DEAR ABBY: Several months ago, I let the 49-year-old son of a dear friend move into my basement. Jason pays me rent plus utilities.
Last week, he informed me that he is not vaccinated for COVID. He was drinking at the time. Since my husband passed away with COVID in his system two years ago, I told Jason he would need to get vaccinated or find another place to live, but now Im not sure he remembers the conversation.
How should I handle this? I dont want to alienate his mother (or him, whom I love like a son) over this. -- HEALTH-CONSCIOUS IN COLORADO
DEAR HEALTH-CONSCIOUS: Ask Jason if he remembers the conversation you had in which he mentioned that he has not been vaccinated for COVID. If he doesnt recall having made the statement, remind him. Then tell him that when your husband passed, he had COVID in his system, that you do NOT want to risk being exposed to COVID and that if he wishes to continue living with you, he will have to stay current on his vaccines. This need not be a confrontation if you approach the subject calmly.
Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.
When two newlywed British doctors started their careers in Africa, little did they realise their work to find out what was killing hundreds of young children would lead to millions of lives being saved.
Prof Sir Brian Greenwood and his wife Alice, a paediatrician, witnessed a large number of infant deaths and this set him on a path towards the creation of the worlds first malaria vaccine, and the first approved vaccine against a human parasitic disease.
After four decades of work dedicated to the fight against malaria, last year the worlds first vaccine against the disease was developed and given to millions of children.
Sir Brian, who is now 85 and a research and teaching professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, found that the main reason children in Africa were dying was the mosquito-borne disease.
His interest in malaria was first sparked when he went to Nigeria in 1965 after graduating in medicine in the UK, and worked as a registrar at University College Hospital, Ibadan.
We have waited over three decades for a vaccine to be approved and now we have two in the space of a few years
Sir Brian Greenwood
While carrying out research for his thesis he discovered that there were very low incidences of autoimmune diseases among Nigerians, and he wondered if this could be linked to their repeated exposure to malaria.
He returned to the UK to continue training in immunology and was given the chance to help start a new medical school at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, in northern Nigeria, in 1970.
Not long afterwards the couple witnessed something they had not encountered before as hundreds of people were affected over a short period of time.
One day we had one or two cases, the next day five cases of meningococcal, going up to 50 cases a day in a small hospital. We did a census to see what was actually killing the children, he said. At that time the mortality was about 300 in every 1,000, three in 10 children were dying.
We had to find out what was going on and because there was no death certification, we thought of using postmortem questionnaires [with relatives of the dead].
It was quite emotional. They were telling you what had happened, what the symptoms were, so we were able to build up a picture.
There were two things they were dying of: pneumonia from chest infections and malaria.
It was there that he set up the lab, initially in a kitchen, to begin researching malaria.
It was tough as the [civil] war was just over, it was completely different from the big teaching hospitals, Sir Brian said.
We didnt have many resources. Our initial lab was in the kitchen but we did get an immunology lab eventually.
We were seeing what the immune system would do and we showed that actually if you had malaria your vaccines dont work so well, because malaria was suppressing the immune response.
My wife began administering drugs to young children to help prevent malaria, to see if it would make a difference.
After 15 years the couple moved to Gambia, where he took up the post of director of the UK Medical Research Council Laboratories.
There he established a research programme focused on some of the most important infectious diseases prevalent in the region at that time, including malaria.
It was here that Sir Brian, who was knighted for his work in 2012, made two major breakthroughs in malaria protection.
He and his colleagues demonstrated the effectiveness of insecticide-treated nets in reducing child deaths and showed how net distribution could be incorporated successfully into a national malaria control programme.
I set up two new field stations in the rural areas where we could start looking at malaria, he said.
I suddenly noticed that everybody in this rural village seemed to have a mosquito net, and that was not the case in the villages in Nigeria.
We thought, 'Do people use the net to stop getting bitten, would it stop you getting malaria?'
It was not a new idea as it had been used in colonial times, but then we looked at the literature to see if anybody had ever actually proven that that was the case, that having a bed net does protect you from malaria.
And it does, so we started doing a study to show it did.
Then people found a way to incorporate the insecticides into the nets and it was eventually picked up by the World Health Organisation.
