Guerrilla History - *UNLOCKED* Intelligence Briefing: A Brief History of Vaccine Flubs

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

This Intelligence Briefing has been unlocked from our Patreon.  It was originally published on 13 November. Guerrilla History- Intelligence Briefings will be roughly a twice monthly series of shorter, more informal discussions between the hosts about topics of their choice.  Patrons at the Vanguard tier and above will get instant access to all episodes.  Half of the episodes will be made available to the public after a week or two, while the others will remain patreon-exclusives (though they will be opened up to members of the Comrade tier after a couple weeks).  This Intelligence Briefing is a conversation about some examples of vaccines gone wrong in the past, timely considering the recent news of the Pfizer vaccine candidate's efficacy results in Phase 3 Trials (and since recording, the Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines as well).  This episode will be the one this month that will be released to the public.   Here is the link to Henry's video he mentioned: https://youtu.be/bXCAYrPhCSc As well as a second video he made after this Intelligence Briefing was recorded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9hNYhnM71s  Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea.   Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!   To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/msgp-queens, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and on Libsyn at https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/, and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod and on Libsyn https://redmenace.libsyn.com/.  You can support those two podcasts by visiting https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio and https://www.patreon.com/TheRedMenace.     Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.        

You remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to a guerrilla history intelligence briefing. For those of you who are subscribers to the podcast,

you are going to be getting this episode a couple weeks after the people on our Patreon. The idea behind these intelligence briefings is that they're going to be shorter, more informal looks at different historical events. We're not going to have guests on for the most part. we're not going to have books that we're basing the discussions about. It's going to be a very informal, conversational discussion between the hosts of the show about these historical events to kind of bring them up to your consciousness and hopefully you'll get some use out of them.

So just briefly, before we get into the topic at hand, the idea behind these intelligence briefings is we're going to roughly be recording two a month, roughly. Both of them are going to be going up onto Patreon. first. One of them will have a couple week delay before it comes out onto our general feed. So it'll be unlocked for the general audience after a couple of weeks. The other episode is going to be a Patreon exclusive episode. So if you are listening on the general feed and you want to get the access to these intelligence briefings right away and you want to make sure that you get even the Patreon exclusives, join our Patreon.com forward slash

guerrilla history. And as I said, if you're only listening on the general feed, this will be, have recorded about two weeks before it's released. So information might change between now and then. So just keep that in mind. But without further ado, our conversation that we're going to have today is about vaccines. So given the recent news that we had, we're recording on Friday the 13th.

So on Monday, it was announced that Pfizer has a vaccine candidate that appears to be about 90% effective, and they're really trying to push this vaccine through as quickly as possible. That way we can prevent as many cases of COVID as possible. And it made us think about how in the past we've had examples of vaccines that perhaps made it through the regulatory process, but the safety information was not fully fleshed out at the time of its release to the public, and there was some negative consequences associated with that. And there's also some more nefarious instances of vaccines being either put out or not put out that I think that we want to talk about. So I sent a couple of examples to the guys to look at. And yeah,

here we're going to have a conversation. And as always, I'm joined by Adnan Hussein, director of the School of Religion at Queens University and Brett O'Shea of RevLeft Radio. Hi, everyone. Yes, hello. And I just want to say something up front as well. another plus of tackling this history and understanding it is not only because of the obvious situation that we're in a pandemic looking down the barrel of a possible vaccine right now, but also just the ambient level of suspicion in our society around vaccines, the ignorance about how they're developed, who develops them on what sort of trajectory, etc. I think it's important for those of us on the left to understand the science and the history

here so that not only that we can have a sort of more coherent understanding of how these things play out, but that we can turn around in our own communities and spheres of influence and help push back some of the more anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, conspiratorial thinking surrounding vaccines, which we might get into a little bit more here, but I think it's really important that we take this stuff seriously and then we go out into our own spheres of influence and help spread the actual science and the actual history to push back on that conspiratorial Thank you. Having said that, Brett, I think you're right about the importance of having an accurate scientific understanding. So we're really lucky that Henry is going to be able to tell us and we can

direct you to other resources. But I think also one interesting aspect of this, and partly why perhaps there is a culture of suspicion and conspiracy that undermines confidence in vaccines and vaccination programs is because very often in a for-profit industry, these corporations, have motives and approaches that don't align with the best practices for the society at large, but are manipulated or part of their desire to promote their product for the sake of seeking private profit. So I think there's two sides of it that generates suspicion while at the same time we need to really adhere to firm scientific understanding.

