The minutes of the first three meetings of the MHRA’s Commission On Human Medicines (CHM) COVID-19 Vaccines Benefit Risk Expert Working Group between 25 August and 14 October 2020 are relatively sparse in riveting details.
They are mainly concerned with organisational details, but several redactions, especially in parts of members' disclosure statements, do not look good. Apart from the secret squirrel warnings we have already reported, which are at the beginning of every minute
and some strange statements on 14 October.
The prose is thick, summarising what must have been quite a discussion, but it seems that the EWG was sceptical that any vaccine could do much to shift the viral load. The EWG was also unsure of the correlate of infectiousness, how to assess infectiousness, and, ultimately, the capacity of any vaccine to interrupt transmission.
These were early days, but the clock was ticking toward the emergency approval of vaccines, any vaccine, and their rollout worldwide.
What underlies these early discussions were doubts about transmission and infectiousness, made four months after we started working on these key issues.
Always remember that all these transactions on our skins were done in secret.
This post was written by two old geezers who have been banging on about the absence of a clear definition of an active case of Covid since April 2020.
"Done in secret" - thus, even after a heavy debate in the EWG, the political decision makers would be ignorant of arguments running counter to the official 'test-test-test' and 'vaccinate-vaccinate-vaccinate' mantras. Nice, and 'useful' - for certain, usual suspects and 'expert' whisperers into politicians' ears.
It's now five years after the first covid ;outbreak' - and still, despite everything, people don't ask why some 'experts' are more experty than others ... and why we elect politicians who are proud of not having an inkling in some basic scientific and mathematical concepts but need 'experts' with dubious connections to certain industries to explain to them why it's good to do as those experts say and not look at counter-arguments, never mind asking inconvenient questions.
Interesting statement in 4.1.14 of the 14 October 2020 minutes that toxicology data is due next Spring (2021). Dame June didn’t appear in the list of attendees but the AZ vaccine got EUA approval in December 2020. Hmm.
Also interesting that the control group got the meningitis vaccine not saline. According to the AZ press release
“The overall reported rates of serious adverse events were 0.7% in the vaccine group and 0.8% in the control group.”
https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020/astrazenecas-covid-19-vaccine-authorised-in-uk.html
That explains that then.