Noah Ngah (left), the first baby to receive the malaria vaccine, and his twin sister, Judith Ndzie, are held for a photograph after receiving vaccines at a hospital in Soa, Cameroon. AFP
Another breakthrough followed when his team were able to show that mortality rates in young children from malaria could be reduced by giving them preventive drugs just a few months before the mosquito season.
We had the idea that if expat children are protected then why dont we do that for African children as well, Sir Brian said.
It seemed crazy if they were dying from malaria why we were not doing that.
There was a lot of resistance in the 1980s because people were worried about resistance coming and they thought malaria prevention should only be for tourists and expats.
My wife had been using drugs to help children not get malaria because she knew my children never had malaria, because they took their tablets.
We started doing studies with malaria prevention in young children following on from what we had done in Nigeria and we showed that it really did work.
Their work has paved the way for the preventions we see today.
In 1996, Sir Brian returned to the UK to take up an appointment at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he continued his research on meningitis, malaria and pneumonia in West Africa.
He continued to build on the study in Gambia and conducted more trials, giving seasonal malaria prevention in Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal.
It was a success and the results supported the earlier studys findings.
This led to a recommendation from the WHO for preventive medicines in countries of the Sahel and sub-Sahel, with more than 30 million children now receiving the drugs each year.
Sir Brian then worked on the design of the first GSK malaria vaccine RTS, S, which in 2021 became the world's first malaria vaccine and the first approved vaccine to battle a human parasitic disease.
The first trials' success led to a pilot programme and now it has finally been recommended by the WHO to be used as a seasonal vaccine in countries of sub-Saharan Africa with a high malaria risk.
More than two million children have been given the vaccine and deaths in the affected areas have so far been cut by 13 per cent.
His work has shown that when a seasonal vaccination was combined with chemoprevention drugs it provided a very high level of protection to children over the first five years of their lives.
The results from this study have also helped the development of the second malaria vaccine, called R21, which was introduced last year and has many similar properties to RTS, S.
Despite the breakthroughs, Sir Brians biggest regret is that it took too long.
In 2022 the disease caused more than 600,000 deaths, nearly all in young African children, but the new vaccines that are now rolling off the production lines can finally spare millions of lives.
There are lessons to be learnt, Sir Brian said. Ten years ago when Ebola broke out in Sierra Leone I was asked to help out with a vaccine and we did that in five years.
Malaria is much more complicated but it should not have taken 30 years.
Looking at where the gaps were and how it could be speeded up helped create the second vaccine, R21, and it benefitted from the experience in developing the first one.
We have waited over three decades for a vaccine to be approved and now we have two in the space of a few years.
But it is not a silver bullet. More research is needed to create a vaccine that can offer longer protection. That is the next step now.
Despite his work in helping to develop the vaccines, Sir Brian's greatest achievement remains training the next generation of scientists in Africa to continue the fight against malaria.
In 2001, he received a large grant to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to set up the Gates Malaria Partnership, which supported the training in research of 40 African PhD students and postdoctoral fellows.
Sir Brian became the director of its successor programme, the Malaria Capacity Development Consortium, in 2008.
It was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which supported a postgraduate malaria training programme in five universities in sub-Saharan Africa.
We have to keep up the funding. For the last eight years I have been chair of a WHO elimination commission to certify countries which have eliminated malaria and I send out teams to see if it is really true.
Since we set this up, about 15 countries have been certified as having eliminated it.
This year Cape Verde and Georgia are on the list. Gradually the map is shrinking but more needs to be done.
After his achievements in the battle against malaria, Sir Brian was awarded his knighthood in the UK's honours list.
It was a team effort, he said. I could have ended up in Harley Street and had a big house in the south of France but I have absolutely no regrets.
Updated: June 21, 2024, 6:34 PM
Donald Trump vowed at a rally Tuesday that if reelected, hell cut funding to every school with a vaccine mandate even though all 50 states have such laws on the books.
I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate, he declared at his rally in Racine, Wisconsin. The crowd went wild.
Its a promise hes made several times in recent months, repeating the same line verbatim at rallies in MarchandMay.
If he followed through on that, no school in the United States would receive federal funding. All 50 states and Washington, D.C.,have laws requiring specific vaccines for students, including measles, rubella, chickenpox, tetanus, pertussis and polio. Exemptions to the rule vary by state, with California, New York and a handful of other states maintaining the strictest mandates.