I think that'll be interesting also with this Pfizer. getting a lot of attention. And definitely, as Henry mentioned, they're really promoting and pushing it. So the real question is, is, well, what does the science really say about how it's developed? So I'm glad Henry's able to tell us more. Yeah. And I think that's important too, because, you know, we think about the conspiracy theories being, you know, predominantly a thing of the right. But because there's this intersection of like corporatism with the vaccines, it often flourishes this specific conspiracy theory can get a foothold on the left because of our inherent suspicion of corporations.

So that's incredibly important. Sorry, Henry. No, that's fine. Like I said, I want to keep this nice and informal for the listeners. Listeners, if you're not on my Patreon or if you don't follow me on Twitter, on the day of the announcement of the Pfizer vaccine, I made a 15-minute-long video on YouTube explaining what that announcement does mean, what it doesn't mean and what our prospects are going forward. So if you haven't checked that out and are interested in what that announcement actually

means, cutting through any of the speculation that some of the major networks might be doing on the vaccine and talking about how the stock market is going to respond to that. If you just want to look at the science, I'll have that video linked in the show notes. So just look down below or, yeah, join me on Patreon. Patreon.com forward slash Huck, 1995. So, guys, did you get a chance to look at any of the incidents that I sent to you? And what did you think about them if so? And maybe we'll bring up individual examples and we can chat about them for the listeners. Yeah, I mean, the one that obviously stood out to me was the situation in Pakistan,

where it was basically a CIA operation under the guise of providing vaccination. I think for polio in Pakistan. It's hepatitis B. Hepatitis B, okay. That's what they were vaccinating against. And there was some suspicion by like counterinsurgents or insurgent militants and stuff about what the U.S. was actually doing. And then maybe you can go a little deeper with the details.

But it basically turned out that it was a front trying to get genetic information on different people to pursue bin Laden. And so that eventually came out after the fact. And it obviously exploded people's suspicion. around vaccines and put a real dent in the ability for the public health officials in that area to get to get hepatitis under control. Yeah, exactly. I think that that was a good introduction to it, Brett. So as you said, this was basically a front by the CIA to try to get genetic information to pinpoint bin Laden's location. So a little bit of background here. Around the

time that this program was taking place, there was only four countries in the world that still had active wild cases of polio. We called them the pain countries, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Nigeria. Since then, two of them have dropped out of that list. But at the time, it was those four countries that still had wild circulating polio.

And we were trying to eradicate polio still. What was happening at the time, though, is that the CIA, and this came out later, the CIA was basically paying a doctor to set up a

fake vaccination, hepatitis B vaccination in these rural areas in Pakistan. And what they were trying to do is instead of giving the vaccine for hepatitis B to children, they were collecting genetic information from these children. And they were hoping to find somebody who they were able to determine was a child of Osama bin Laden. And then if you find a child of Osama bin Laden, you might be able to find Osama bin Laden himself. So obviously this is before the U.S. went and it killed him. And so they went in, they were doing these fake vaccinations, collecting genetic information, and the program never really paid off. This isn't how they found bin Laden. But it came out later that this is

one of the tactics that the CIA was doing to try to find bin Laden was this fake vaccination program, which then led to a couple of different things. So some of the militant groups in the area found out about this and started threatening vaccine workers, legitimate vaccine workers. They started threatening people that were wanting to get vaccines. And on the other hand, there was also just skepticism among the population and the area. They saw the CIA was coming in doing these fake vaccinations because they cared more about Osama bin Laden than caring about the people in the area and preventing hepatitis B. So there was a mass skepticism in the area against vaccine workers as well as actual violence that was being threatened and in some cases perpetuated against vaccine workers. The result of this was the rates of polio vaccination in the area of Pakistan that this covert action was taking place.

