Is it Too Big to Fail? By Brian Simpson

Moderna has opened a mRNA factory based at Monash University's Technology Precinct in southeast Melbourne. It will churn out mRNA vaccines in 2025 for respiratory diseases including influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and Covid. It has been reported that the former Morrison government spent $ 2billion on this deal, and the Victorian premier refuses to say how much state money has been spent, because that is "commercial in confidence." Nice how they play with public money like it is their own.

Still is this project really to big to fail? Rebekah Barnett raises some issues here, with vaccine hesitancy after the Covid vax adventures. This project is not too big to fail, and the bigger they are the harder they fall. The assumption is that all is peachy cream with the mRNA platform. But is that true, in the light of recent articles reviewed at this blog?

"Australia has seen a "concerning decline" in childhood vaccination rates of one or two percentage points since 2021, when Covid vaccines were mandated at large. The proportion of 'up-to-date' infants (12 months old) dropped from 94.3% in 2020, to 92.8% in 2023, the last available year of data, while only 93.3% of five-year-olds were up to date in 2023, compared to 94.2% in 2020.

The role of mandates in driving this decline was acknowledged in the recent federal Covid inquiry, during which the panel heard that "mandating restrictions and actions, especially vaccination, had the biggest negative impact on trust and increased rejection of these measures."

Australia has had coercive No Jab No Pay/Play vaccination policies in place since 2016, where family tax benefits and childcare rebates are withheld from families whose children are not up-to-date with the schedule, and under-vaccinated children are not allowed enrolment in childcare centres and kindy (conscientious objection exemptions are not allowed). Australians have mostly accepted this, but Covid vaccine mandates seem to have been a bridge too far for many.

Furthermore, 6 in 10 Australian parents reported feeling distressed when thinking about vaccinating their child, according to preliminary insights from new research into childhood vaccination barriers conducted by the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (NCIRS).

This suggests that while a majority of parents are still willing to vaccinate their children according to the National Immunisation Program Schedule (NIPS), which requires that Australian kids have 45 doses of vaccines by the age of five (up to 52 doses for Indigenous children), parents are sitting with a level of discomfort about it.

Politicians and health officials have made a huge deal of this dip in childhood vaccination rates, spending millions of taxpayer dollars to advertise taxpayer-funded vaccines back to the taxpayers, and staging semi-regular media blitzes on the importance of vaccinating newborns and "pregnant people" - most recently with a focus on whooping cough, for which Australia is reportedly experiencing the worst year on record.

Underlying the rise in vaccine hesitancy are unresolved safety concerns unique to the novel mRNA platform, the mass-scale rollout of which, during Covid, was enabled by two key scientific breakthroughs.

One, the stabilisation of the mRNA used to prompt recipients' cells to create the antigen, by swapping out natural uridine for synthetic pseudouridine, for which scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2023. Hence, the mRNA in the Covid injections is synthetically modified-RNA, not natural mRNA.

Second, the delivery mechanism of lipid nanoparticles (LNPS) to ensure that the fragile mRNA could be safely delivered to cells. Without being sealed in the fatty LNP packets, the mRNA would be destroyed too quickly to stimulate production of the antigen.

While both inventions solved one problem (how to get the mRNA into cells without it being destroyed en route), they gave rise to new problems. As example, in a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature, scientists shared findings that the modifications made to the mRNA in Covid vaccines are causing "frameshifting," resulting in the production of "off-target" (i.e.: unintended) proteins, the consequences of which are unknown.

Scientists have explored the pro-inflammatory potential of LNPs, calling for further research to investigate a possible link to adverse events following immunisation (AEFIs) such as anaphylaxis and autoimmune responses.

And more recently, with the discovery last year that the mRNA vaccines contained excessive levels of residual synthetic DNA left over from the vaccine production process, including a gene therapy sequence called the SV40 enhancer/promoter in the Pfizer vaccine, LNPs have come under the microscope for their potential to dump this foreign DNA into cells, raising concerns of long-term health risks, including genomic integration and cancer.

While much of the public is likely unaware of the scientific ins and outs of these safety concerns, the contamination issue has caught some public attention since the local government of West Australian mining town Port Hedland initiated a call at the grassroots level to stop the shots in October, after which several other councils have followed suit. Federal MP Russell Broadbent has also taken up the matter with the Prime Minister and the Health Minister, reporting regularly to constituents on his progress.

But also, people don't need to know science to observe that friends and family aren't doing too well after getting the shots. In Western Australia during the vaccine rollout in 2021, AEFIs reported in relation to Covid vaccines were a staggering 24 times higher than the rate of reporting for all other vaccines combined.

There were 141,074 adverse events AEFIs and 1,038 deaths reported to Australia's safety surveillance database in association with the Covid vaccines as at 23 November. The majority of these (91,315 AEFIs and 518 deaths) are related to the mRNA Moderna and Pfizer products.

Anecdotally, people who believe they have witnessed family or friends get injured after a shot are less inclined to take another one themselves, and there is research to confirm that this is the case at population level.

Australia's drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and the Health Department insist that the above-listed concerns are immaterial, and that the mRNA vaccines are safe and effective.

The Federal Government has two billion reasons not to look too closely, and the state governments, which are invested to the hilt in the mRNA industry, have a few million reasons of their own to double down on the safe and effective messaging.

It appears that our governments believe they can afford to ignore safety concerns, and they may even be right. During a recent court hearing for Australia's first Covid vaccine injury class action against the government, lawyers for senior health officials including the Health Minister, Chief Medical Officer, and head of the TGA, argued that the case should be dismissed because these officials did not owe a duty of care to Australian citizens who were injured by the medical products they approved and promoted."

https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/vaccine-hesitancy-and-safety-concerns