Public health experts credit those vaccine requirements with eradicating diseases that once killed thousands of people a year. Polio, a disease that infected, paralyzed or killed nearly 60,000 American children in 1952 alone, has been completely wiped out in the U.S. thanks to mass vaccination programs.
Trumps campaign did not immediately respond to questions about which vaccines he was referring to. Months earlier, his spokespeople said he was only referring to schools COVID-19 vaccine mandates. But hes declined to make that distinction during his speeches, including at Tuesdays rally a decision that panders to his partys anti-vaccine crowd.
A growing faction of conservatives have begun questioning the safety of vaccines in recent years, despite the intense scientific scrutiny they undergo before the public receives them, and a dearth of evidence that they have any lasting adverse side-effects. A Politico/Morning Consult poll found last year that while vaccine skepticism was about equal among both Democrats and Republicans before 2020, more than half of Republicansnow say they care more about the potential health risks of vaccines than the benefits.
Though he once took credit for the development of COVID-19 vaccines, Trump has since scaled back his endorsement of them and vaccines in general. Last month, he even attacked independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the most prominent voices in the anti-vaccine movement, as not being anti-vaccine enough.
Republicans, get it out of your mind that youre going to vote for this guy because hes conservative. Hes not. And by the way, he said the other night that vaccines are fine, Trump said in a video posted to social media. He said it on a show, a television show, that vaccines are fine. Hes all for them. And thats what he said. And for those of you that want to vote because you think hes an anti-vaxxer, hes not really an anti-vaxxer.
(NewsNation) Dr. John Moore, Cornell University virologist and researcher, says Red COVID is a statistically proven phenomenon that people in Republican-led states are more likely to die from COVID.
Moore believes COVID misinformation is what ultimately killed voters in red states.
The reason youre less likely to be vaccinated is youre bombarded with this information from right-wing sources, notably Fox News, and by the political leadership of the red states, Moore said during a Thursday appearance on NewsNations CUOMO while discussing a recent lawsuit filed against Pfizer by the state of Kansas. Red state politicians ended up killing their constituents and voters.
Inthe lawsuitfiled Monday, Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach claims Pfizer misled Kansas residents by claiming the vaccine was safe and hid evidence of the shots link to myocarditis and pregnancy issues.
Pfizer made multiple misleading statements to deceive the public about its vaccine at a time when Americans needed the truth, he said in a statement.
In astatement to The Hill, Pfizer claims the case has no merit and plans to respond to the lawsuit in due course.
We are proud to have developed the COVID-19 vaccine in record time in the midst of a global pandemic and saved countless lives. The representations made by Pfizer about its COVID-19 vaccine have been accurate and science-based, the company said.
Kobachs lawsuit comes as a new study discoveredpossiblelinks betweenCOVID-19 vaccinesand possible neurological, blood and heart-related conditions.
The new studyis the largest of its kind since the pandemic began and could reignite the debate over the risks and benefits of the vaccine.
NewsNations Taylor Delandro contributed to this report.
Opinion
Donald Trumps military ran a covert campaign to discredit Chinas Sinovac vaccine at the height of the pandemic
Tue 18 Jun 2024 13.26 EDT
In July 2021, Joe Biden rightly inveighed against social media companies failing to tackle vaccine disinformation: Theyre killing people, the US president said. Despite their pledges to take action, lies and sensationalised accounts were still spreading on platforms. Most of those dying in the US were unvaccinated. An additional source of frustration for the US was the fact that Russia and China were encouraging mistrust of western vaccines, questioning their efficacy, exaggerating side-effects and sensationalising the deaths of people who had been inoculated.
How, then, would the US describe the effects of its own disinformation at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic? A shocking new report has revealed that its military ran a secret campaign to discredit Chinas Sinovac vaccine with Filipinos when nothing else was available to the Philippines. The Reuters investigation found that this spread to audiences in central Asia and the Middle East, with fake social media accounts not only questioning Sinovacs efficacy and safety but also claiming it used pork gelatine, to discourage Muslims from receiving it. In the case of the Philippines, the poor take-up of vaccines contributed to one of the highest death rates in the region. Undermining confidence in a specific vaccine can also contribute to broader vaccine hesitancy.
