I'm Charles Covess, I'm your moderator.
I am wearing my red jacket because I am Australasia's passion provocateur.
Red is the colour of passion.
Sam, I love you in your lovely red top, looks very impressive.
So I'm about passion people here on this call.
Passionate, this is medical doctors for COVID ethics.
There are lots of professionals here for those of you who don't know, welcome particularly
if this is your first time.
There are doctors, retired doctors, lawyers, philosophers.
Leo from Borneo will call him a gosh naturalist and explorer of animals.
He's an expert on primates.
Leo, you are our only primates expert.
We've got journalists, philosophers, troublemakers and people from lots of countries around the world.
So welcome.
We are here in a true spirit of exploration and discovery.
And most of us understand that we're in World War Three, although Jerry Brady would say
that we're in the ongoing continuation of World War Two.
This is not just a medical science conversation.
Charles, we've got Craig Bartekuper from Central Africa as well.
Well, no, he's from the UK, I think, but he's in Central Africa.
Central Africa, we've got sometimes Finland, Norway, Czech Republic.
So we go for two and a half hours quite strictly and Russia.
And we have a telegram.
Stephen?
Russia.
Yes, Russia and any other.
Put your word, if any country you haven't mentioned, please put in the chat, because
I love the fact that we are a global group.
The number of people who come here is anything from 40 to 140.
It depends on people's timetables, but they know that they can get a recording.
A lot of people ask for recordings afterwards.
We do record.
We do record this because it's a valuable learning experience.
We don't have censorship.
This is a free speech environment, because, as you all know, the beginning of the end
of freedom is the end of free speech.
But we have proper moderation.
And that means that because we're in a tight time frame of two and a half hours,
where I make sure that you're efficient with your questions and your comments.
It is not censorship when I say we're moving on to the next speaker.
That's proper moderation.
And if we try to apply the rules of parliament, you can say something once,
but it's not an ongoing debate, generally speaking.
That's what that's what we try to do.
Now, the other big thing in science is please become aware of your beliefs,
because some heated debates happen, which is fantastic, because I'm all about passion.
But your beliefs are not necessarily true for each one of us.
And we hold on to beliefs.
And it's holding on to these beliefs that causes the conflict.
Now, we're here in science.
We are here to discover.
There are so many challenges that we've got to overcome.
That's why we're here.
And an important principle, we come from love, not fear.
We are here because we're putting our lives on the line by not accepting the narrative.
Stephen has done that.
I certainly do it.
And fear is a shitty way to live.
That's my principle.
Fear is a shitty way to live.
And Dr. Lee Vleet on her Truth for Health Foundation is running a wonderful weekly
programme on resilience.
And it's all about let go of fear.
And this twice a week is your opportunity to not be driven by fear and have an open mind.
And they're the ground rules for this group.
We are medical doctors for Covid ethics.
So hopefully we behave ethically.
So Meryl Nass, now I'm not going to introduce you, Meryl, because we always let our presenters
introduce themselves and tell us what you would like.
We're delighted to have you here.
And thank you for addressing us.
And over to you.
Hi, some people know me.
I am an internal medicine doctor and I was the sort of lead doctor in the fight against
anthrax vaccine mandates, which began about 25 years ago and has been ongoing to an
extent ever since.
Now, so I was very aware of what was going on in the bio defence vaccine field.
And in the late 1990s, when President Clinton was our president, it was claimed that he
read a book that scared him about biological warfare and decided to create programmes that
would defend Americans against biological warfare threats.
And he started buying up, you know, I think these were boondoggles and that the area of
bioterrorism was basically a new frontier.
America is all about new frontiers, like Australia.
And so if you can claim that something is a bioterrorism threat, there is no limit on
what you need to defend against it.
That could be vaccines, drugs, it could be for one person or it could be for three hundred
and thirty four million Americans.
And so you can spend an awful lot of money on preparing for bioterrorism.
So this started during the Clinton regime and then it and and in fact, the military
had a plan to develop up to seventy five vaccines for biological warfare threats.
