AstraMengele Paid UK Celebrity TV Doctors

When The Media Says "Experts" They Mean Paid Corporate Shills (Part 31)

Although I didn’t pay much attention to this particular third rate short lived partial immunization, since it never received approval in the U.S. ,it is worth mentioning that even the smaller COVID shot makers paid doctors generously for positive media coverage of their brand. The UK was no exception with TV doctors promoting their particular adenoviral vector shot on public broadcasting such as BBC without disclosing thousands of pounds in payments from its maker. Ranj Singh, who regularly appeared on BBC including last month to downplay the SAEs, received undisclosed payments of 22,500 pounds in 2021 according to Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry. Nighat Arif, another covertly paid “expert” who appeared on the BBC morning show regularly, received an undisclosed 10,000 pounds from the same company in 2022. She also appeared as recently as April of this year to downplay the risk of blood clots. What’s even worse is that some of them lied about the rarity of blood clots and the severity of COVID for immunocompetent non-senior adults over two years into the very mild omicron variant. For instance, Phillipa Kaye, who received 12,500 pounds from the company in 2020 and an additional 9,000 pounds in 2022 falsely overstated the mortality risk of 40 year olds as being one death for every 1,250 COVID cases and understated the risk of blood clots as only occurring as 1 case for every 2.5 million recipients. As I noted last year the median infection fatality rate was 1 death for every 10,000 infections for adults 30-39 years of age and 3.5 deaths for every 10,000 infections for adults 40-49 years of age which for 40 year olds would likely be closer to the first number. The age stratified fatality rates mentioned in that post were for the much more virulent wildtype variant of 2020 which was not circulating in 2021 when Phillipa made that claim. According to the UKHSA data, the number needed to vaccinate to prevent 1 hospitalization (not death which is even less common) for 40-49 year olds in the no risk group was 186,800 for the primary series and pre-omicron variants and 932,500 for the bivalent booster for omicron variants. The rate of excess blood clots in adenoviral vector recipients was also much higher than the 1 case in 2.5 million recipients Phillipa claimed. As I mentioned last year in my summary of a systematic review of 132 studies published in Forensic Science International, the actual incident rate found for the AstraZeneca-Oxford primary series was 1 case per 20,000 doses was much higher and contributed to most of the blood clot case load across all platforms and brands. This was much higher than even the incident rate found for the only other adenoviral vector shot, Janssen-Johnson & Johnson, which a review of Thromboembolic adverse events following administration of Janssen doses, a year after its rollout, identified 3,790 reports of shot induced thrombosis,of which 2,892 were serious adverse events requiring hospitalization and of which 421 deaths occurred. The article identifies 445 cases attributable to that particular brand with 81 of those cases being fatal which of the 20 million who received this primary series in the UK comes out to a much lower incident rate of 1 case per 45,000 recipients for the general public which it should be noted is still much higher than what Phillipa told the British public of only seeing 1 case in 2.5 million recipients. Of course, blood clots were not the only or even the most common SAE. The aforementioned systematic review also identified 875 cases of anaphylaxis and 178 cases of myocarditis. A long term safety analysis (n = 1,472) of the “rare” SAEs that occurred following administration of AstraMengele’s adenoviral vector shots found that nearly 4% of recipients developing musculoskeletal disorders and nearly 1% developing hypertension problems. Nearly half of AstraMengele recipients in that study contracted COVID19 within a year of completing the primary series anyway.

While they claimed to have been paid through a PR firm to promote a different vaccine the idea that they would separate brand bias and product bias is laughably naive. Paid shills do not separate different products within the same brand from the brand itself in their bias. It is far less likely that they compartmentalized the different products from the brand than it is that they saw the brand as a means to embellish their own salience.