The campaign, conducted via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X) and other platforms, was launched under the Trump administration despite the objections of multiple state department officials. The Biden administration ended it after the national security council was alerted to the issue in spring 2021. The drive seems to have been retaliation for Chinese claims without any evidence that Covid had been brought to Wuhan by a US soldier. It was also driven by military concerns that the Philippines was growing closer to Beijing.
It is all the more disturbing because the US has seen what happens when it plays strategic games with vaccination. In 2011, in preparation for the assassination of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the CIA tried to confirm that it had located him by gathering the DNA of relatives through a staged hepatitis B vaccination campaign. The backlash was entirely predictable, especially in an area that had already seen claims that the west was using polio vaccines to sterilise Pakistani Muslim girls. NGOs were vilified and polio vaccinators were murdered. Polio resurged in Pakistan; Islamist militants in Nigeria killed vaccinators subsequently.
The report said that the Pentagon has now rescinded parts of the 2019 order that allowed the military to sidestep the state department when running psychological operations. But while the prospect of a second Trump administration resuming such tactics is alarming, the attitude that bred them goes deeper. Reuters pointed to a strategy document from last year in which generals noted that the US could weaponise information, adding: Disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.
The US is right to challenge the Kremlins troll farms, Beijings propaganda and the irresponsibility of social media companies. But its hard to take the moral high ground when youve been pumping out lies. The repercussions in this case were particularly predictable, clear and horrifying. It was indefensible to pursue a project with such obvious potential to cause unnecessary deaths. It must not be repeated.
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The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved Merck's new vaccine designed to protect adults from a bacteria known as pneumococcus that can cause serious illnesses and a lung infection called pneumonia, the drugmaker said.
Merck's shot, called Capvaxive, specifically protects against 21 strains of that bacteria to prevent a severe form of pneumococcal disease that can spread to other parts of the body and lead to pneumonia. It's the first pneumococcal conjugate vaccine designed specifically for adultsand aims to provide broader protection than the available shots on the market, according to the drugmaker.
Healthy adults can suffer from pneumococcal disease. But older patients and those with chronic or immunocompromising health conditions are at increased risk for the illness, especially the more serious or so-called "invasive" form.
Invasive pneumococcal disease can lead to meningitis, an infection that causes inflammation in the area surrounding the brain and spinal cord, and an infection in the bloodstream called bacteremia.
"If you have chronic lung disease, even asthma, you have a higher risk of getting sick with pneumococcal disease, and then being in the hospital, losing out on work," Heather Platt, Merck's product development team lead for the newly cleared vaccine, told CNBC in an interview. "Those are things that have a real impact on adults and children, their quality of life."
Around 150,000 U.S. adults are hospitalized with pneumococcal pneumonia each year, Platt said. Death from the more serious form of the disease is highest among adults 50 and above, Merck said in a release in December.
Even after the FDA approval, the company's single-dose vaccine won't reach patients just yet. An advisory panel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet on June 27 to discuss who should be eligible for the shot.
Platt said Merck will support the committee's decision and is ready to supply the vaccine by late summer.
Some analysts view Capvaxive as a key growth driver for Merck as it prepares to offset losses from its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda, which will lose exclusivity in the U.S. in 2028.
The market for pneumococcal conjugate vaccines is currently around $7 billion and could grow to be worth more than $10 billion over the next several years, according to a November note from Cantor Fitzgerald analysts.
Merck's newly approved shot could boost its competitive edge in that space, which includes drugmaker Pfizer. Merck currently markets two pneumococcal shots, but neither is specifically designed for adults.For example, the company's existing shot Vaxneuvance is approved in the U.S. for patients 6 weeks of age and older.
Pfizer's single-dose pneumococcal vaccine, Prevnar 20, is the current leader in the market for adults. But Merck expects its new shot to capture the majority of market share among adults, Platt said.
"We do expect there to be rapid uptake of" Capvaxive, she said, adding that the company is confident that data on the shot will "really resonate" with clinicians and policymakers.
Merck's pneumococcal vaccine protects against eight strains of the bacteria that are not included in any other approved shot for the disease. Those eight strains account for roughly 30% of invasive pneumococcal disease cases in patients 65 and above, according to a release from Merck, citing CDC data from 2018 to 2021.
