I find it disturbing that Mr. Sloan, our MP would forward a petition to Parliament full of so many factual errors.Mr. Sloan, or as he states Ms Baribeau, complains that the vaccines have been rushed and she fears for their safety. She’s upset she cannot sue the manufacturers should there be a problem with the vaccines. It takes 12-15 years for a vaccine to be researched and to be approved by a regulatory agency. At the same time, normally only one or two companies work on a particular vaccine. If the world wished to tackle this pandemic and avoid a total economic collapse, they could not conduct business as usual. Thus governments, not companies, funded the research for a vaccine. The vaccine will still be run through a regulatory agency, but individual governments will oversee the distribution of the vaccines, not private entities. Because governments are the ultimate source of the vaccines, individuals will not have the right to sue such entities as pharmaceutical companies.
Has it been too fast? Again, normally only one or two companies or a research centre will work on a vaccine. However, when numerous countries come together to find a solution the results are amazing. There was an ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. It was over a year before the West decided to make a huge effort to combat ebola. Once the decision was made, in just over a year two ebola vaccines were ready for distribution although by 2016 the epidemic had burned itself out. However, those vaccines are in use today in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Has the regulatory process been rushed? Normally, when a company develops a vaccine they wait until it’s ready for distribution before they present all the research material and results to say, the FDA. Due to the current crisis, all the companies with the most success were giving their research material to the regulatory agencies on a monthly basis. Thus, the regulatory agencies were able to come to their conclusions faster than normal. So, Moderna, which had an enormous amount of US funding, gave their research data and their testing results to the FDA every single month from last spring, onward. By November when the US FDA made their decision on Pfizer/BioNTech, they had been looking at the research and testing for almost a year.
But what about animal testing? The only purpose of animal testing is to convince people to undergo testing for a new vaccine. With the pandemic in full force there were no shortage of volunteers to take the vaccine without prior animal testing. Which leads to a truly horrifying falsehood in the Sloan petition; there was no double blind testing. In fact, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna had 73,000 people participate in their vaccine testing. Of that number – 36,500 were given a placebo. Both vaccines proved to be 95 per cent effective, a truly incredible result.
And yes, they used mRNA technology to develop those two vaccines. This is not a brand new technology. mRNA techniques have been used for cancer-related applications for 10 years. It was the first time the technology has been used to develop a vaccine.
There is too much hysteria going around during this pandemic. Our MP should not be fanning the flames.
Jeremy Hopkins
Napanee
Glaringly inaccurate Parliamentary petition
