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According to a British Medical Journal investigation, GSK's own internal safety reports showed that GSK was aware of the safety problems with Pandemrix, but never disclosed them to the public. The most alarming data point was a five-fold increase in deaths among those who received Pandemrix, compared with people who received H1N1 swine flu vaccines that didn't contain the adjuvant.
Lawsuits against the drugmaker began to pile up, but taxpayers ended up footing the bill for millions in damages because the dormant vaccine contracts included full legal indemnity for the vaccine makers.
The panic that surrounded H1N1 swine flu and the subsequent rush to get vaccinated was in part driven by inflated and widely disseminated models which incorrectly predicted thousands upon thousands of people would die from the flu.
These models were provided by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team of researchers at Oxford's Imperial College. Ferguson's group advised the UK government to prepare for at least 65,000 deaths. By the end of the pandemic, H1N1 swine flu had claimed the lives of just 457 people.
Paul Flynn, the vice chairman of the Council of Europe's European Health Committee, said of the H1N1 swine flu debacle: "The world has been subjected to a stunt by the greed of the pharmaceutical companies."
Eleven years later, on March 11, 2020, WHO, relying on the same attenuated definition of a pandemic, declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic.
Many governments based their COVID-19 prevention policies, including border closures and lockdowns, on computer models designed by Ferguson and his team at Oxford, despite the exponential inaccuracies of the model he had provided during the H1N1 pandemic.
Ferguson's models predicted more than 2.2 million Americans would die from COVID-19. To date, about 229,000 have died.
Oxford's Imperial College has received more than $180 million dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation making the self declared largest funder of vaccines in the world the second-largest funding source of Oxford's Imperial College.
Oxford's Imperial College also has financial ties to an organization founded and funded by the Gates Foundation, GAVI the Vaccine Alliance, a public-private global health partnership focused on increased access to vaccines.
Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientist in charge of U.S. efforts to find a COVID-19 vaccine, now known as Operation Warp Speed, was GSK's Chairman of Vaccines in 2009. Slaoui oversaw the development and safety testing of GSK's H1N1 Pandemrix.
In July 2020, Sanofi and GSK secured a $2.1 billion deal to supply the U.S. with 100 million doses of their vaccine. The partnership is a collaboration between a modified Sanofi flu shot and GSK's AS03 adjuvant, the same compound believed to be responsible for causing permanent brain damage in at least 1,300 European children during the H1N1 swine flu.
If history repeats itself and GSK's COVID vaccine causes adverse effects, taxpayers not the vaccine maker will once again be on the hook for damages. This is because in March 2020, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a declaration under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, or PREP Act, that broadens immunity for COVID vaccine makers, protecting them "against any claim of loss caused by, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the manufacture, distribution, administration or use of medical countermeasures," including vaccines.
These new protections are on top of those already granted to vaccine makers under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986. NCVIA's purpose is to eliminate the potential financial liability of vaccine manufacturers in the face of vaccine injury claims.
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