When Bush, the second, took over in 2001, he continued this, particularly after 9-11
and the anthrax letters.
So the anthrax letters were sort of a watershed moment.
And Congress then allocated about seven billion dollars a year for preparing for for pandemics
and bioterrorism.
And we've been living with the results ever since.
So the first slide I got is a bill that was passed by Congress in 2003.
It's the Bioshield Act.
And so this was a way to provide emergency use authorized or, in other words, unlicensed,
not particularly well looked at, not not well evaluated, very little regulatory action on
But you could still use them in an emergency because of this law.
And so that this was the start.
And next slide.
There were three authorities, as I said, relaxing regulatory requirements, guaranteed, you know,
a guaranteed market.
That's very important for the pharmaceutical industry.
They have that for children's vaccines as well, and they had it for COVID.
And then permitting the use of unapproved countermeasures using a very low bar for approval.
Next slide.
So I'm telling you this to give you a flavor, give you the background of how our Congress
and our president look at pandemics and biological threats.
They look at them as an opportunity to spend money while guaranteeing their constituents
that they're protecting them, but actually, you know, getting contracts to their friends
and potentially we don't, I can't prove this, you know, funneling money back into campaign
coffers, because there's a lot of money involved in these products.
So what did we know about monkeypox before 2022?
The first case ever identified in any kind of animal was only 1958, which is rather remarkable.
First human case, 1970.
There was very little outside of Africa.
In the United States, the first human cases occurred in 2003 as a result of a variety
of rodents, different kinds of rodents that had been transferred from Ghana to become
pets and they were housed close to other animals in an American warehouse for pets.
And some of the prairie dogs and other animals then developed this same virus.
And I'm just going to assume it's a virus for now because I'm not getting into the discussion
of whether viruses exist.
But they caught something which we're calling monkeypox.
So people in the pet business and also people who purchased these infected animals developed
monkeypox.
There were 47 cases.
Every single case had a connection to an infected animal.
So while it's possible there was secondary spread from human to human, none could be
absolutely identified.
And in Africa it was also thought that it rarely, there was rare secondary spread from
person to person.
In the West, up until 10 days ago, there were no deaths reported at all associated with
monkeypox.
And I'm saying associated with rather than due to deliberately.
So as of today, there have been five deaths associated with monkeypox in the West that
were reported and four reported in Nigeria during this year.
Of the five deaths in the West, two, the one from Peru that was only reported yesterday,
apparently they're saying this person died from an underlying condition.
The one in Brazil was a 41 year old with lymphoma, which is cancer.
Presumably that person also died of their underlying condition, primarily.
The other three in the West and the four in Nigeria, we don't know anything about underlying
conditions or what they died or who they were, what they died from.
Curiously, so there had been a clade identified in West Africa, primarily in Nigeria and Central
Republic and the country between them.
And another clade in what was Zaire and is now Democratic Republic of the Congo.
And it was said, but there really wasn't much data to back up any of this, that the Congo
monkeypox caused 10% mortality and the Nigerian monkeypox caused 1% mortality.
But you have to realize that in Africa it was really impossible to distinguish monkeypox.
They did not have PCRs from other things, particularly chickenpox, but potentially other
illnesses.
So those data are not really reliable about mortality rates.
Most of the deaths reported in Africa were in children and usually when children die
it's because of dehydration or other secondary consequences when they don't have access to
fluids or modern medical care.
According to the New England Journal, in Africa monkeypox was mostly due to hunting, skinning,
preparing infected animals.
Just the way we get Lyme disease here, if you shoot a deer or a moose and prepare the
carcass you're lucky to get a case of Lyme disease as a result.
And of course we don't call Americans who go deer hunting bushmeat eaters, but that
is the way we like to define Africans.
Next slide.
So in four and a half years, all the slides that are dark blue that look kind of like
this are CDC slides which I've adapted mostly from a talk that was given to the advisory
committee on immunization practices at the end of June.
