While long-proven, cheap coronavirus treatments with decades of safety testing are being described as dangerous and unproven for treating COVID-19, no one seems to be looking at the risks of the novel vaccines being rushed to market as the only viable alternative for getting the economy back to work.
Why the Need for Haste?
The argument originally advanced for fast-tracking a COVID-19 vaccine was that the magnitude of the pandemic required shutting down the whole economy until a vaccine was found. But earlier dire projections have now been heavily revised downward. The 3.4% coronavirus mortality rate put forward by the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) at the start of the pandemic was downgraded by the CDC in May to between 0.2% and 0.3%, less than one-tenth the original estimates. The computer-modeled projection of 2.2 million US deaths issued by Imperial College London in March, which triggered shutdowns across the United States, has also been found to be "wildly" overblown. In fact researchers writing in the UK Telegraph on May 16th called it "the most devastating software mistake of all time." They wrote that "we would fire anyone for developing code like this" and that the question was "why our Government did not get a second opinion before swallowing Imperial's prescription."
Here is a chart of the actual death rate from COVID-19 in Sweden, which did not lock down its economy, versus the rate projected by the Imperial College model without lockdown:
Sweden has actually fared better than many industrialized countries that did lock down their economies. As of June 5th, Belgium, the UK, Spain and Italy, which all locked down, had more deaths per million than Sweden; while France, the Netherlands, Ireland, the US, Switzerland and Canada all had fewer. Sweden was in the median range. Other researchers have found no correlation between lockdowns and COVID-19 deaths.
In other news from the CDC, on May 23rd the agency reported that the antibody tests used to determine whether people have developed an immunity to the virus are too unreliable to be used.
But none of this seems to be dimming the hype and the deluge of investment money being thrown at the latest experimental vaccines. And perhaps that is the point of the exercise - to extract as much money as possible from gullible investors, including the US government, before the public discovers that the fundamentals of these stocks do not support the hype. If we need seven billion doses of the vaccine before life can return to normal, as Bill Gates contends, the profit bonanza is enormous; and there is no need for vaccine manufacturers to proceed with caution, since the government will pick up the tab for vaccine injuries.
Moderna: A Multibillion-Dollar "Unicorn" That Has Never Brought a Product to Market
Moderna in particular has been suspected of pumping its stock price with unreliable preliminary test data. On May 18th its stock jumped by as much as 30%, after it issued a press release announcing positive results from a small preliminary trial of its coronavirus vaccine. After the market closed, the company announced a stock offering aimed at raising $1 billion; and on May 18th and 19th, Moderna executives dumped nearly $30 million worth of stock for a profit of $25 million.
On May 19th, however, the stock rocketed back down, after STAT News questioned the company's test results. An antibody response was reported for only eight of the 45 patients, not enough for statistical analysis. Was the response significant enough to create immunity? And what about the other 37 patients?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the results a "catastrophe" for the company. He wrote on May 20th:
Three of the 15 human guinea pigs in the high dose cohort (250 mcg) suffered a "serious adverse event" within 43 days of receiving Moderna's jab. Moderna " acknowledged that three volunteers developed Grade 3 systemic events, defined by the FDA as "Preventing daily activity and requiring medical intervention."
Moderna allowed only exceptionally healthy volunteers to participate in the study. A vaccine with those reaction rates could cause grave injuries in 1.5 billion humans if administered to "every person on earth".
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