Did Govt & MOH Keep the Public in the Dark?

Sometime during October last year, Grant Robertson allegedly signed a negotiated contract with Pfizer for vaccine supply. The content of this contract remains secret and the government has refused to release its terms after OIA requests. However, some Pfizer vaccine supply contracts from other countries have been leaked. These specifically absolve and indemnify Pfizer from any legal responsibility if anything goes wrong. This leaves our government with the liability. The contracts require that any dispute arising out of vaccine deployment can only be resolved by a court in the State of New York—that is: out of the jurisdiction of NZ courts and our legal system. Importantly vaccine supply contracts usually contain a clause as follows:

Clause 5.5 Purchaser Acknowledgement

Purchaser acknowledges that the Vaccine and materials related to the Vaccine, and their components and constituent materials are being rapidly developed due to the emergency circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic and will continue to be studied after provision of the Vaccine to Purchaser under this Agreement. Purchaser further acknowledges that the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and that there may be adverse effects of the Vaccine that are not currently known. Further, to the extent applicable, Purchaser acknowledges that the Product shall not be serialized.

Thereby we can feel sure that from the outset our government was aware that the long-term adverse effects were unknown. Serialization involves the identification of vaccine batches for the purposes of tracking and research. As a result, our health service would not have been able to track any particular vaccine batches for efficacy and safety—severely hampering our capacity to research any defects in the delivered vaccine.

Curiously and crucially the Pfizer vaccine supply contracts we have seen do not contain any provision compelling Pfizer to continually update the receiving government on vaccine adverse effects as they come to light. This potentially left each government probably including ours ignorant of the overall tally and import of vaccine adverse effects worldwide. We shall see the effect of this shortly.

At the time of the contract signing, our government and in fact our whole population was relieved to hear that impending vaccination promised an end to the pandemic. No one was fully aware of what the fine print of the contract would mean for us. Nor did the implications of ‘emergency’ approval and the unknown scope of adverse events really sink in, especially as the standard opt-out clause only allows 5 days to reconsider.

Should the Government Have Instituted Mandatory Reporting of Adverse Events?

At this point, the Government and Medsafe should have geared up to fill the gap in our knowledge through mandatory reporting of any adverse events through CARM (the NZ system of adverse event reporting) and through full information sharing with health professionals at every level. This did not happen.

The Pfizer vaccine was handled in the same way as all previous vaccines which, unlike the Pfizer Covid vaccine, had gone through elaborate and lengthy safety testing over many years. Despite only continuing with its rather haphazard voluntary adverse events reporting system (which Medsafe itself estimates takes in only 5% of actual adverse events), the extent of adverse events reported to CARM following Covid vaccination proved to be a veritable tsunami—thirty times more than previous flu vaccines.

Israel was leading New Zealand from the beginning as far as the Pfizer vaccine rollout was concerned. They too had an exclusive contract with Pfizer. Early delivery was available as they promised to publicise the use of the Pfizer vaccine worldwide. The Israeli vaccination campaign began on 20 December 2020. By February 2021, in response to initial cases, the Israeli Ministry of Health began a myocarditis surveillance programme requiring all hospitals to report cases.

A Pfizer fact sheet reproduced by Medsafe at this time indicated that myocarditis and pericarditis were known serious adverse events proximate to vaccination.

New Zealand did not however institute a requirement for myocarditis and pericarditis reporting. Our government and our Ministry of Health have never responded to numerous written requests to make reporting mandatory.

By the end of February, just before our vaccination programme began, Pfizer had collected over 42,000 reports from countries around the world of adverse events proximate to vaccination. They compiled and analysed these into a document published on 30 April 2021 entitled:

5.3.6 CUMULATIVE ANALYSIS OF POST-AUTHORIZATION ADVERSE EVENT REPORTS OF PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) RECEIVED THROUGH 28-FEB-2021

This document contained reports of over 100 types of serious adverse events following Covid vaccination. Anyone reading this Pfizer adverse event report compilation will be staggered. The sheer density of the technical medical terms and disease names are nevertheless broken down into recognisable and serious categories of illness—kidney failure, stroke, cardiac events, pregnancy complications, inflammation, neurological disease, autoimmune failure, paralysis, liver failure, blood disorders, skin disease, musculoskeletal problems, arthritis, respiratory disease, DVT, blood clots, vascular disease, haemorrhage, loss of sight, Bell’s palsy, and epilepsy.

The effect of the inadequacy of Pfizer vaccine supply contracts now became apparent. There was no requirement for Pfizer to supply this updated adverse effect reporting information to governments and no record of whether they did so.

Let us suppose that Medsafe was proceeding to evaluate reports of adverse effects proximate to vaccination, that had occurred in NZ, in ignorance of the worldwide data. This had a critical effect on Medsafe’s efforts to ‘discover’ the extent and types of adverse events and to decide whether they were related to or caused by vaccination.

To be continued…