So CDC said in terms of cases in the west of monkeypox, in four and a half years there
were only nine cases identified.
There was apparently secondary spread.
So three cases, one health care worker and two family members did develop monkeypox from
an initial case.
The initial cases all were thought to have a connection to Africa or to an infected animal.
The two cases in the US were people who had just flown in from Nigeria.
When the CDC says no flight contacts because most of these people had just traveled back
home to their country from Africa and nobody on the flights got monkeypox as far as we
know.
Next slide.
So there have been three, in the United States and probably in most of the world, there have
been only three available vaccines for smallpox.
We used the New York Department of Health strain which brand name was Dryvax for many
years that's probably what I received.
It was made by scraping the virus onto the belly of calves and then collecting the pus
and developing the vaccine from that pus.
There were multiple viral strains.
It was considered a very dirty vaccine and it was considered the most reactogenic both
local and systemic reactions.
It was claimed to kill one in a million babies that got it but that number could well have
been higher and caused a lot of reactions in adults.
So the vast majority of people who got this vaccine felt ill afterwards.
And currently the CDC actually admits on its website that one in 100 people who received
this vaccine developed myocarditis or pericarditis.
So the United States had a large stockpile of this frozen and they decided to throw it
away again at the end of the Clinton, beginning of the Bush administrations and get something
more safe and potentially better in other ways.
So the first contract went to a startup company, a canvas, and they just basically plucked
one strain out of this multi strain mess of the New York Department of Health's vaccine
and they grew it and they could make cheap vaccine.
It cost about $3 a dose and they made a huge stockpile for the United States of about 300
million doses.
However, it wasn't acknowledged at the time.
So in 2003, the United States decided to make war on Iraq for the second time.
And in the run up to that war, there was a lot of posturing by the United States about
the threat of biological warfare from Iraq, particularly smallpox and anthrax.
Now I don't know what strain of smallpox Iraq may have had or strains, but I can tell you
that one anthrax strain they had was actually sold to them by the United States by the American
type culture collection, which at the time was located in Manassas, Virginia.
They had to get permission from the, what's it called, from one of the federal agencies,
the Department of Commerce.
And this was an anthrax strain that the United States had weaponized for use in World War
II.
So we actually had a company in Indiana, Terrahot, making cattle cakes made of this strain of
anthrax for potential use on Germany during World War II.
That's the strain we sold to Iraq.
So we knew they had something that was a killer strain for anthrax.
And again, I don't know what they had for smallpox, but the United States government
decided, and it's not clear how this was decided, they decided they would vaccinate at least
10 million Americans against smallpox in 2003.
So if you can remember, smallpox was eradicated from the planet around 1977.
It was reported at that time by the WHO there was no more smallpox.
Ring vaccinations had succeeded and many countries had already ceased vaccinating their children
for smallpox because there were so little of it, only a few cases popping up in the
world for that last 10 years.
But the United, and it was such a dangerous vaccine, why would you want to use it?
However, the US government decided they were going to start vaccinating people and they
had some of this ACAM2000 and so they began vaccinating people.
And immediately people started getting ill and there were a bunch of heart attacks, episodes
of myocarditis, heart failure and other problems.
And there was no program to, because this was at the time, I think it was still unlicensed,
but it did get a license around that time.
There was no federal program for paying people who were injured by the vaccine.
So they only got about 30,000 doctors, nurses and first responders to accept the vaccine
because word got out quickly of all the problems and the program died in 2003, 2004.
Now, this entity, BARDA, had been set up to distribute money from Project Bioshield and
other money that was allocated by Congress.
So they settled on a newer vaccine, which now is called JYNNEOS, then it was called
Modified Vaccinia Anchora, based on a non or poorly replicating virus, the vaccinia virus.
Now, I haven't figured out how you can make a live virus that doesn't replicate, but
apparently you can or it doesn't replicate very much.
And this was felt to be in terms of acute local and systemic reactions, it was a lot
less reactogenic than the ACAM2000 or the dry-vax New York strain.