The rates of polio vaccination dropped basically off a cliff the following year, which then led to a spike of polio the following year. And it set back the efforts to try to eradicate polio by several years. The year after that was a low year for polio, but if you look at the number of cases that we're having now, the last couple years, of polio, wild circulating polio in Pakistan, it's still higher than it was before this covert raid. So the U.S. doing this fake vaccination program. This isn't necessarily a problem with the vaccines itself. It's a problem with the military industrial complex and the state apparatus of an imperial power doing a fake vaccination program, but then fomented suspicion among the populace and led to a public health crisis where we were set back several.

years in the fight to eradicate polio in Pakistan. It was a really obscene event. Adnan? Well, I noticed that looking at some of the data that you sent us, that it is precisely in the regions where the U.S. military would have been searching that the polio outbreaks in 2019 and 2020 really increased so dramatically with a huge upsurge in cases in Haibur Pachtunghwa. And that region is, is, of course, you know, in the Pashtun areas close to the Afghanistan border. And in 2019, there were 93 cases. And in 2020, it was less, but it was still one of the highest. It was still 22 cases of polio. And keeping in mind that the year is not over yet. That's right. Yeah. That's right.

Yeah, and I think one of the other things that's worth mentioning here just briefly, so this isn't associated with the covert fake vaccination program, but one of the other things that we saw polio cases linked with before the fake vaccination program was drone strikes in the area. The more drone strikes in the area and the more deaths via drone strike, the higher the number of cases of polio, which was interesting. And there's definitely the listeners I can allow them to put them, let them put that together themselves as to why the rates of polio and decreasing vaccination rates when areas being shelled by drones might be occurring. But I think perhaps let's move on to some other examples that might be a little bit more one to one with the news that we have with the Pfizer vaccine candidate right now.

Yeah, Henry, I was going to push in the direction of a situation where a vaccine was, was, attempted to be made in good faith, right, under fair protocol, and it still turned out to have incredibly negative effects. Could you talk about that case? Yeah. So there's actually several cases that would fit into that description. And two of them that I can bring up are the cutter vaccine. So the cutter polio vaccine is one. And then the Deng Vaxia vaccine is the other. Adnan, I know you know a little bit about the Deng Vaxia vaccine. We've talked about it before. so I'll let you, you know, bring that up in a second, but I'll talk about the cutter vaccine briefly right now. So the cutter polio vaccine basically was, I don't know if the listeners

are familiar with it, but if not, you can look it up pretty easily. Early on what was happening, there was two researchers that were working on polio vaccines. There was Jonas Sulk, who was working on an inactivated polio vaccine, and Albert Sabin, who was working on a live attenuated vaccine. Now, Salk's vaccine came out first, and once he developed his vaccine, there was a bunch of pharmaceutical companies who were going to be doing the production of the vaccine, right? Okay, so you've got all of these different plants that are going to be producing it. One of the things that's critical with inactivated vaccines is that they're actually inactivated, but it turns out that that was not the case for one of these companies. So Cutter Pharmaceuticals was one of the

pharmaceutical companies that was producing the sulk vaccine. But the issue is that they didn't inactivate the vaccine properly. So there was live vaccine in their vaccine that they were giving out to children. And the children ended up with polio. There was about 220,000 people who were found to have gotten polio as a result of this cutter pharmaceutical vaccine, polio vaccine, about 100,000. 120,000 of them got it from the vaccine itself, which had inactivated, a non-inactivated virus. And then there was about 100,000 other children who caught it from people who had gotten

that vaccine. And there was almost 200 people who were severely paralyzed by it and 10 that died because of this vaccine. And briefly, before we get to the other thing, this reminds me of a recent example that I was telling Brett about before we hit record. just last year in China, there was a pharmaceutical company that was doing research on Brucella, which is a bacteria that spread from animals to people and back. It's not super deadly, but in some cases, the symptoms can become chronic, where it lasts several months to several years. And needless to say, that's kind of a bummer as a person.

But what happened is this pharmaceutical company in China was trying to do research on a vaccine and so they were using the bacteria in there. When they were done using the bacteria, what they would do is they would sterilize it and then pump the air out of their facility. But it turns out that their sterilization techniques were not up to par, and they ended up just pumping out the bacteria

into the city that they were in. And it just came out this week, or within the last week or so, of the time of recording, that they just got back the full results. They tested all of the people in the town to see whether they had contracted, Brousela or not, which again would have been linked to them pumping the bacteria out of the pharmaceutical company into the city.

