Some people claim that the Covid-19 vaccine will not be rigorously tested. That’s a lie.
I worked for a software company once that didn’t test its code in a testing environment. They tested their code “in production.” That worked until it didn’t. Everything fell apart. Customers lost millions. It was the most awful product release I’ve ever witnessed.
Similarly, the Covid-19 vaccine will be tested in production. Notable examples come to mind when people talk about testing vaccines in production.
1955 — Cutter Labs Polio Vaccine Catastrophe
As reported in the Journal of The Royal Society of Medicine “In April 1955 more than 200,000 children in five Western and mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.”
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1955-1970 — Japanese SMON “Epidemic”
Smithsonian Magazine recalls the 1955-1970 epidemic of subacute myelo-optic neuropathy (SMON), which mystified and terrorized many, though ultimately proving to be medically induced. While not due to a vaccine, the concern is similar. Examples of “cure as cause,” are legion. Johns Hopkins, in a 2016 published study, pointed to medical intervention as the third leading cause of death over an eight year period. At 250,000 deaths per year, medical error surpasses the CDC reported third leading cause of death — respiratory diseases, which claim 150,000 Americans a year. The Johns Hopkins team claimed the CDC does not effectively collect data on medical error.
1976 — Untested Swine Flu Vaccine
The 1976 and 2009 stories of untested vaccines offer detailed lessons for our era in their foolhardy similarity.
“This is a story about one time over 40 years ago when poor decision-making on the part of the government led to the unnecessary vaccination of about 45 million citizens,” reports Smithsonian Magazine.
There was a novel form of the flu that killed a US solder in February 1976. The flu that was expected that fall was widely reported to be an outbreak unlike anything seen since the 1918 Spanish Flu.
Smithsonian Magazine goes further “To avoid an epidemic, the CDC believed, at least 80 percent of the United States population would need to be vaccinated. When they asked Congress for the money to do it, politicians jumped on the potential good press of saving their constituents from the plague.”
“The World Health Organization adopted more of a wait-and-see attitude to the virus… They eventually found that the strain of flu that year was not a repeat or escalation of the 1918 flu, but ‘the U.S. government was unstoppable.’”
President Ford was up for re-election that fall and something had to be done. A Salon report from 2009, cautioning President Obama against mass vaccination continues with the story:
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“1976 was the year of the U.S. Bicentennial. 1976 was a presidential election year. 1976 was two years after Watergate caused Nixon’s resignation, and one year after the fall of Saigon. The U.S. government, both Republicans and Democrats, had never been held in such low esteem. Practically every elected official felt an overwhelming itch that patriotic year to do something to get the public thinking of them as good guys again. A swine flu pandemic was an opportunity on a plate. What better way to get into the good graces of the voters than to save them from a plague?
“Knowing the Republican president would not, could not veto a bill he requested, the Democratically controlled House attached $1.8 billion dollars in welfare and environmental spending to the flu bill.
“The 1976 to 1977 flu season was the most flu-free since records had been kept; a condition that was apparently unrelated to the vaccination program. The Great Swine Flu Epidemic of 1976 never took place.”
Once informative on the topic of caution around inherently risky medical intervention such as needless vaccines, Salon, The New York Times, and NPR have all fallen silent, as mass vaccination campaigns have mystifyingly become yet another liberal shibboleth.
2009 — Untested Swine Flu Vaccine
As reported by Buzzfeed, and not too many other outlets, “Dozens of NHS workers are fighting for compensation after developing narcolepsy from a swine flu vaccine that was rushed into service without the usual testing when the disease spread across the globe in 2009. They say it has destroyed their careers and their health.”
It’s a story of government employees naively trusting that everything would be okay if they received a vaccine that had been rushed through testing.
Tested in Production — Taking A Lesson From Other Industries
Since the Covid-19 vaccine will be tested in production, with very little preliminary testing, it’s worth taking lessons from other industries that have entities that regularly test in production in order to determine how best to effect this end goal.
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Best Practices for Testing In Production — E-mail Communication
When testing in production, a good feedback loop is needed. A direct email address to the manufacturer, ideally read daily by all members of the team that developed the product is helpful.
These emails can’t be filtered by customer service, marketing, or the product team. That risks only a few emails being sent along. The data from these emails can’t be compiled into a document and passed along. They can’t be filtered through a doctor that determines if the data is useful. They can’t be filtered through some obscure government compensation program.
All raw data needs to get to all the right people as quickly as possible, if critical infrastructure is going to be tested in production.
In such a situation, where a vaccine is tested in production, the recipient needs to be handed a piece of paper that says the equivalent of “If ANYTHING seems different, e-mail this address immediately.” Oversampling must be preferenced over undersampling.
If there is going to be success in an effort to test in production, then as much as possible, the research and product teams who developed the vaccine and their executive leadership team need to receive the email of the mother crying at 2 a.m. over her suddenly unhealthy baby, or the son trying to figure out why his mother suddenly took a turn for the worse 11 hours after getting a vaccine.
Best Practices For Testing In Production — Telephone Communication
Better than an email, because sometimes written words can’t convey what a voice can, is a cell phone number answered by someone on that team 24-7.
