get the same type of illness again your body will react like it’s the first time you’ve been sick.
It’s so much worse than “just a disease”.
Measles does WHAT
Holy fuck
What the fuck what the fuck what the fUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK
antivaxxers also, in part, helped sabotaged the human lyme disease vaccine for lyme disease caused by borrelia burgdorferi infection (until 2016 the only known species of lyme disease causing bacteria in the USA). In 1998, the first lyme disease vaccine for the strain of the bacteria prevalent in the USA licensed. It passed clinical trials and was shown to be safe and effective; it was between 76 and 92% effective at preventing lyme disease with 3 injections. Antivaxxers proceeded to abuse the adverse affect reporting system, often complaining of arthritis, and this caused media and general hysteria about the vaccine. if you remember the flu vaccine hysteria around the swine flu epidemic, it was kind of like that. despite double-blind trials conducted both before and after licensing, that was unable to support their claims and instead displaying that the vaccine was safe and effective, the damage was done, and the vaccine was shelved in the USA. you can get a lyme disease vaccine in Europe, but Europe has a different strain of the bacteria that causes lyme disease.
Lyme disease can become very serious, it can infect the nervous system and cause neurological problems especially in young children who are often bitten on the head or the neck, undiagnosed it can cause chronic health issues that mimic other diseases. Without safe prophylactic measures beyond trying to minimize contact w ticks, this has driven people who have had lyme disease, have chronic effects from mass-disseminated lyme disease infection, or people who believe they have chronic lyme disease to go to quack doctors and undergo unsafe, unapproved medical treatment in an attempt to stop suffering.
This would not be happening on the scale that it is if antivaxxers didn’t straight up execute a supervillain plot to sabotage the lyme disease vaccine. the vaccine was licensed in december 1998, which was the year andrew wakefield published his fraudulent research on the MMR vaccine
antivaxer are terrorists and should be dealt like one
H.Bomberguy’s video on the anti-vaccine movement is absolutely worth watching in its entirety. Because it lays out just how fucking twisted and wrong the entire thing is, and how this entire movement that is KILLING CHILDREN is based on a lie for money.
wait wait wait wait WAIT!
YOU GUYS HAD A VACCINE AGAINST FUCKING LYME????
AND THOSE ASSHATS HELPED TO SHELF THAT STUFF?????????
Do you people even KNOW just how much trouble lyme disease makes every fucking year? Holy shit think of the possibilities!!!
So when I say I hate anti-vaxxers, yeah. This is why.
Yeah its not a viable belief system, it doesn’t have any nugget of truth or good intentions in it, the lie and the packaged alternatives that come with it are quicker easier money than you could ever make climbing the ranks of “big pharma,” these lies kill people, they become politicized and contaminate government legislation, and believers are not just quaint fringe eccentrics who only harm themselves. They’re abusing their kids, hampering medical progress, robbing other people of medical choice in situations like the Lyme vaccine, and actively making the world around them worse and deadlier. No mercy or tolerance for anti vaccine propaganda. Make it legally terrorism.
Gonna say it on every reblog of this post I see - This began because of ableism against autistic people. Jenny McCarthy insisted that her child’s autism was caused by vaccines, and enough people hated the thought of ever having an autistic child that they wouldn’t use vaccines. They did not care that their child would die of the illnesses prevented by vaccines, they would rather have a dead child than an autistic one.
I saw a tweet yesterday where she said ‘It’s finally happened, had a patient refuse a tetanus shot’. OMG, people seriously don’t remember how bad stuff was because we’ve been vaccinated for so long, but the reason these illnesses seem like ‘no big deal’ anymore is because we vaccinate. Dying from tetanus is not a death anyone wants, and it’spreventable.
We’re losing medical and scientific knowledge at an astronomical rate because we’re literally stupiding our way out of the knowledge and refusing it.
This is why we stare at ancient city ruins and wonder why the civilisation collapsed. This is why.
I know that the party line right now is “the vaccines don’t keep you from getting COVID, they keep you from getting seriously sick or dying.”
And yes, I’m in favor of not getting seriously sick or dying. I’d take a vaccine just for that. Like I get the flu vaccine every year even though some years it’s had an efficacy rate of like 10%. I’ll take a free 10% reduced chance of getting the flu.
But if there is anyone, anyone at all, reading this who hasn’t gotten vaccinated, for whom “well, it won’t keep me from getting it, so what’s the point” is playing any role in your decision-making…
I want you to know that the vaccines still stand a moderate chance of helping to prevent you from getting it.
The mRNA vaccines show a significantly reduced efficacy against the omicron variant, on top of diminishing efficacy a few weeks to a few months after vaccination.
That efficacy still is not zero. It is not.
Signed someone who spent a week living in a 600 sq. ft. apartment with an infected roommate and didn’t catch it.
We tried to keep the windows cracked before the temperatures outside got way too cold, but we couldn’t avoid sharing a bathroom and kitchen or walking the same hallway, and I never caught it.
I know that right now we’re supposed to somehow simultaneously believe that we’re not supposed to just be resigned to catching it, but also that being vaccinated won’t prevent us from catching it, and that feels impossible. Because it is impossible.
But getting vaccinated can still help keep you from catching it.
Informed consent is essential with any pharmaceutical product.
Dr. Pain (Luis Quiles)
“About the senator in California Dr. Richard Pan, and the vaccines business.I’m not an antivaxx but I don’t support the pharmaceutic lobby, and it’s sad to see how many people can’t see the shades between both things.”