The 21 strains included in Merck's shot account for roughly 85% of invasive pneumococcal disease cases in adults 65 and above, Merck, citing the CDC data. Meanwhile, Pfizer's Prevnar targets strains that only account for roughly 51% of cases in that age group, based on the same CDC data.
The FDA's approval is partly based on Merck's late-stage trial called STRIDE-3 that pitted the vaccine against Pfizer's Prevnar 20 in adults 18 and up who had not previously received a pneumococcal vaccine.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect 150,000 U.S. adults are hospitalized with pneumococcal pneumonia each year.
Amid an influx of efforts to help the African continent claim vaccine sovereignty, a new financing mechanism devised by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the African Union and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) has taken flight.
On Thursday, Gavi, the African Union and Africa CDCplus France and other countriesdebuted the African Vaccine Manufacturing Accelerator (AVMA), which will help meet the African Unions goal to produce at least 60% of the continents required vaccines by 2040.
AVMAs aim is to make up to $1 billion available over the next 10 years to boost the expansion of commercially viable vaccine manufacturing in Africa, according to a Gavi release. By using a pull financing mechanism, AVMA aims to provide downstream incentives to manufacturers to help parry the initial costs of development and production of much-needed shots.
As part of the launch, the European Union is pledging more than 750 million (about $802 million) to the project. Some $318 million will come from Germany, in addition to $100 million from France and $60 million from the United Kingdom, France 24 reports. Additional donations are coming from the likes of the United States, Canada, Norway, Japan and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the publication added.
Also on Thursday, the U.S. government said it would work with Congress to earmark at least $1.58 billion to Gavi over the next five years. The U.S. pointed out that its supported AVMA since its conception and looks forward to working together with the African Union to advance the vaccine localization effort.
Gavis board formallyapproved plans for AVMA back in December. At the time, the organization noted that the present demand for vaccines in Africa is valued at more than $1 billion per yeara figure thats projected to grow as the continents population continues to rise over the next few decades.
While Africa accounts for roughly 20% of the worlds population, the continents vaccine industry currently contributes some 0.1% of global supply, Gavi stressed.
AVMA will work by providing manufacturers with two types of incentives at different trigger points, Gavi explained.
Milestone payments will be triggered when a company withan eligible vaccine successfully snags World Health Organization (WHO) prequalification and enters into a milestone payment agreement. Meanwhile, accelerator payments will be made available upon delivery of eligible vaccine doses.
AVMA is prioritizing a number of vaccines to start, including those for oral cholera, malaria, measles-rubella, yellow fever, Ebola and rotavirus. The organization is emphasizing mRNA and viral vector shots as its technology platforms of choice.
The new organization isa piece of a complex jigsaw that will, over time, strengthen the resilience of global and regional vaccine supply chains," the Africa CDCsaidin a release.
AVMAs launch comes as other efforts to establish vaccine manufacturing in Africa have yielded mixed results.
In April, after Moderna said it was rethinking its decision to build a $500 million vaccine plant in Kenya thanks to a lack of demand, the Africa CDC was quick to step in, arguing that Modernas second-guessing of its plan helped perpetuate the inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic on the continent.
However, mRNA rival BioNTech, which opened an immunization plant in Kigali, Rwanda, in December, recently received $145 million from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to help establish vaccine R&D, plus clinical and commercial manufacturing at the Kigali site.
The goal is to establish an end-to-end vaccine ecosystem on the continent, which would help Africa better prepare for potential future epidemics and pandemics, BioNTech and CEPIsaidin a joint release in May.
Photo taken on Feb. 19, 2020 shows the Pentagon seen from an airplane over Washington D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
"We weren't looking at this from a public health perspective...We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud," an officer involved in the Pentagon's misinformation campaign against Sinovac was cited by Reuters as saying.
BEIJING, June 20 (Xinhua) -- A recent Reuters investigation has found that the U.S. military launched a secret disinformation campaign to discredit Chinese vaccines in the Philippines, a nation severely impacted by COVID-19.
The disclosure has sparked widespread condemnation of the U.S. scheme from public health experts. Even former U.S. intelligence officials have decried the disinformation campaign.
China's Sinovac vaccine, the only type available in the Philippines during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, was smeared repeatedly under the Pentagon program.
Reuters reported that it identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation.
Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus, meaning China is the virus in Tagalog, a major language of the Philippines.