There was over 6,000 people that tested positive for Brouselah because of this improper activation in a pharmaceutical company. So that's really quick, Henry, you say inactivation. For those who don't understand, can you quickly, like what does it mean to inactivate a virus? Yeah, okay, good, good question. So I'll keep this very brief because I talk about this on my Patreon. to and people can also check that out or any of my other media appearances or whatever. But basically, the two original types of vaccine that we had were inactivated and live attenuated. I mentioned this in regards to the polio vaccine. Inactivated, basically they kill the

virus, completely dead, but not completely destroyed. So you want to keep the virus, the proteins intact so that the body can recognize the proteins, but you want the virus to be dead so you're not getting infected. That's inactivated. Live attenuated, on the other hand, they basically grow the virus in conditions that it doesn't like to grow in, so that it gets really, really damaged and weak, but not completely dead. So you can think about this as growing it in media that it doesn't like with very little nutrients, just enough to keep the virus alive, but the virus is really, really unhappy. This is an oversimplification, but for our purposes, it's fine.

So that's when we say attenuated, that's what it means. It's unhappy virus, not dead, but it doesn't really cause disease because it's so unhappy and kind of crippled. Think of it as a crippled virus. Whereas inactivated is dead, but still intact. And I think that helps because a lot of people have this sort of false idea that vaccines that, you know, give you a little bit of the virus, you know, but not a lot. And I think that's a way too simplified understanding of it.

So I think that that thing that you just laid out really helps us understand what exactly we're talking about when we talk like that. Sure. And just very briefly, the Pfizer vaccine that we're talking about is completely. different than both of those. This is an mRNA-based vaccine, synthetic mRNA. So what they're doing here is they're constructing the MRI

which, okay, in the body you have DNA and then you have MRI and then mRNA makes protein. It tells the body to make protein. It codes for proteins, right? COVID itself is an RNA virus. It doesn't have

DNA, so it just goes right from RNA into protein. What they did in the lab is they made mRNA, which is just a type of RNA, that codes for different proteins of COVID. They're injecting the MRI into the body, that mRNA is going into our cells, and then our cells are producing proteins associated with COVID, so that our body recognizes the proteins, but we never actually put anything that was ever a virus into our body. It's just the synthetically produced sequence that makes our body produce some proteins

associated with the virus that our body recognizes it. But we never get any virus in it with the Pfizer vaccine specifically. There are other vaccine candidates out there right now that are using viral vectors. But that's a different story for a different show. Adnan, have anything that you want to add? Well, I wanted to ask you actually about the dang Vaxia scandal. This is a pretty interesting one because in the Philippines, they developed in collaboration with, I think it was a French pharmaceutical company, a vaccine for the Deng fever, which is a big problem in the Philippines, but they made all kinds of mistakes in how they developed it or administered it such that it caused a lot of problems. and one of the scientists at any rate, I think of several of the scientists who actually worked on it were charged with criminal negligence.

And so that seems like a very uncommon. You know, you don't hear a lot about scientists being charged because they, you know, made mistakes in the science. And I'm wondering if you thought that there was something a little bit more nefarious, maybe you could tell us about the case and about the culpability. of the scientists from your view? Yeah, that's a great question. And I'm going to lead in with another quick example to explain why one of the reasons why we rarely see scientists charged.

So in 1976, we had a swine flu outbreak that was going around, and they really wanted to rush the vaccine to production because basically what happens is the flu vaccine is a combination of a couple of different flus that they predict are going to be the major strains that year. And they make this cocktail with, the things that they're predicting, but it doesn't always hit. That's why some years our flu vaccine is

really effective. That's if they predicted the right strains. And some years, it's not very effective. That's where if they predicted the wrong strains. In 76, there was a strain that was going around that was pretty nasty that they hadn't predicted. So they wanted to really rush to production a vaccine that wasn't originally planned. And one of the things that the manufacturers of the vaccine demanded of the government was that they have basically immunity from any negative consequences of the vaccine. They said, hey, you're making us rush through this. So if anything bad happens to people because of this vaccine, we don't have any responsibility for that. And the government signed off on that. And there was a linkage to Guillain-Barre syndrome that came up

afterwards. It was rare, but it did happen and it was linked to the vaccine. But none of those people were ever held liable for that because they had made a prearranged agreement with the government to get out of any liability, which in that case did make sense because they really were put under the gun in that case. In Dengvaxia, on the other hand, as you mentioned, Dengue fever is a problem in a lot of these tropical areas. It's a mosquito-borne virus. Usually what happens, if somebody gets Dengue fever once, they're pretty miserable for a while, but they don't usually die. The death rate of Dengue fever is quite low. But what happens, and I'm going to avoid most of the science because this is a history show after all,

there's different strains of dengue fever. If you get infected with one strain, it doesn't make you immune to the other strains. In fact, what happens is if you get infected by one strain, you produce antibodies against it. But those antibodies will slightly recognize other strains, but not enough to actually bind them efficiently in order to turn off or kill the other strains. and those antibodies actually help the virus get into your cells and make the disease much worse. We call it antibody dependent enhancement. I've talked about it on my Patreon before.

