#1 “Vaccine Makers Are Immune from Liability”
The first point on Elliot’s list falls into the years’ old anti-vaccine trope category.
It is true that vaccine manufacturers are shielded from liability. Without this liability protection, vaccine manufacturers were unwilling to supply the government with vaccines. As part of a 1986
compromise, the United States created legal protections for vaccine manufacturers while also establishing the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a federal claims court that settles cases of alleged vaccine injury. As
explained in Science, “The VICP was established after lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers and healthcare providers threatened to cause vaccine shortages and reduce vaccination rates.”
While invoking this liability protection is a common anti-vaccine tactic, it is not a specific or novel argument unique to COVID-19 vaccines. All vaccines including the ones that have been required by schools for decades fall into this category.
#2 “The Checkered Past of the Vaccine Companies”
Pharmaceutical companies, including
some involved in COVID-19 vaccine production, have indeed been fined billions of dollars in damages or criminal fines. Elliot asks “Given the free pass from liability, and the checkered past of these companies, why would we assume that all their vaccines are safe and made completely above board?”
Elliot’s framing falsely suggests that the only check on vaccine safety derives from the word of the manufacturer. But all vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccines, have all passed through phase I, phase II, and phase III trials, and these data are analyzed by both academics and government health officials. The process is not a rubber stamp of approval. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
found problems in the way AstraZeneca presented its data to regulators, for example, and the agency has yet to approve the vaccine for use in the United States.
Elliot states that neither Moderna nor Johnson & Johnson had ever brought a vaccine to market before COVID-19. While true, neither company is inexperienced in vaccine development. Johnson & Johnson
received long-awaited approval from the European Commission for a vaccine against Ebola in July 2020. Moderna has been at the forefront of developing the mRNA technology used in both its vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine. Moderna and the U.S. government had already entered into a licensing agreement for this technology
before the global COVID-19 pandemic was declared.
Although off topic, Elliot asserts in this section of the post that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine “contains tissues from aborted fetal cells.” This is false. As Snopes
explained in March 2021, embryonic stem cells are used in the production of the vaccine, the shot itself contains no material derived from fetal cells.
#3 “The Ugly History of Attempts to Make Coronavirus Vaccines”
The first attempted scientific assertion about COVID-19 vaccines presented by Elliot at this point is where things really get off the rails. The purported “ugly history” of coronavirus vaccine research stems largely from a factually deficient telling of events pushed by anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny. Snopes debunked her claims
in detail in March 2021.
About four months ago, Tenpenny began making the claim that COVID-19 vaccines would begin to wreak “havoc on the lungs” in “four to 14 months.” Her argument relied on the studies of SARS and MERS vaccines later cited in Elliot’s post. The rhetorical trick employed by Tenpenny, who
charges hundreds of dollars for her “Mastering Vaccine Info Boot Camp” class, is to highlight older studies describing scientific challenges identified over the past decade of coronavirus vaccine development and ignore the studies that show how they overcome these challenges.
These challenges concerned two types of negative outcomes observed in some trials of previous SARS and MERS vaccine candidates that researchers feared could also happen in COVID-19 vaccines. The first was the possibility that the vaccine could actually
increase the susceptibility of cells to be infected through a process known as vaccine induced enhancement, or antibody-dependent enhancement. The second was that exposure to COVID-19 following vaccination could send your immune system into overdrive and destroy the lungs — an injury termed
immunopathology.
Subsequent study on coronavirus vaccine research — ignored by both Tenpenny and Elliot — led scientists to
understand that this suite of reactions, broadly speaking, would occur in vaccines that
failed to do two things: first, generate high levels of neutralizing antibodies (in the case of vaccine-enhanced disease) and, second, produce an immune response dominated by what are called Th-1 cells as opposed to Th-2 cells (in the case of immunopathology). For this reason, researchers knew at the very start of the pandemic
to focus their efforts on technology that produced neutralizing antibodies and avoided the production of Th-2 cells. The mRNA vaccine technology provides the ability to generate such a response.
An
October 2020 report in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that “The mRNA-1273 vaccine [i.e Moderna] induced [Th1] biased … responses and low or undetectable Th2 … responses.” As
reported in Nature, data from the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine indicate a “TH1-biased response.” These, along with the 192,282,781
doses administered in the United States alone, are quite literally the data necessary “to suggest they overcame that pesky problem of Vaccine Enhanced Disease.”