The 23rd World Vaccine Congress in Washington DC

Written by Meryl Nass MD on April 20, 2023. Posted in Current News

Lots of Beltway Bandits, new vaccine platforms, and a completely different way of viewing the world were encountered

This conference is basically about where the money is, which is why the price of admission is so high.

Industry and especially startups come here to learn what the USG may be spending money on.

Which areas of research and development are favored this year? What hoops do the regulators really want them to jump through?

This is not a conference for people who administer vaccines, and adverse events are essentially a non-issue for this industry. This is for people who make lots of money from vaccines.

What did our intrepid CHD spies find out? Madhava tells the story.

Last week I attended the 23rd World Vaccine Congress in Washington, D.C. — which bills itself as “The Most Important Vaccine Event of the Year”:

“Our event format allows for whole-sector topics, giving an opportunity for people to find out more about their specific area of research and their job-function.

By running parallel niche conference channels over the 3 days, it increases the relevance of the whole event for everyone who attends.

“During the sessions you will learn how cutting-edge research efforts can be integrated with

• Pharma
• Biotech
• Academia
• Government

“to produce more and better vaccines to the market.”

More than 3,100 people, largely from the pharma and biotech industries and regulatory affairs, attended the event.

Keynote speakers included prominent figures from public health agencies, including Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA); various directors of research at BioNTech and Moderna; and academic bigwigs like Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine (my own alma mater).

During the three full days of the conference, neither I nor Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, a Virginia-based pediatrician and strong advocate for vaccine safety, encountered another physician presently in clinical practice.

The event was open to anyone willing to pay the entry fee, which started at $495 for students and went up to $1,000+. But from what I could tell, this was largely a gathering of big and small pharma, biotech and leaders in regulatory affairs.

General impressions

• The majority of attendees truly believe they are doing the right thing.
• The majority of attendees look no further than recommendations from agencies of public health to guide their opinions. In other words, they fully believe COVID-19 mRNA (and other) vaccines are exceedingly safe and have saved millions of lives.
• Beyond members of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) and officers from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), few, if any, are aware of vaccine trial and post-marketing observational data around COVID-19 vaccine safety and efficacy.
• The keynote speakers and expert panel moderators who raised the topic of “vaccine hesitancy” were dismissive of those who managed to avoid vaccination and were openly contemptuous of those who encouraged others to do the same.
• Except for a few instances, the tone of the presentations and round table discussions were collegial. Aside from the pointed questions that Mumper and I were able to pose, there were no open hints that any of the attendees questioned the conventional narratives around the COVID-19 pandemic response.
• One-on-one exchanges revealed encouraging signs that not everyone there has bought the conventional narratives around the pandemic.
• Calls for public-private “partnerships” were a common theme.

I was able to attend only a fraction of the hundreds of presentations and panel discussions during the conference. Below I summarize the most important points from the sessions I attended and key conversations I had with the presenters.

I discussed my experience with Joe Martino, CEO of ThePulse and Collective Evolution here:

Note to readers: Throughout this article I have quoted myself and others. I do not have access to any audio or video recordings from the sessions, if there are any. Quotations are paraphrased from my own recollection and are not to be taken verbatim.

Introduction to the conference: Anti-vaxxers are dangerous, expect annual COVID vaccinations

Dr. Gregory Poland, director of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic, delivered the opening remarks. He then moderated a panel discussion with Marks; Paul Burton, chief medical officer at Moderna; Isabel Oliver, chief scientific advisor transition lead at UKHSA; and Dr. Penny Heaton, vaccines global therapeutic area head, Johnson & Johnson.

This first session was possibly the most fascinating 90 minutes of the entire week. Poland, I learned in a brief conversation with him after the conference, is also a pastor.

His oratory skills were on full display during his opening and closing remarks, quoting both William Wordsworth and William Shakespeare among others. He asked us to acknowledge the limitations scientists have when looking at the world through the lens of duality.

Poland is also vaccine-injured.

In February 2022, Poland reported suffering from significant tinnitus after receiving the second dose of “an mRNA vaccine.” At the time, Poland described his symptoms as “extraordinarily bothersome.” Nevertheless, he chose to receive a third dose (monovalent booster).

Poland’s commentary on the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines was extremely positive. He said the rapid deployment of the new therapy saved millions of lives and would have saved millions more if it weren’t for the disturbing trend of growing vaccine hesitancy.

I assumed that his vaccine-induced tinnitus had resolved over the last year. It was only at the end of the conference, several days later, when he told me personally that his symptoms were still debilitating, making his unmitigated support of these products even more astonishing.

Poland set the tone for the four-day conference in the first 10 minutes. In his mind, the COVID-19 pandemic was halted through the hard work of our regulatory agencies and the remarkable products borne of the mRNA platform.

The only failure came in the form of “inexplicable” vaccine hesitancy, a phenomenon driven by anti-vax pseudoscientists who are profiting from spreading baseless, fear-driven propaganda.

Combatting vaccine hesitancy, he said, is as big a challenge as protecting the world from the next deadly pathogen. Indeed, a significant portion of the events focused on strategies to dismantle the troubling “anti-vaxxer” movement.