And so BARDA and later other federal agencies started putting lots of money into this vaccine
after the Akanbus had already made their billion on the ACAM2000 vaccine.
But it turned out there were a lot of problems with this one too, which I would say the federal
government has been loath to acknowledge because they've spent so much damn money on
these things and they don't care, they want to get these into arms.
So right now the US has a supply of both these two, the ACAM2000, lots of vaccine, and the
JYNNEOS, and we'll talk about how much they have later.
Next slide.
Coming.
Thank you.
All right, change the subject.
The current monkeypox has apparently too many mutations compared to what you would expect
for a double-stranded DNA virus because the current strain in the West is fairly close
to a strain that was isolated in 2008 in Israel, Singapore, and the UK, I think the UK in 2009.
So it's thought that this current strain is derived in some way from that one, but it's
too different to, some people say, to have changed naturally, but others say that no,
it underwent accelerated adaptation to humans and they have come up with some arguments
which I don't, I'm not a virologist, I can't comment on those arguments, but what I can
comment on is the fact that two of the people who are pushing the natural origin of the
current monkeypox are known for having pushed the natural origin of COVID or SARS-CoV-2.
Andrew Rambeau, who signed the original article that Tony Fauci had encouraged to be written
in early February of 2020 to say that it didn't make sense, it couldn't have been a lab origin
for COVID, and Michael Waraby, who has written subsequently about the natural origin of COVID
most recently in Science Magazine.
And both these two guys, by the way, also had challenged Ed Hooper, who wrote the book
The River, about the origin of AIDS being likely from a polio vaccine made on monkey
kidneys.
They challenged that origin story as well a couple of decades ago.
So I think they are professional naysayers who the system uses.
Next slide.
I don't know if John Lukasz is talking about my obfuscating, but I hope not.
This is simply a very curious thing that, as you know, before the COVID pandemic, there
was a tabletop exercise to plan how to deal with a coronavirus outbreak.
And before this monkeypox outbreak last year, there was also a tabletop exercise.
And it wasn't just some little thing.
This was really a big deal.
Ernest Moniz is the head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, former Secretary of Energy, former
MIT professor.
Sam Nunn, George Gao, who is the head of the Chinese CDC, and Michael Ryan, who's one of
the top people at the WHO for handling emergencies.
Next slide.
Am I missing?
Next slide.
Here's a list of some of the other people.
Chris Elias, who is again the president of the global group at Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation.
Margaret Hamburg, former FDA commissioner.
She has been at a lot of these tabletop exercises for pandemics.
So keep your eye on her.
Jeremy Farrar, who collaborated with Fauci to hide the natural or the lab origin of COVID.
He was one of the participants.
The people from National Security Council, CHEPI, UN, WHO, African CDC, and two pharmaceutical
companies.
Can we go back one slide, please?
So this just gives you the website for the report that was written about this event.
Of course, it was fictional.
And they thought that there was a high mortality rate.
Let's go forward a couple of slides.
To be very quick, the recommendations in the report on this tabletop exercise regarding
monkeypox are exactly what you would expect, which is, of course, get the international
organizations involved and have them manage the pandemics for us.
Next slide.
This is scary.
Early proactive pandemic response.
No regrets approach.
That means even if you have to do rather draconian things, just do them and don't worry about
the consequences.
At least that's how I read this.
I think it's very worrisome.
Next slide.
Yes, again, create an international entity, of course, through the WHO, ideally, or create
another one, which will tell us all what to do.
Next slide.
Always, always these organizations have an idea that you can create money for nothing
and chicks for free.
A catalytic global health security fund.
What does that mean?
It's going to just make its own money.
So you're going to pull in development banks, et cetera, and they're all going to give money
to finance this new international project.
Next slide.
Supply chain issues.
Yeah, that's going to be a big one.
Next slide.
So I'm changing subjects again.
