The disappearance of the safe and effective vaccine

We’re living through a medical scandal, and unless you’re already aware of it, no ‘ordinary’ source is going to tell you about it. I’m writing this as a public record, my aim is to illuminate the whole thing, as clearly as possible, to serve as a permanent reference. As paid readers of the substack know, I’ve created a new AI application to help create permanent and accessible references of large datasets. It’s called case.science, and I’ll be creating cases there which will accompany and help unpack this series as I write it.

When the mRNA vaccines were announced, the public were bombarded with a slogan ‘safe and effective’. December 8th 2020 “Researchers have confirmed the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is safe and effective” said the BBC. It was repeated endlessly from government departments, press releases, and newspaper comment sections. Such was the fervour and excitement of these new products, that brand new phrases began to emerge. “Covid vaccines extremely safe, finds UK regulator” was a headline from the positively beaming BBC.

Extremely safe? What does that even mean?

Daytime television show, “This Morning”, even went on to say the product was “100% effective against hospitalisation and death”, an entirely incorrect statement even under the most charitable interpretation of the data.

One month later, the UK’s early warning system was receiving reports of the AstraZeneca jab causing blood clots. Quick to dispel these fears, the NHS released a statement: “no evidence to suggest the blood clots have been caused by the vaccine” Presumably they were running out of adverbs when they went on to say the vaccines were “extremely effective”.

Extremely safe and extremely effective. Got that?

The British Medical Journal got in on the action, “The Oxford-AstraZeneca covid-19 vaccine is not linked to an increased risk of blood clots”. Then June Raine, the head of the UK drug regulator, added to the chorus, “there is no evidence that that blood clots in veins is occurring more than would be expected”. There’s “no proof” shouted The Guardian.

Note the strategy: to deny the existence of any evidence. A strategy which I specifically built case.science to combat

After three weeks of denials, the UK regulator admitted there were risks of clotting which until then had never been disclosed. An FOI request details the timelines; the MHRA (UK regulator) was three weeks behind their European colleagues. By the 7th of May, they told the public that the benefits for under 40s were now “finely balanced”. As medical guidelines go, a ‘finely balanced’ risk reward ratio is about as ambiguous as it gets. The product either reduces your risk of a bad health outcome, or increases it, and the regulator told the public this was ‘finely balanced’. Would you get on a fairground ride where the risk/reward ratio was ‘finely balanced’?

We might foolishly assume that this ratings downgrade meant the AZ vaccine was no longer considered “extremely safe”, but no such statements were ever published. Instead, something entirely unexpected happened. The vaccine was taken off the market.

Did you hear that? It’s unlikely you did if you’re a UK citizen, because in the UK, the public were simply never told. Instead the messaging on the vaccine just dropped off a cliff as the quiet truth manifested on data sheets that very few people paid attention to. How might the public have reacted had they been told the product was yanked because it caused blood clots? Imagine the headlines, ‘AstraZeneca vaccine taken off the market in blood clot scandal!”. Clearly it was better to do things quietly, and so that’s what happened.

Take a look at the image below taken from official UK data. Note the nose dive in total doses from the end of May 2021, then the AZ vaccine simply disappears. It was pulled from use and hasn’t been used since.

So what story might we tell about this? Because the story we tell ourselves matter. One story might be that a better, safer vaccine was found and it replaced the AZ jab. Another story might say that new vaccines were even more effective so they replaced the AZ. Or… we could say that a safety issue was identified and the product was quietly pulled from the shelf under a fig leaf of meek language.

They’re all plausible stories, but the problem we have is that no explanation for the total disappearance of the AstraZeneca vaccine was ever given. Is there any official source you can find that explains it?

As I said at the start of this article, I’ve been building a tool to help with questions like this. I expected the issue of AZ’s disappearance to come up in the UK Covid Inquiry which is a long, stuffy, and tediously British affair. It has been going on for months, and may continue to bore us all to death for many more months to come. That said, there are important matters of public record stated that should be more readily accessible to people - but how can we we trawl through months and months of boring transcripts to get the answers we need? Well… read on

I took the liberty of uploading the entire covid-19 inquiry transcript into my new tool, case.science. Big thanks to Matthew Sommerville who published an app making the transcripts accessible. You can now ask natural language questions of the covid inquiry by talking to the case bot at this link. The AI will then go through the indexed data, pull out relevant sections, and then summarise back to you what it found. It’s a very useful tool! Needless to say, unless there is a mistake, I found no mention of the yanking of the AZ vaccine. Months and months of boring talking, and none of the important stuff discussed. Go ahead and query the dataset for yourself!

More to come soon…

I’ll pick up this thread and continue with the story of what followed that product’s total disappearance. For now, I wanted to get back into regular publishing after spending all of my time building case, a tool I believe can really help further understanding of topics like this. I encourage readers to check out the new tool, perhaps try and make a case of your own, and see what insights you can gather by querying the Covid-19 Inquiry. Comments open.