Tip - If you are using a phone, set the "Desktop Site" option in your browser   

2021-10-12

Del Bigtree of the Highwire brings us a review of the W.H.O. Global Vaccine Safety Summit. December 2019.

This reminds us that the vaccine hesitancy problem was a feature before the Covid vaccines burst upon us, before they were mandated by various bodies both private and governmental around the world, and before sections of populations were motivated to march in their thousands around the world to defy the demand that the whole world should be vaccinated. Indeed the W.H.O. Safety Summit took place before the pandemic even (officially) started.

It was taken so seriously that the W.H.O. debated it in front of the cameras.

Did the W.H.O. heed the advice of their Summit?

This is just two quotes, still topical today, almost two years later:

"I spend a lot of time talking ... with tech companies (Facebook, WhatsApp ... Weibo) they have a lot of fingers pointing at them to fix the misinformation problem, but it's not so simple. 1. The biggest problem is a lot of it's not misinformation. Our problem is ... that there's not anything 100%, and what actually can legally without creating a censorship thing, can we absolutely say that this is misinformation? because we have a lot of ambiguity in the safety field, and we have to come to terms with that - so we have to think about it differently than deleting misinformation, but building trust so that people are willing to put up with a certain amount of risk because they believe in it enough ..."

"... we need much more investment in safety science"

Del does shout a lot, but ... he's American, and that's his style. What matters is: is he right? Just turn down the volume a tad ...

(2 hours)

After watching this I am left with the overwhelming notion that this topic of vaccine safety is in effect intractable when we mix in all the risk factors that need validation in the course of approving a new vaccine - and that's before we add in the additional complexity inherent in applying more than one vaccine at a time.

If vaccination safety is so intractable, is it really sensible to roll out an untested unapproved vaccine that hasn't even completed its admittedly inadequate safety trials, and mandate that vaccine to the whole world?

Could the vaccine industry ever be economically viable without the cooperation, even effectively the coercion, of governments around the world? Or even if it was merely genuinely concerned for the safety of its products?