I just want to show you that the European Center for Disease Prevention put out a fact
sheet two months ago on monkeypox in which they said, while the virus is not considered
basically a biological warfare agent, according to the US CDC, it is considered an agent with
high threat for deliberate release, according to the EU task force on bioterrorism.
So the Europeans are saying, the Americans are trying to say it couldn't be biological
warfare or terrorism, but we think it's possible.
Next slide.
Again, changing course.
Just want you to know, the CDC told its advisory committee a lot of things, most of which were
true in June.
Next slide.
Brett Peterson was the briefer on the next set of slides, and I want you to remember
his name.
Next slide.
All right.
It's a mild self-limiting disease.
Doesn't need any specific therapy.
And of course, the prognosis is going to depend on whether you have other preexisting conditions.
Next slide.
So well, I'll get into that later.
The issue is these vaccines were made for smallpox.
They weren't made for monkeypox, but there is no smallpox.
And so you can't test them in humans for smallpox.
And actually, it's very hard to test them in humans for monkeypox also, because there's
very little monkeypox.
But monkeypox was one of the viruses used in animals to test this JYNNEOS vaccine.
Now, there was a paper published about some of these 47 Americans who got monkeypox in
2003 in the New England Journal.
And they were able to say that in the 11 people studied in this paper, five of them were old
enough that they should have received a smallpox vaccination as children, and they still got
monkeypox.
They didn't go into any more detail.
Next slide.
Yeah, we saw this one.
Next slide.
So again, supportive care, not easily transmitted.
Next slide.
Prolonged close interaction.
So this post-exposure prophylaxis is of interest to people who are bioterrorism folk, because
they want to be able to come up with some remedy after you have already been exposed
to whatever agent is being used.
And so it has been believed that the old vaccines for smallpox could be used up to four days
after a smallpox exposure and prevent you from getting smallpox.
That's sort of the belief.
And it's probably true.
That doesn't mean it holds for these newer vaccines, and it doesn't mean it holds for
monkeypox.
But of course, the CDC is very interested in using the vaccines available for both what
they call post-exposure prophylaxis as well as pre-exposure prophylaxis.
And they're interested in giving information to health care workers who may have come in
contact with a patient, and do they need to be vaccinated?
What precautions do they need to take?
Next slide.
So they said the health care workers should be okay as long as they wear gloves.
There should not be a problem.
Now, CDC has been recommending since the start of this outbreak that you can give the JYNNEOS
vaccine between four and 14 days after the date of exposure, although you're better off
within four days.
They have no data that we know of to support this claim.
And given that the incubation period has been variously suggested as between the average
incubation period, eight to 12 days with a range of about three to 20 something, it suggests
to me that the CDC is trying to get vaccine into an awful lot of people.
So they're trying to get it quickly, probably many of whom too late when it won't do any
good, but then again, possibly it will do some good later if they get exposed again.
Next slide.
So JYNNEOS, you need two doses, whereas ACAM2000, you only need one.
You're believed to become immune six weeks after the first dose.
There is no evidence, there's no data that the CDC and the other health agencies have
provided the public with absolutely no data to show effectiveness of JYNNEOS in the current
outbreak.
And CDC added onto its recommendations just a couple of weeks ago, not even that long
ago, that they're finally telling people that they're basically part of an experiment and
they will be following them to try to find out whether the vaccine works.
Next slide.
There is a limited supply of JYNNEOS, although more is expected in the coming weeks and months.
This again is from the CDC.
This is scary because they're telling people basically that they're willing to break out
the ACAM2000 and they're willing to give it to people unless they have eczema, pregnancy
or possibly some other immune compromising conditions.
So we've got to be concerned about this willingness because of the one in 175 people risk of myocarditis
from ACAM2000.
Next slide.
When I say what did CDC leave out, they left out this.
CDC conducted a study, conducted an open label clinical trial of the JYNNEOS vaccine in Democratic
Republic of Congo.
They started it more than five years ago.
And Brett Peterson, the guy who was briefing the advisory committee, is the principal investigator
of this trial.
