Top medical journal: Release the vaccine safety data

Declaring Big Pharma “the least trusted industry,” editors of one of the world’s oldest medical journals called for regulators and public health bodies to release raw data from the COVID-19 vaccine trials to provide answers to critical questions such as why vaccine trials were not designed to test efficacy against infection and spread of SARS-CoV-2.

The British Medical Journal article by senior editor Peter Doshi, editor-in-chief Kamrn Abbasi and former editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee argued that if regulators had insisted on transparency, countries would have learned sooner “about the effect of vaccines on transmission and been able to plan accordingly.”

“Big pharma is the least trusted industry,” they write. “At least three of the many companies making covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars. One pleaded guilty to fraud. Other companies have no pre-covid track record. Now the covid pandemic has minted many new pharma billionaires, and vaccine manufacturers have reported tens of billions in revenue.”

In a previous BMJ article, Doshi pointed out that trial registries and other publicly released information indicated the trials were assessing the vaccines’ ability to protect against “severe” COVID-19 rather than to prevent the disease itself. – READ MORE