We’ve Unlocked the Article, “Weber Shandwick Provides PR for Moderna and Pfizer, While Staffing the CDC’s Vaccine Office”

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Dear Readers,

After consulting with my editor, and in response to numerous requests from reporters in different countries, we’ve decided to unlock last Tuesday’s article. We feel this is in the public interest and important for public health.

This might lose us some paid subscribers, but the article is now free.

Weber Shandwick Provides PR for Moderna and Pfizer, While Staffing the CDC’s Vaccine Office

A potential $50 million contract allows PR firm to be “embedded at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta as part of the Division of Viral Diseases team.”

I’m still not certain what happened to Americans, who seem to have tossed aside all caution and critical thinking when it comes to medical interventions that get labeled “vaccines.” I can only remark that, to myself and many living in Europe, it comes across as rather disturbing at times—almost cultish.

If interested in further reading about the major conflicts of interest and lack of transparency surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines, I won a British Journalism Award for a series of investigations published by The BMJ:

• Conflicts of interest among the UK government’s covid-19 advisers Little is known about the interests of the doctors, scientists, and academics on whose advice the UK government relies to manage the pandemic. Attempts to discover more are frequently thwarted, finds Paul D Thacker

• How independent were the US and British vaccine advisory committees? Investigation finds disclosure standards differ widely, often leaving the public in the dark

• Tracking down John Bell: how the case of the Oxford professor exposes a transparency crisis in government As testing and the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine are hailed as UK pandemic successes, why won’t Oxford University or the government disclose the “long list” of financial interests of a high profile researcher at the centre of both? Paul D Thacker investigates

Oxford’s John Bell is certainly an interesting figure, as he has his fingers in so many pies. Yet Oxford and the British government continue to hide his financial interests and corporate ties. Bell is also a board member of Hakluyt, a British spy firm, with a long shady past. As I wrote a couple weeks back, the Brunswick Group PR firm provides public relations for both Hakluty and British Petroleum (BP), the fossil fuel company which employed Hakluty in the early 2000s to spy on Greenpeace activists.

Finally, you might want to read an investigation I wrote for The BMJ on poor practices inside a contract research company that was putting together the clinical trial for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. That article was a finalist for another journalism prize and now has the second highest Altmetric score ever, was rereported in multiple countries across the globe, and was featured in an investigative documentary by UK’s Channel 4 Dispatches.

This investigation really gives you a sense of how sloppy the companies and the FDA have handled these vaccines.

• Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight. Paul D Thacker reports

At the bottom of the article, I had to disclose that I had taken the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. This wasn’t my choice; it was just that this was the vaccine that Spain bought, so it’s the one I took.

Despite myself, editors, and BMJ lawyers spending weeks digging through dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails, that were provided by a whistleblower—then sending the investigation out for peer review by experts in clinical trial research—several prominent physicians and public health “experts” in America began tweeting that I was “anti-vaxx” for daring to author such an investigation into Pfizer.

Even though I was vaccinated with Pfizer’s vaccine … wut?

Seriously, what in the world has happened to people’s brains? If you have any thoughts, please leave them below in the comments.