I don't believe he informed the advisory committee about it.
It's only by chance that I was able to discover this.
They were planning to enroll 1,600 participants.
Estimated completion date was this month, five and a half years since they started.
The idea was to give it to healthcare workers and see if they got monkeypox and see what
the side effects were.
CDC probably has a boatload of data on this vaccine in Africa, some of whom were exposed
to monkeypox.
And so far, it's a big secret.
And by September 2020, they were no longer recruiting for the trial.
So that's all I can tell you.
Two years ago, they had stopped recruiting.
So they must have collected all the data by now.
Next slide.
So as I said, BARDA gave out about a million and a half, a billion and a half dollars a
year for products for bioterrorism and pandemics.
And other federal agencies gave out more money.
This was the first start to finish vaccine that BARDA and Project BioShield were involved
with.
And that is perhaps the reason why they continued with it, even though it has some significant
problems.
And I'm not sure why, but the name keeps changing.
It's had three names since I have known it in the last 20 years.
It was called MVA.
Then it became InfImmune.
And suddenly when it got licensed by FDA two years ago, it was called GENIOS.
Next slide.
So you don't have to read all these things, but I pulled all this information from a series
of about 35 press releases that this company has put out over the last 13, 14 years, because
there's been a lot of questions about how much of the vaccine is available to Americans
as well as others in the world.
And there has been claimed to be a tremendous shortage of this vaccine.
And let's just look at what we bought.
And so by 2013, the company had completed delivery of 20 million doses that were frozen
liquid vaccine.
And over the next three years, it delivered 8 million more doses.
And then it continued to get contracts from the US government, mostly from BARDA, but
also others, to develop a freeze-dried version rather than a liquid vaccine that was alleged
to have a longer shelf life.
And they got lots of money for different things.
They got money to perform clinical trials and money to take the vaccine through FDA
licensure.
Next slide.
And money to build a fill and finish factory.
So apparently what they had for the first, say, 15 years of these contracts was only
a facility that can manufacture bulk liquid vaccine but could not bottle it.
And so they've been paid a lot of money to create a fill and finish, which is a bottling
facility as well.
And in 2017, they got a new nine-year contract for both the freeze-dried and the liquid vaccines
that could be, what do they say, contracts, it could involve as much as over a billion
dollars after the approximately billion that had already been spent on this vaccine earlier.
And two and a half, let me see, three and a half years ago, they got the last 44 million
to qualify their new bottling facility.
So I'm not sure how long it takes to qualify such a facility, but it wasn't qualified by
the FDA until less than two weeks ago.
And then again in April, two years ago, they got another new big order.
This may have been part of the former contract, but they were putting it out in a press release.
And again, the story was that they couldn't ship any vaccine to the United States because
the fill and finish facility had not been approved by the FDA.
Next slide.
This is the contract that they had from 2017.
And I have circled it.
We're halfway through at the top and at the bottom.
You can see that over 1.029 billion is the potential award amount of which 675 million
has already been obligated.
Next slide.
Okay.
The label mentions or omits information on some problems with the vaccine.
So I'll just mention some of the big ones that you can see right on the label.
Again, there's no studies of pregnancy, children, lactation, fertility, carcinogenicity.
2% of recipients had a serious adverse event during a trial.
They had about 7,000 recipients altogether in a series of trials.
According to the label, it looks like over 1% had a cardiac event of special interest.
These were downplayed in the label and in some FDA documents, but there was some degree
of troponin cardiac enzyme elevation in 10% of the subjects in one sub-study and in 18%
of the subjects in another sub-study.
So these were not very high, apparently.
According to the label, they weren't very high, but they did exist.
There were people with EKG changes.
There were people pulled out of the trial because of cardiac concerns.
And the other thing is that although I don't know what monkeypox virus the vaccine was
tested against in animals, but it's probably completely different than the monkeypox virus
that is currently circulating.
They filed their information with the FDA to get licensed in 2018.
And the current monkeypox strain is very different from the strains that existed then.