Marks supported Poland’s position that the vaccine-hesitant are irrational, “It’s crazy that they don’t get how great vaccines are,” he said. “I am past trying to argue with people who think that vaccines are not safe.”

This remark was particularly disquieting to me. What is it going to take for the director of the FDA’s CBER to ever reassess the safety profile of the mRNA shots, especially if he no longer wishes to engage with those who disagree with him?

The panelists expressed shock that some states (Idaho and North Dakota) are considering bills making the administration of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines illegal.

“How can we get the public to understand that science is iterative?” Heaton asked. “COVID vaccines save lives!”

Poland responded: “Can we get an amen?!!”

Marks, flanked by his partners — I mean counterparts — in industry let the audience know what the future would look like. “I am not going to hold my breath waiting for a sterilizing vaccine, protecting against severe disease is enough,” he said.

Marks predicted COVID-19 vaccines would be administered annually or even biannually.

He noted that the challenge will be to identify the strain of interest in June so that we can have a vaccine by September. A 100-day turnaround is possible as long as we have manufacturing ready to go, he said. Heaton (J&J) and Burton (Moderna) nodded in response.

To summarize, leaders of the vaccine industry and the regulatory agencies are, in my impression, convinced that they have offered the world an amazing product and are frustrated that it is not being readily and universally accepted.

They cited the fact that although 70 percent of Americans received the primary series, only 15 percent have chosen to receive the bivalent booster that became available in September 2022.

The reluctance of the public to accept the shot, they think, is due to the perceived reduction of threat of the disease, which can be overcome by “proper messaging.”

Of course, the public is correct. The pathogenicity of the strains now circulating is less than the original ancestral strain from 2020. The possibility that reduced uptake could be linked to a poor safety profile was never mentioned. 

In their minds, vaccine injuries and serious adverse events are extremely rare. Their incidence has been exaggerated by anti-vax rumor mills. Poland joked that “maybe we should start a rumor that microchips are in ivermectin!”

His rejoinder was met with only sparse, nervous laughter.

Roundtable discussion: ‘Insights and tools to counter vaccine hesitancy’

Though the speakers at the introductory session were clearly entrenched in the “safe and effective” position, they acknowledged that there was a strong and growing swath of the population that was vaccine-hesitant.

More importantly, they were interested in dismantling this movement and not ignoring it. It was an opportunity to engage with them, perhaps in smaller groups or individually. I made my first attempt at a roundtable discussion where people could offer ways to convince the “anti-vaxxers” that they were wrong.

I found myself sitting next to Dame Jennifer Margaret Harries, a British public health physician and chief executive of the UKHSA. The UKHSA has been publishing U.K. health surveillance data with more granularity and frequency than our own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

I let her know that I appreciated the data coming from her agency and that I began following the agency’s regular surveillance reports two years ago. She was grateful for the acknowledgment and appreciated my interest in her work.

It was the UKHSA that offered the first glimpse of negative efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines in a public dataset in September 2021. 

I asked Harries about that and her tone immediately shifted. She said she was aware of no such thing and that she would have to look into it before commenting.

I was surprised by her response. The report from September 2021 wasn’t an aberration. Subsequent reports from the agency over which she presides indicated there was a large and growing incidence of COVID-19 among the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated. 

The UKHSA stopped making that data available several months later. I wanted to know why, but she was unwilling to answer.

I changed tactics and asked her about Tess Lawrie, Ph.D., of the Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy who notably saw safety signals in the U.K.’s Yellow Card system and, in an open letter in June 2021, urged the director of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to halt the British vaccination campaign.

Harries looked at me sternly and said, “There are a number of prominent physicians in my country who are gaining fame for their unfounded positions around vaccine dangers, most recently a cardiologist.”

“Do you mean Dr. Aseem Malhotra?”

“Yes. He has gotten a lot of attention of late.”

Harries didn’t think Malhotra or Lawrie held credible opinions, or at least that’s what she told me. It wasn’t easy for me to accept this. We didn’t have a chance to speak about this further. I had another brief interaction with Harries later in the week (see below).

An American pediatrician chaired the roundtable. He opened the discussion with a request for ideas on how to counter vaccine hesitancy.

I had one:

“It’s obvious that the Krispy Kreme doughnuts and travel restrictions are carrots and sticks that have only partially worked. Those that remain hesitant are steadfast in their position because they have looked harder than most.

They aren’t believing rumors. They are listening to credentialed physicians and scientists who have authored numerous peer-reviewed papers and who happen to be COVID-19 vaccine critics. Why don’t we engage them openly and see what they have to say?”

Katie Attwell, Ph.D., a professor from the University of Western Australia whose interest is in vaccine policy and uptake, shot down that idea. I didn’t know who she was at the time. I did manage to speak with her personally later in the week.

Her rebuke was curt and to the point, “We cannot give any voice to the critic,” she told me. “Once the public sees them on equal footing with us they may believe what they are saying.”

Implicit in her strategy is the idea that the public cannot separate information from misinformation. Truth, in her mind, cannot stand on its own. It needs to be identified by those who know better.

Of course, there is another possibility. Perhaps she knows what the truth is and wants to hide it.

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here substack.com

Some bold emphasis added

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