This TV review was first published in the Andersonstown News
CHANNEL FOUR NEWS usually runs for a full hour, but on Friday nights it stops after half-an-hour, and lets DISPATCHES take over. Last Friday DISPATCHES investigated ‘drug wars’, In particular the Pfizer vaccine.
The Pfizer is a powerful vaccine that comes at a powerful price: around £22 a dose. Compare that with the Astrazeneca vaccine, which costs roughly £2.20 – what it cost to produce.The Pfizer company, going the capitalist route, reaped a gross income of £36 billion over the past year.
Not content with out-selling the opposition, DISPATCHES suggests that Pfizer may have been undermining the opposition. The company put together a report which suggests that the Astrazeneca vaccine could cause cancer.
Please – stop screaming ‘WHAAAAT??’ and squeezing at your arm. Listen to Prof Andrew Pollard, who knows about the Astrazeneca vaccine: ‘There is huge risks of misinformation, because anything that makes people hesitate about being vaccinated can risk their lives.’ The professor is a kind and diplomatic person: what he terms ‘misinformation’, most of us would call a dangerous bloody lie.
Besides throwing phony claims at their opposition, Pfizer appears to have cut some corners when it was racing to be first vaccine out of the blocks. In research, it’s absolutely vital that scientists are ‘blind’– that is, they don’t know if they’re offering a group a placebo or the real deal. This kind of blindness is like the foundation of your house – without it, the whole structure is dodgy. Pfizer, according to a whistle-blower, failed to impose ‘blindness’ on its researchers, such was its hurry to be first.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were passed this information by the whistle-blower, who of course was fired. The FDA wrote her a very sympathetic letter, so sorry to hear you lost your job and all that. She never heard from them again.
It’s hard to know how to respond to this DISPATCHES report. According to the whistle-blower, Pfizer’s research in developing the vaccine was clearly imperfect. But on the other hand the vaccine is now out there and saving lives. OK, the lives they are saving are in wealthy countries, but rich lives matter too, don’t they?
Here’s a very, very hard question: if you were about to get a jab and were told it was a Pfizer vaccine, would you say “No, not fair. You are profiteering and you are letting people in poor countries die. Go away, I want no hand, act or arm in such a company”? Or would you sigh and say ‘It’s a tough industry and a tough world’, before rolling up your sleeve?
Sad to say, principles are fine with most of us as long as we keep our place at the head of the queue.
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