All right, next slide.
This is a small trial, but it was reported recently in the New England Journal right
after the vaccine was licensed.
They acknowledged this was in soldiers, so basically a captive population, yet 47% or
11% of them withdrew after apparently getting a dose of vaccine.
So there were two arms of this trial.
One got two doses of JYNNEOS, and after that, they got a third dose, which was the ACAM2000.
The other arm only got an ACAM2000 one dose.
I thought this trial was probably unethical because obviously humans don't need to get
in rapid succession two different smallpox vaccines, both of which are known to cause
cardiac problems and other problems.
But anyway, that's how the trial was carried out.
And I love the terminology.
This is kind of Ezekiel Emmanuel type language.
Now we're not going to call our people in our subjects in clinical trials, we're not
going to call them volunteers, we're not going to call them subjects.
We're going to call them participants.
And we're giving them the opportunity to participate in research as if this is something
they should be longing to do and enjoy.
So I just wanted to point that out because you'll probably be seeing more of it.
Next slide.
This is from CDC.
This is a slide they showed the advisory committee, and they acknowledged here
myopericarditis 5.7 per thousand in the ACAM2000, which is one in 175.
And for JYNNEOS, they acknowledged that the risk was believed to be lower.
Next slide.
This was just a description in a journal in 2010 of the ACAM2000 vaccine.
If somebody wanted to learn more about it, I'm giving you a reference.
And this is an acknowledgement that it causes a lot of adverse events, an unexpectedly high
rate of myocarditis and pericarditis.
And yet, this is what was used to replace dry vaccine.
And at this point in 2010, we had over 200 million doses of this vaccine in the U.S.
strategic stockpile for use in an emergency.
Next slide.
Okay. From Nature, two months ago, I thought this was...
I wanted to grab this because the CDC was claiming at that point that the
vaccines were...
The monkeypox vaccine, JYNNEOS, was going to be 85% effective against a monkeypox infection.
And I pointed out that then and subsequently that there's no published data to support that.
And so Nature pointed it out as well.
It's never been directly tested against that disease in people.
However, Nature didn't know, and at the time I didn't know, that CDC had been conducting
a trial for five years in Congo to find out whether the vaccine worked.
So I think we need to put their feet to their fire about that bit of hidden information.
Next slide.
Yeah, this is also from Nature acknowledging again, we don't know if it's going to work
post-exposure within four days.
We certainly don't know if it's going to work within 14 days post-exposure, which seems
ridiculous.
Next slide.
I'm going back to this issue of how much of this vaccine we actually have and where it might be,
because it's interesting since the government today announced we don't have enough, so they
are going to be splitting the doses of JYNNEOS.
Yeah, I guess I should have told you that.
The government is going to be reducing the dose to 20% of the licensed dose and is going to be
administering it as an intradermal dose like a vaccine.
I hope everybody got that.
You're only going to get 20% as much and it's going to be administered differently within
the layers of skin.
And the media claims this then will cause it to have an emergency use authorization.
Very important.
See, if they were giving it in the licensed way for the licensed indication, according
to the license, it would have liability, at least for now.
But by giving it an emergency use authorization, no liability for anyone, not for the government,
the manufacturer, the doctor who gives it to you, the facility in which it's given, etc.
So this was a press release from the company and I'm emphasizing the date of July 15.
They claimed they were delivering this year and next year 7 million doses to the United States.
And because of these problems with their fill and finish facility, which nobody's acknowledged
what those problems are or were, that they're getting a U.S. contract manufacturer to actually
take the bulk vaccine, which they have stored for us, which is something like 16 million doses,
and we'll fill it into vials.
And probably they can also fill it into vials diluted to make up what now the government
wants to get out to people.
Now note also that in June and July 500,000 and 2.5 million doses were ordered,
and then an order from BARDA had been ordered in 2020 for 1.4 million doses, blah, blah, blah.
So this is what we should be getting the 7 million doses this year and next year. Next slide.