Based on data compiled by Global Justice Now and released Saturday, “just 8 top Pfizer and Moderna shareholders” added a combined $10.31 billion to their fortunes last week after stock prices soared in response to the emergence of Omicron.
According to a statement by the group:
Moderna’s shares skyrocketed after the announcement and settled at $310.61/share on Wednesday 1 December, up 13.61% from $273.39/share since Wednesday 24 November, the day before the announcement. Pfizer’s shares rose by 7.41% from $50.91/share to $54.68/share.
Moderna’s CEO, Stephane Bancel, personally became more than $824m richer in the week after the announcement, with the value of his shares rising from $6,052,522,978 to $6,876,528,630. He sold off 10,000 shares for $319 each on 26 November, the day after the variant was announced, cashing out $3.19 million.
At close of business on Tuesday, Bancel’s shares had grown by $1.7 billion since the announcement, before falling after the company lost a legal dispute over patents.
Bancel has refused to share the recipe for Moderna’s vaccine with the World Health Organisation to help scale-up manufacturing of mRNA vaccines through its new hub in South Africa. WHO scientists are now trying to reverse-engineer the vaccine. His company is also waging a legal battle to erase the role of massive public funding and public scientists in developing the jab.
A damning new report shows that one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine makers appears to have played a role in restricting access to those very vaccines. The report, “Pfizer’s Power,” published this week by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, examines Pfizer’s contracts with the United States, United Kingdom, European Commission, Albania, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic and Peru. They offer a rare glimpse into the power Pfizer has to silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximize profits in the middle of a public health crisis.
OCLA researcher Dr. Denis Rancourt and several fellow Canadian academics penned an open letter to support those who have decided not to accept the COVID-19 vaccine.
The group emphasizes the voluntary nature of this medical treatment as well as the need for informed consent and individual risk-benefit assessment. They reject the pressure exerted by public health officials, the news and social media, and fellow citizens.
Control over our bodily integrity may well be the ultimate frontier of the fight to protect civil liberties. Read the letter below or as a PDF here.
Open Letter to the Unvaccinated
You are not alone! As of 28 July 2021, 29% of Canadians have not received a COVID-19 vaccine, and an additional 14% have received one shot. In the US and in the European Union, less than half the population is fully vaccinated, and even in Israel, the “world’s lab” according to Pfizer, one third of people remain completely unvaccinated. Politicians and the media have taken a uniform view, scapegoating the unvaccinated for the troubles that have ensued after eighteen months of fearmongering and lockdowns. It’s time to set the record straight.
It is entirely reasonable and legitimate to say ‘no’ to insufficiently tested vaccines for which there is no reliable science. You have a right to assert guardianship of your body and to refuse medical treatments if you see fit. You are right to say ‘no’ to a violation of your dignity, your integrity and your bodily autonomy. It is your body, and you have the right to choose. You are right to fight for your children against their mass vaccination in school.
You are right to question whether free and informed consent is at all possible under present circumstances. Long-term effects are unknown. Transgenerational effects are unknown. Vaccine-induced deregulation of natural immunity is unknown. Potential harm is unknown as the adverse event reporting is delayed, incomplete and inconsistent between jurisdictions.
You are being targeted by mainstream media, government social engineering campaigns, unjust rules and policies, collaborating employers, and the social-media mob. You are being told that you are now the problem and that the world cannot get back to normal unless you get vaccinated. You are being viciously scapegoated by propaganda and pressured by others around you. Remember; there is nothing wrong with you.
You are inaccurately accused of being a factory for new SARS-CoV-2 variants, when in fact, according to leading scientists, your natural immune system generates immunity to multiple components of the virus. This will promote your protection against a vast range of viral variants and abrogates further spread to anyone else.
You are justified in demanding independent peer-reviewed studies, not funded by multinational pharmaceutical companies. All the peer-reviewed studies of short-term safety and short-term efficacy have been funded, organized, coordinated, and supported by these for-profit corporations; and none of the study data have been made public or available to researchers who don’t work for these companies.
You are right to question the preliminary vaccine trial results. The claimed high values of relative efficacy rely on small numbers of tenuously determined “infections.” The studies were also not blind, where people giving the injections admittedly knew or could deduce whether they were injecting the experimental vaccine or the placebo. This is not acceptable scientific methodology for vaccine trials.
You are correct in your calls for a diversity of scientific opinions. Like in nature, we need a polyculture of information and its interpretations. And we don’t have that right now. Choosing not to take the vaccine is holding space for reason, transparency and accountability to emerge. You are right to ask, ‘What comes next when we give away authority over our own bodies?’
Do not be intimidated. You are showing resilience, integrity and grit. You are coming together in your communities, making plans to help one another and standing for scientific accountability and free speech, which are required for society to thrive. We are among many who stand with you.
Angela Durante, PhD Denis Rancourt, PhD Claus Rinner, PhD Laurent Leduc, PhD Donald Welsh, PhD John Zwaagstra, PhD Jan Vrbik, PhD Valentina Capurri, PhD
For those that haven’t seen Gupta on Joe Rogan it’s a must watch. This is the first time we have seen an “establishment” member questioned by a non establishment member.
National Influenza Vaccination Week is a national observance that highlights the importance of flu vaccination for everyone 6 months and older. Below is a selection of articles to help raise awareness of the importance of vaccination to prevent influenza illness and its complications.