Check that out if you want more of the science. But basically what happens is if you get it once, you're miserable, but you don't die. The second time you get it, if it's a different strain, your likelihood of dying is much higher because the disease is much worse because your antibodies are actually helping the virus get into your cells rather than actually killing the virus. Now, what happened with this vaccine is they made a vaccine that didn't use a lot of the structural proteins. I'm going to skip all the science.

I talked about this story on my Patreon as well. If you want the science, you can go there. But long story short, what happened is it basically simulated a first infection with dengue fever. Or it simulated an infection, not necessarily a first one. it just simulated a regular old infection. So if somebody had been infected once before and they got this vaccine, then they were likely to be immune for life

because they had already been basically infected twice, but the second infection was a vaccine that didn't make them sick. However, if they had never been infected before and they got this vaccine, it was basically as if they had been infected before. So then if they got infected later by a different strain, it was like the second time of being infected and was much more severe. So what they found is that this vaccine, and this vaccine went through all of the regulatory trials

and passed all of the safety tests that they had on it and efficacy tests. But when they put it out in the Philippines, this is in 2017, it's really recent. When they put it out into the populace, what they found is the vaccine did cut the rates of people getting the virus. There was a lot less people that got the vaccine that were getting dengue fever. But the people that still got dengue fever after having,

the vaccine were much more likely to die than people who had not gotten the vaccine, somewhere between 10 and 100 times more likely to die than if they had not gotten the vaccine. So they had to pull that vaccine from distribution because they hadn't planned. And it was, looking at it now, I mean, of course, hindsight's 2020, but looking at the vaccine strategy now, it was a terrible plan because knowing how vaccine works, knowing how antibody dependent enhancement works, we knew that this would be a possibility, but they did it anyway. And so they saw this reduction in cases, but an increase of a proportion of the number of people dying. And that's something that I think is always going to be a worry. And this is kind of how it ties back in with the current vaccine is

when you're doing safety trials, but you're kind of rushing through it, even if it looks really safe now, there might be unforeseen things that your safety trials didn't find. So this one, it passed all the safety trials just fine. They put it out in the general populace and they find that people that were infected, even though they were less likely to be infected, were much more likely to die than if they hadn't gotten the vaccine at all. Now, of course, the strategy for the COVID vaccine that we're talking about with Pfizer is completely different. But the idea is there in that you want safety information that's applicable to the widest amount of people within the population. That way you can say, hey, that safety data is applicable to people rather than what we had in the

Philippines in 2017 it looking good before they used it and then it not looking so good afterwards well is that partly Henry that they wanted maybe because this was a private pharmaceutical company that was involved that they wanted to administer it as widely as possible rather than doing the background public health work to determine who had already received had already been infected in the past, in which case administering it to them would be safe, but it might be a much more limited group of people for whom it was effective and safe, and they wanted to administer it widely to all these kids and have a lot of administration and sell to the government a lot of, you know, vaccines, vaccinations.

And, you know, it would have been much more tailored and very limited a market. That's why I was kind of concerned at the actual. outset with problems that may emerge that aren't a problem of the science necessarily and of the vaccine's effectiveness for doing what it's intended to do if the intention is to serve public health rather than make somebody money and the problem is is really when you introduce a corporate capitalist system pharmaceuticals companies are incentivized even through public health services to you know, want to implement in a way that will maximize the sale of their product and produce greater profit rather than, you know, have a smaller market that might be safer.