So is it a real shortage? This is what the New York Times said.
So is it a real shortage? This is what the New York Times said on August 3rd.
It said, we failed to replenish them. We let the supply dwindle to almost nothing. Well,
actually we did have the 200 or 300 million ACAM2000 doses because nobody was expecting
monkeypox was going to be a problem, nor that anyone would need to be vaccinated for monkeypox
since it's a mild disease.
And the New York Times then admitted we own the equivalent of 16 million doses of bulk vaccine,
which is stored in Denmark. Okay. But the company had trouble delivering it. Now,
how do you have trouble delivering these doses that are stored in Denmark?
Can't you put them on a plane and deliver them? Next slide.
But of course, if you don't have them, then you can spend a lot of money and buy more, right?
So again, July 26th is 11 days after that press release.
Government officials estimate that $7 billion in new funding would allow the department to support
domestic end-to-end vaccine manufacturing capacity and technology transfer in the United States.
So all of a sudden we want to start making the whole thing here, even though we've got 16.5 million
doses there. And what a catastrophe that these hundreds of thousands of genius doses were
stranded overseas for weeks, awaiting U.S. inspection and transport. Give me a break.
Next slide.
With the $7 billion, officials estimate they could secure 19 million new doses
of monkeypox vaccine and buy all this other stuff. Next slide.
New York Times now acknowledging that the fill-in-finish plan is bottling so many doses per week.
And somehow the United States didn't bottle them because it had the ACAM2000 already,
and no FDA inspection was scheduled until after the monkeypox outbreak, and the FDA inspection
did not conclude until July 27th. Well, actually the first case of monkeypox was in the United
States, and the FDA inspection did not conclude until July 27th. Well, actually the first case
of monkeypox that anyone got reported was at the end of April. So May, June, July, August,
we're talking three and a half months. The FDA could have completed that inspection a long time
ago if in fact that is what was holding things up. Next slide.
Just in terms of the modified vaccinia anchora as a virus, you need to be aware of this because
it is being used as a platform for other experimental vaccines that aren't necessarily
against smallpox or monkeypox, but for other pathogens. So somehow it can express its genes,
replicate its genome, but doesn't assemble correctly. And it's been fully approved in Canada
for smallpox and monkeypox, in the U.S. for both, and in Europe for smallpox. Next slide.
Yeah. So again, I'm just writing the same thing here. Next slide.
Changing the story again. All right. So now monkeypox is going to be the excuse to start up
track and trace all over again. However, when I tried to look up track and trace online,
I found out the terminology isn't there anymore. And now it's test and trace.
This in yellow shows you that the disease is already spreading in the community without
being detected. Officials know that most many cases are not being reported and therefore
track and trace is only going to have, it's going to maybe slow things down,
but is not going to be able to stop an outbreak. But that of course doesn't stop the people who
like the idea and the benefit, the surveillance benefits it can provide.
So next slide is when I looked up track and trace, Google told me it was an error.
I didn't like track and trace and I went to a different browser and I got the same message.
And then I tried again later and it did give me track and trace the third time. And apparently
the terminology is still used in the U.K. But it's not being used by, I couldn't find that it was
being used by any federal agencies in the U.S. anymore. So I'm sorry to have gone that far down
in the weeds with you. I hope I've answered all the questions you may have, but I'm
happy to try and answer anything else. So thank you very much.
Well done, Meryl. What an amazing survey of the journey. One of the issues I'm going to raise is
the question of liability. But traditionally, Meryl, as you know, Steven, as founder of this
group, goes first on the questions. For the rest of you with questions, please put your hands up.
Meryl has said she's not going into the question. We've had many discussions around it on the
existence of viruses or not. That's another topic. That's not today's topic. So whilst you might put
some stuff in the chat, we're not going into that question of, you know, there's no virus,
the proof of isolation of virus. We've had that conversation. However, it's okay in science to
keep having those conversations, but that's not the conversation for today because Meryl's not
going there. Steven, questions to you?