Day 1166: A Vaxx Like Any Other Vaxx

Aaron Siri, the man who sues the FDA so you don't have to, wrote an excellent essay against the anti-vaxx talking point that certain mRNA products that fail to prevent COVID infection or transmission "aren't vaccines." Apparently the essay was restricted to his paid Substack subscribers at one point, but in the intervening two months has gone fully public.

If you're not familiar with the other non-sterilizing vaccines on the market, this essay is both short and educational. One omission is why the pertussis vaccine is non-sterilizing, but it's much like the other inactivated virus vaccines: the virus (or bacteria in some cases) runs rampant in some more external part of the body (e.g., the mucus membranes or the digestive tract) but is prevented from getting into the bloodstream or spinal column where it could do the most harm.

If this sounds like a just-so story to obscure the poor performance of inactivated virus vaccines in first-world countries where the diseases aren't circulating anyway, well, further research on this topic is left to the reader. There's no particular evidence that the COVID vaccines are achieving even this half-arsed immunity, so (if the others are) the mRNA vaccines could still be not-a-vaxx by most people's standards.

Non-sterility is not his only argument, though the remaining points are less about the definition of a vaccine and more about standards of vaccine (or drug) safety that the mRNA products violate. That it's been a long, slippery slope with littered with other bad vaccines is a sort of argument for yes-a-vaxx, though not the one he makes.

It's all worth a read, but the most horrifying example is the hepatitis B vaccine, which appears under both the yes-vaxxes-use-new-technology point (recombinant DNA) and the yes-vaxxes-are-largely-untested point:

The clinical trials for Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines each enrolled at least 30,000 people, reviewed safety for at least six months, and had a placebo control group for at least two months on average.

In contrast, most childhood vaccines had only days or weeks of safety review; typically far, far less than 30,000 participants; and virtually never had a placebo control. As an example, let’s use the very first vaccine on the CDC’s childhood schedule – the hepatitis b vaccine given on the first day of life:

[vaccine schedule chart omitted]

The safety review in the clinical trial relied upon to license this vaccine is similar to that of many other vaccines on the childhood schedule. In a word: useless. Now let me earn the use of that adjective.

There are only two brands of hepatitis b vaccines that are given to babies on the first day of life, Recombivax HB and Engerix B. Here is a summary of the clinical trial relied upon to license Recombivax HB for babies and children directly from the official FDA documentation:

[screencap omitted]

So, 147 children were injected with 5 days of safety monitoring after injection. The clinical trial for Engerix B (see page 6), the other hepatitis b vaccine given to babies, only had 4 days of safety monitoring after vaccination.

This seems so unbelievable that, on behalf of Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), my firm sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FDA demanding copies of the clinical trial reports submitted to the FDA to license Recombivax HB, and you can see for yourself it was indeed five days of safety monitoring after each shot given to babies and children! For Engerix B we requested that the FDA only produce clinical trial reports that reviewed safety for more than a week and after 3 ½ years, the FDA has still never been able to produce a single such study!

[...]

And if you are thinking, as I did, that maybe, just maybe, a clinical trial or some other large, robust safety assessment occurred after licensure (even though it would be condemned by the medical community as unethical – to withhold an “effective” vaccine from children in the control group), you would be wrong.

Note that hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted disease; there is no reason to vaccinate an infant unless the mother carried it. Studies have shown that immunity does not persist well into puberty as was hoped when the whole boondoggle of vaccinating day-old infants began. (PlagueBlog recommends against this vaccine in infancy, even if it is a vaxx like any other vaxx.)

P.S.: Alex Berenson reports that the vaxx became like any other vaxx in yet another way today when the FDA nixed the storied two-shot series along with booster samsara (the eternal cycle of boosters) in favor of one bivalent shot for all but the most defenseless among us. This remains an emergency authorization, with no final, allegedly vetted product in sight (as the monovalent vaccines are now deauthorized).