There's no incentive for that. Yeah. So, of course, this is going to be speculation on our part. But that is always possible. Whenever there's a profit motive involved, there's always going to be the potential for people that are going to be acting in the profit motive rather than in the capital. case of public health. Whether or not that was the case with this, it's impossible to say, unless we see, you know, memos come out that say, hey, make sure that even if the kids haven't

been infected before to give them the vaccine, because that means that we'll have more people that we can vaccinate. But sure, anytime that we have a profit motive, the potential for using that profit motive as a means to getting the research out is certainly there. And I just want to mention one other quick thing that I forgot to mention, but it's kind of the important point of this dangvaxia story. So the point of our show is to talk about how events will shape history and how events shape society. One of the things that happened after this dangvaxia fiasco in the Philippines is the people in the Philippines got really concerned. So this is basically the idea that we had in Pakistan with the fake vaccination problem is that the people in the Philippines got

concerned because they saw that this vaccine was causing kids who yeah most of them didn't get sick but if they did happen to get sick they were much more likely to die uh they got concerned and so they stopped taking the mmr vaccine which is measles mumps and rubella that's a super safe vaccine and super effective and very very important the mmr vaccine is one of the most important vaccines that we have but because of the dangvaxia fiasco or scandal or whatever you want to to call it, people stopped taking the MMR vaccine, large amounts of them, so much so that there was several outbreaks of measles across the Philippines that took place within the couple of years after the Dengvaxia scandal because people were so afraid of these pharmaceutical companies

giving them something that's going to make them more likely to die rather than actually help them, that they just stopped taking things even that we knew were very safe. And it led to a public health crisis again, and this is going to disproportionately affect young people and poor people who the vaccine is very cheap and it's most effective for young kids that are going to be more susceptible for these diseases. And by the improper action of the pharmaceutical company and the regulatory process that just kind of failed in that case, we had hundreds or thousands of children dying from measles that otherwise wouldn't have died if it hadn't been for an unrelated vaccine. So it's kind of, this is the history.

here and the societal impacts, it's a very interesting thing to see children dying from measles because of a failed dengue fever vaccine. But alas, that's what we had. And this is why it makes these discussions often complicated because in the case of Pakistan and the Philippines, right, in these two cases we covered, there were legitimate reasons to be suspicious of these vaccines, right? Like cold, hard facts about the CIA and then the what the dengue vaccine scandal or mishap or whatever and those people had every right to then be suspicious although it had downstream effects that they became suspicious of vaccines that were completely safe and you know and that's his own problem but here in the u.s it's different right because i think if you talk to a lot of the everyday anti-vaxers here in

our society they're not going to know about or reference any of the things we've talked about so far oftentimes you'll see them referencing this one paper about, you know, the links between vaccines and autism, for example, which has no historical or scientific integrity at all. And so understanding these instances and where the history and the science and the profit motive came together to create bad results is important for us to know. But on the other hand, we have to be able to separate those instances from a lot of the conspiratorial thinking that's going on in the U.S. surrounding vaccines much more broadly and where the genesis of that skepticism is. On the same hand, though, we're looking at a Pfizer vaccine coming down the pike, which has been produced under a lot of the same pressures that in the past have given risen to errors.

And if this Pfizer vaccine comes out and for one reason or another does cause harm or isn't as safe as people thought, the impact on people's belief in and faith in, science and the public health sector, especially, we'll just plummet even more than it already is. So there's no easy answers here. We're definitely not pushing forward skepticism of vaccines. As Henry has said, there's these vaccines that are tried and true and been around forever, but it behooves us to understand these complications. So we don't make the opposite error, which is to pretend like everything is lollipops and rainbows and there's never been any, you know, mishap or scandal or fuck up on this front. Yeah, I think that it's,

important for the listeners to know. So we've been talking about vaccine scandals. We're all pro vaccine. We're not anti-vaxies on this show. We just want to provide a little bit of historical context here. But we are all pro-vaccines. So go get your vaccines. That's point number one. But I think, Brett, you raised a really good point, which is that when you have these small isolated cases of things that can raise suspicion or, you know, cast doubt on the efficacy or safety of vaccines that it causes long-lasting problems. So the paper that you referenced about the link between vaccines and autism, that's, I think, 25 years old now. That was a paper that was published in The Lancet by Andrew Wakefield, who's had his medical license revoked because

he literally, when I say literally, I mean this in the literal sense. He literally falsified data to show that there was a linkage between vaccines, and I think it was the MMR vaccine specifically, but between vaccines and autism, he literally made up data to publish in the paper and he was being paid by different special interest groups that basically would explain why he would do that. But that paper was 25 years old and it's still the basis for a lot of the anti-vaccine skepticism in the country. One other thing I want to bring up, and this circles back to the Cutter polio vaccine