We can’t have the kind of feedback loop we have now around vaccines and expect a test in production to work. There has to be a little more skin in the game before a vaccine is tested in production.
Best Practices For Testing In Production — Full Disclosure, Clearly Presented
There has to be full disclosure and informed consent along the lines of “We don’t know how well, if at all, this vaccine works, and we don’t know how safe, if at all, this vaccine is. You may be dead tomorrow because of this vaccine. This vaccine may disable you for life. We really don’t know.”
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It must be plain language. Not legalese. It would be best if it were written by a pipe fitter or a stevedore during his lunch break. It should seek to be about as honest and direct as the European tobacco carton warnings showing photos of tumor-filled lungs and gum cancer lesions.
The Key To Achieving The Manhattan Project Of Vaccines
It can be taken a step further if those involved in the vaccine manufacture process want to get feedback from the vaccine as quickly as possible and to have as safe and effective of a vaccine as possible, a “Manhattan Project” of vaccines, as some have suggested.
It’s not in the development that the Manhattan Project of vaccines becomes helpful, it’s in the rollout, in the introduction, in the feedback loop, in the follow through. Responsibility, however, is anathema in our era. Drug manufactures have sizable teams dedicated to the mitigation of risk, and the socialization of harm. These are modern-sounding, alternate terms for the age-old concept of “avoiding responsibility.” The responsibility avoidance teams at vaccine manufacturers often rival the size of those teams that help develop the product and those who help in the follow through with the product.
Development work may include patient sampling, virus isolation, virus characterization, standardizing, manufacturing, releasing, manufacture scale up, validation, safety, efficacy, monitoring of adverse events, and regulatory review and approval. Responsibility avoidance might include legal, marketing, lobbying, post-vaccination trials, medical liability insurance, product liability, post-marketing, and scheduling.
Since avoiding responsibility is so written into the DNA of large corporations, and large institutions, fresh ideas like those mentioned in this paper are needed if a Manhattan Project of vaccines is to make any headway.
To expand that thinking, at the time of vaccination with the untested vaccines, if a patient has a problem, in addition to an email address, the following can be provided to a patient in order to facilitate the feedback loop: the personal cell phone, spouse’s personal cell phone, home address, and vacation home address of all executives, government officials, spokespersons, and media sources who endorse the vaccine should be provided to a patient both on a handout and in electronic form.
The Manhattan Project Of Vaccine Safety
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A Manhattan Project could be embarked on for identifying an extensive list of factors that put a child at risk from harm from vaccines. That Manhattan Project could then develop effective screenings for those risk factors.
Rather than making it a potentially career ending issue, perhaps there can be fiduciary encouragement to report to an employer that a vaccine study efficacy had been undermined or the manufacturing process had been compromised.
Bonding Of The Vaccination Process
Each vaccine could be accompanied by a five million dollar bond if the vaccine were considered safe by the manufacturer. This acceptance of risk by the manufacturer, would generate considerable goodwill in encouraging vaccines to be perceived as safe. Alternately, an insurance policy could be issued. It would likely be a policy that would take mere pennies to write on a safe vaccine. On a truly safe vaccine, this insurance policy would be free money for both the insurer and the pharmaceutical company, as they would be able to significantly markup the cost of a vaccine that is so safe that it comes with its own insurance policy, truly delineating itself from the competition in and industry that has repeatedly created unsafe products and then turned to government to defend them from responsibility.
Vaccine “Contact Tracers,” The Pro-Active Approach To Shortening The Feedback Loop And Identifying Adverse Events
“Contact tracers,” could be hired by those pharmaceutical companies truly interested in knowing the extent of the impact from their product. They could followup with all vaccine recipients 8 hours, 24 hours 72 hours, 2 weeks, 2 months, 12 months, and annually thereafter for life. Imagine the kind of data a diligent contact tracer would collect over the course of a carrier to help inform that feedback loop.
Any patient preferring to be left alone would be able to opt out of the service. These contact tracers will not be selected for their ability to intimidate. They will not be the type to make frightening threats by telephone or to lurk around dark corners as people leave their homes, in an effort to silence genuine concerns. Some might imagine this work to be handled that way by pharmaceutical executives. They will instead be well-trained and customer friendly consumer advocates.
Best Practices: Grand Awards For Vexing Concerns
Scientific awards of $100,000 or even just $10,000 can be given to anyone who is able to identify a study that can point to the safety of mercury on a fetus. A similar approach could be taken with tests on aluminum as an adjuvant in vaccines. This would help highlight these and other relatively poorly studied vaccine components. A vaccine manufacturer motivated to create the safest vaccines would likely take such an approach.
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Best Practices: Opposing The Scheduling Of Vaccines And Prioritizing An Individual Approach
Perhaps a manufacturer can assure the public that its product is so wonderful, and it is so certain people will voluntarily flock to it, that it won’t lift a finger to add its product to the schedule of childhood vaccines. In fact, if some government agency tries to add it to the schedule, it will vow to lobby against it, out of the principle that a vaccine must be administered through informed consent without pressure from the outside world. This would be a truly encouraging step to see from a vaccine manufacturer committed to the well-being of individual patients, as opposed to greedily seeking every tiny advantage over a competitor and a patient by involving the heavy hand of government.