"We weren't looking at this from a public health perspective," a senior military officer involved in the program was cited by Reuters as saying. "We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud."
Due to the disinformation campaign, vaccination rates in the Philippines remained dismally low. In June 2021, then-Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte appealed on television to the public to get vaccinated.
At that time, only about 2.1 million out of the country's 114 million people were fully vaccinated, far below the target of 70 million for that year.
"Over 60,000 Filipinos died, and many of them would have survived if not for the disinformation campaign against the Sinovac vaccine," former Philippine presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said on his social media.
Cho-Chiong Tan, a doctor and associate professor at the Institute of Medicine, Far Eastern University, said Reuters' report "shocked the whole Philippines."
"The malign action of the United States has seriously harmed the health of the Filipino people and hampered the Philippine efforts to fight against COVID-19," Tan said, adding that distrust and panic about vaccine safety caused some people to give up vaccination, increasing the risk of contracting the virus.
"The practices of the United States not only harmed the interests of the Filipino people, but also endangered global public health and the well-being of all mankind," he added.
"I don't think it's defensible. I'm extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that," said Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine.
TOPEKA Attorney General Kris Kobach filed a civil lawsuit June 17 against pharmaceutical company Pfizer, alleging that Pfizer misled the public that it had a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine, violating the states Consumer Protection Act.
The state seeks civil monetary penalties, damages and injunctive relief from misleading and deceptive statements made in marketing its COVID-19 vaccine, Kobach said.
In the complaint, Kobach alleges that Pfizer willfully concealed, suppressed and omitted material facts relating to the COVID-19 vaccine, the most egregious ones regarding safety of the vaccine for pregnant people, in regard to heart conditions, its effectiveness against variants and its ability to stop transmission.
Pfizer marketed its vaccine as safe for pregnant women, Kobach said. However, in February of 2021 (they) possessed reports of 458 pregnant women who received Pfizers COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy. More than half of the pregnant women reported an adverse event, and more than 10% reported a miscarriage.
The percentage of adverse events which is a term that means any negative reaction was higher in pregnant women than the general population by roughly 17%, according to a study published in the journal Medicine in February 2022.
An earlier study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2021 offered preliminary findings that did not show any significant safety concerns among pregnant individuals who received the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, indicating that observed miscarriages were not unusual and likely not a direct result of the vaccine.
Kobach says that Pfizer marketed the vaccine as safe in terms of heart conditions such as myocarditis and pericarditis. He referenced a question Albert Bourla, Pfizer CEO, was asked in January 2023 of if the vaccine caused severe myocarditis, to which Bourla responded, We have not seen a single signal, although we have distributed billions of doses.
However, as Pfizer knew, the United States government, the United States military, foreign governments and others have found that Pfizers COVID-19 vaccine caused myocarditis and pericarditis, Kobach said.
According to the CDC, cases of myocarditis and pericarditis caused by the COVID-19 vaccine are rare, and most patients experienced resolution of symptoms by hospital discharge.
Kobach says Pfizer marketed its vaccine as effective against COVID-19 variants, even though data available at the time showed Pfizers vaccine was effective less than half the time.
His final allegation in the complaint was that the company falsely marketed the vaccine as preventing transmission.
Pfizer urged Americans to get vaccinated in order to protect their loved ones, clearly indicating a claim that Pfizers COVID-19 vaccination stopped transmission, Kobach said. Pfizer later admitted that theyve never even studied transmission after the recipients receive the vaccine.
In a statement, Pfizer said its COVID-19 vaccine saved countless lives and that the companys claims about the vaccine were accurate and based on science.
The company believes that the states case has no merit and will respond to the suit in due course, the statement said. Pfizer is deeply committed to the well-being of the patients it serves and has no higher priority than ensuring the safety and effectiveness of its treatments and vaccines.
Kansas is the first state to file such a lawsuit, though Kobach says five other states will be joining. They will make announcements independently. The only other confirmed state is Idaho.
More suits may follow, depending on Pfizers reaction, Kobach said.
In 2023, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Pfizer for unlawfully misrepresenting the effectiveness of the companys COVID-19 vaccine and attempting to censor public discussion of the product. That suit was also based on the states Consumer Protection Act.
The case is filed in Thomas County. Kobach says this is because they wanted to go to a place with a lighter workload, to make sure they had the time to deal with it.