that we talked about earlier. I think that, again, understanding history and understanding sociology will really help us understand why things unfold the way that they do. So again, the cutter vaccine took place in the 50s, I want to say 55, 54 or 55. At that time, people were dying left and right from what are now vaccine preventable illnesses that just don't exist anymore. Smallpox is still around. people were being paralyzed daily by polio, we had a lot of different illnesses that now we'd never even think about

because we don't deal with them anymore. And so even though there was this case where 200,000, 220,000 people ended up contracting polio, 10 people died, almost 200 were paralyzed because of polio because of this one vaccine mishap. We didn't see an uptick in vaccine skepticism at this time. People knew it was an unfortunate accident, but they understood that the alternative is getting polio in their community center

and then being paralyzed or dying anyway. They understood that, yeah, if they didn't take their smallpox vaccine, they might get smallpox. Smallpox kills 30% of the people that get it. We don't have diseases like that anymore, things that are very visible in society. We don't have people that are in wheelchairs because they had polio anymore. We don't have people that are permanently in the iron lung

in a assisted living facility because they've contracted polio when they were a child and it paralyzed their diaphragm so they couldn't breathe on their own. The things that we're preventing now are very acute and generally, you know, we don't see them in society very much anymore. Like even measles, we don't see huge outbreaks of measles in the U.S. where the entire town is, you know, going and being infected, basically. We'll have sporadic cases. So I think that understanding the sociology and the history of this can help explain that

because since 95, which is when I want to say when the Andrew Wakefield paper came out, it was right around then anyway. We don't really have too many diseases that leave those visible impacts, these severe impacts, like polio did, where people were in iron lungs and wheelchairs and et cetera, et cetera. We had a president who was in a wheelchair because he had polio. We don't have that anymore. We haven't had polio in the U.S. for decades. And since we don't have these kinds of things, it makes it easier.

to minimize the impact of vaccines on public health. And I think that that's one of the reasons why we're seeing a growing anti-vax movement because people can say, oh, yeah, you know, autism and all of that. Again, no scientific basis to that, but they don't see with their own eyes the benefits of vaccine. So I just want to underscore that, yes, we are very much pro-vax, but we also are pro-public safety. So I think that this is probably a good way to tie it up unless any,

either of you have something else that you want to say before we close. But this Pfizer vaccine, so this is how we opened the conversation, the Pfizer vaccine, they're searching an emergency use authorization. You only need two months of safety data from phase three trials in order to get an emergency use authorization. Two months. A lot of these problems that we saw, let's say dengue fever, we didn't see negative effects associated. with the safety of that vaccine until people were infected with dengue fever after having been vaccinated. You know, the cutter vaccine, we saw negative effects right away, but the Dengvaxia vaccine didn't see the effects right away. The Guillain-Buray syndrome that was linked with the 76

swine flu vaccine. We didn't see that until we did long-term analysis afterwards and found that there was a linkage between there. We're not going to find that in two months. So I want to emphasize the vaccine strategy that Pfizer is using is a very safe strategy, this MRNA vaccine strategy. It's a very safe strategy, but that doesn't mean that there couldn't be some safety concern. So when the vaccine is approved and it's looking increasingly likely that it will be, let's make sure to pay attention to the safety profile of the vaccine, not only during its trials, but also in the days after the trials, to ensure that we're not going to have another incident like we had in the past It's only going to give fuel to the anti-vaxxer fire and allow for this backlash against all vaccines that keep us safe and keep our children and friends and family safe.

So I think that that pretty much wraps it up unless anybody has a final word that they want to say. So that will be our intelligence brief for the day. Again, this one will be released on our public feed in a couple weeks. Patreon, you're going to get access to it right away. and we are going to have another intelligence brief come out soon that will be Patreon only. We already have one up where Adnan and I talked about the history and historical implications of the plague. We're not going to keep doing public health intelligence briefings. The reason that we did this one is just because of the news, but we will have other topics that we cover during these intelligence briefings.

So those on our public feed if you're hearing this and you want to have instant access to these and then access to the Patreon-only exclusives, join us on patreon.com forward-slash guerrilla history and follow us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Score pod. Guys, how can the listeners follow you? You can find me at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. And you can find me at Adnan A. Hussein on Twitter.

And I'm at Huck-1995 on Twitter and patreon.com forward slash Huck-1990. Take care everyone. Stay safe. These are trying times that we're all going through. But I think that we just need to pull together as a society and really get through this together. So solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.