This Can All Be Done Voluntarily By Manufacturers
It could all be done voluntarily, as a show of faith in the high quality of a company’s vaccine, a true competitive advantage in the marketplace, with no need for government to step in and mandate such encouragement of the feedback loop. Millions of vaccine consumers would be thrilled to suddenly receive such assurances, and would flock to the company providing this level of support for its product.
This is the kind of drastic action that would be taken if safe and effective vaccines were the goal.
None of this will happen though.
The lawyers, the marketers, the government, and media will all get together and run their usual hatchet job on trusting individuals.
The Covid-19 vaccine will be tested out in the world, on an unsuspecting public, and tremendous resources will go into hiding, obfuscating, or otherwise preventing discovery of and silencing any notion of any negative impacts from that vaccine.
Patently unsafe medicines are sometimes removed from our medical supply by government testing. This provides a false sense of security, is not reliable, and leaves some shut out of a marketplace for medicine that they need. Individuals who want to take the calculated risk are prevented by the federal government from using the medicines that they want. The pharmaceutical supply is neither safe nor unobstructed. Far worse, it is both dangerous and obstructed. Even that might be okay if it were discussed openly and honestly.
We are assured through giant marketing campaigns that the pharmaceutical supply is incredibly safe, followed by an almost comical litany of legalese and medicalese to the contrary. Television ads for pharmaceuticals might have more time spent on legalese than the ad themselves. Magazine or newspaper ads might have fine print medicalese that takes up more space than the actual ad. All of this is intended to obscure a key detail, and is used to spread the notion that group data can be predictive of individual outcome. It can’t.
Abstinence Is The Only Way Not To Be A Test Subject
Like our medical supply, too many of our vaccines are tested that way: In production. Even after extensive pre-market testing has taken place, they are still tested on individuals, in real time, who don’t realize that they are part of the testing process. We are told group data informs individual outcomes. We pretend that data collected from groups can be used to predict the future for individuals.
They can’t.
Nothing other than that should ever be suggested — not by a doctor, not by a journalist, not by an official, not by an executive, not by a stranger offering friendly advice.
Regardless of how much the odds are in your favor, abstinence from pharmaceutical intervention is the only certain way to prevent the side effects from pharmaceutical intervention.
No one has any idea how you will react to this medicine, or any medicine. That’s the truth. This medicine has not been well-studied enough to make that prediction and the human body remains quite poorly understood. No amount of study can allow someone to predict the future. The future is unknown, a pharmaceutical’s effects on your body are unknown.
An honest starting place for a conversation like this allows a different conversation to take place, where you recognize your role as a test subject. You are also able to recognize that the people who want to test on you, see you as a data point in a data set, not as an individual.
You don’t matter to them.
Philosophically you might. Theoretically you might. Abstractly you might.
But you, the individual, don’t matter to them.
You, the person, don’t matter to them.
If your doctor isn’t your mother or your father, you are asking a lot from a doctor to expect anything other than that attitude.
You don’t matter to them.
And as such, you must understand that becoming their test subject is a choice you willingly make.
Don’t do it.
Don’t do it unless the disease really is so much worse than the cure.
Make an individual decision. Recognize yourself as an individual. Don’t let anyone encourage you or pressure you otherwise, especially not someone from a far more philosophically impoverished background than yourself.
The White Coat Does Not Make Anyone More Philosophically Astute Than You
You are a human, not a guinea pig.
You are not a lab rat. You are not a bunny.
You are not one of Pavlov’s dogs.
You are not a chimp.
You are not a cute and furry creature in our twisted society that people hold street marches to prevent others from experimenting on.
It is your job to stop yourself from being experimented on.
It is your job to stop those under your care from being experimented on.
If even one experiment takes place, and something goes wrong, the fault may lie partly in another. But the fault lies mainly in you. For you have volition. And you allowed it. You are no victim.
The doctor who wants to see you as a data set in a group is not necessarily anti-science, though pretending that one can predict the future is the most superstitious of behaviors, and confusing group measures with individuals outcome is a well recognized fallacy (or “bias”) within the field of statistics.
You who don’t want to be experimented on are certainly not anti-science.
Philosophically you are likely at loggerheads over the nature of individual volition and individual value. You don’t need to be a scientist to see that important difference. Sometimes, in fact, education and confirmation bias can make that distinction harder to see. That is a drawback to education that could be more commonly mentioned.
Recognition of the individual is one of the most important developments to have taken place in the history of humanity. If you developed that, whether from reading tomes of philosophy or from just going to church and listening once in a while, you are a student of the richer and more truthful intellectual heritage, while the collectivist looking you in the eyes, despite any outward appearances to the contrary, is the more philosophically impoverished person in the room.
Do not forget the vital power of timeless wisdom and philosophy to get you to the right answer in any age, to get you closer to the truth in any age.
The man in sackcloth, in any age, may know more of truth than those in the lab coats, tasseled gowns, and juridical garments.
Don’t be intimidated by the philosophically impoverished. Their bluster is their only tool against you.