When asked if hed received the Pfizer vaccine, Kobach declined to answer. I think whether Ive received the vaccination is irrelevant to the lawsuit, its not about me, he said. Its about the statements that were made to the people of Kansas.
Maybe its the way his mind works or maybe its the brain worms but presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a moth to the flame of conspiracy theories. Heres another one he just cant seem to quit: the notion that Covid-19 was targeted to spare the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews its most damaging effects.
Kennedy whose uncle was a champion of the science that took America to the moon first uncorked the moonbat notion last summer at a dinner party. In comments that were caught on video and published by the New York Post, Kennedy said of Covid-19: There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. He further asserted that Covid-19 is targeted to attack caucasians and Black people, and that the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.
Kennedys conspiratorial notions were soon widely blasted, including in The New York Times, which ran the unvarnished news headline: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Airs Bigoted New Covid Conspiracy Theory About Jews and Chinese. As the controversy swelled, Kennedy posted on X that he was being unfairly maligned: I have never, ever suggested that the Covid-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews. He nonetheless added that Covid-19 serves as a proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons. Despite having voiced the argument that the virus was ethnically targeted, Kennedy wrote that he never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.
Fast forward to the present and Kennedy is again misconstruing science around the deadly virus. A TV station in Maine aired an interview last week that characterized Kennedy as doubling down on his original conspiratorial sentiment, showing a clip of Kennedy insisting: This is a scientific study. Its not a racist statement. Its just the truth.
That news segment, with News Center Maine reporter Donovan Lynch, is quite condensed. Rolling Stone has reviewed unedited video of the exchange, in which Kennedy appears combative and unrepentant. Lynch presented Kennedy with his previous remarks and asked, Do you still believe in what you said? He also pressed Kennedy about trafficking in an antisemitic trope.
At first Kennedy dodged and weaved: The irony is that at the same time Im being called antisemitic which, of course, is a joke Im also being called a Zionist. So somebody has got to make up their mind.
Kennedy then insisted: All I was doing was quoting an NIH [National Institutes of Health] funded paper that anybody can look up that was funded by the United States government that showed that certain races were more susceptible. Kennedy elaborated: The races that it was least compatible with were people from Finland. The second most was Ashkenazi Jews. The third most was Chinese nationals. It was most compatible with Blacks, with people from Africa, and with Caucasians. Kennedy added as a caveat: There are ethnically targeted bio-weapons. I never said that Covid was one of those.
The science is never really the point with Kennedy, who routinely misconstrues research studies to support dark, preconceived notions. But the paper he cites makes no reference to the genetic targeting of Covid-19. It observes that potentially deleterious variants of a gene called ACE2 appear to make certain populations more susceptible to the virus.
Such variants, it is true, are found disproportionately in Africans and African Americans as well as in Non-Finnish European populations. However the study does not refer to Chinese nationals at all. It notes that a wide grouping of Latinos, East Asians, and South Asians are less likely to carry the susceptible genetic variants. (Contra Kennedy, the Finns are also in this grouping.) Finally, it observes that these genetic vulnerabilities are not seen in either Ashkenazi Jews nor in the Amish.
Of course a conspiracy theory centered on resistance to the coronavirus by Ecuadorians and the Pennsylvania Dutch is not nearly so explosive as one featuring Chinese and Jews. Specifically, it would not resonate with widely circulated, bigoted tropes that blame Beijing for unleashing Covid-19 on the world, nor those that falsely cast Jews as leading a globalist cabal served by this great reset.
The Kennedy campaign did not respond to specific questions from Rolling Stone about why Kennedy is so stubborn in misrepresenting covid science. Instead, a campaign spokesperson pointed to a second recent clip with the candidate on The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur from June 17.
In that clip Kennedy portrays himself as the victim of mainstream media spin designed to make me seem crazy. He complained that his original 2023 comments were meant to be off the record, and that he was never suggesting that people deliberately developed or cultivated covid as a bio-weapon against certain races.
And yet Kennedy continued to mangle the NIH research, again falsely asserting the primacy of Finnish immunity to the disease. Kennedy concluded with the last resort of the conspiracy theorist, which is that he was only raising questions. I wasnt vouching for the paper, he said. I was just saying: Its interesting that this is out there.
