So-called “fact checkers” have been scrambling to defend Pfizer after one of the pharmaceutical giant’s senior executives testified under oath that the company never tested its COVID-19 against transmission of the virus.
As Slay News reported, Pfizer’s Janine Small, president of international developed markets, made the explosive admission during a European parliamentary Covid hearing.
Small testified that neither she nor any other Pfizer officials knew whether its vaccine would stop transmission of Covid before entering the market last year.
The confession has sparked widespread international outrage as one of the main arguments being pushed by governments and health officials was that low-risk healthy individuals should get vaccinated to protect others, if not themselves.
Small was grilled about the testing on Monday by European Union Member of Parliament Rob Roos.
Roos asked Small if the company tested its mRNA vaccine on stopping transmission before rolling it out, to which she said no.
The Dutch lawmaker later called it “scandalous” given that vaccine passports and mandates were pushed globally on the implication that they would stop transmission.
The “scandalous” parties Roos referred to were global governments, not Pfizer.
While there is no evidence Pfizer ever claimed its vaccine was tested for transmission, the notion that the vaccines offered such protection against the spread of COVID was seized upon by governments to compel people to get vaccinated.
The distinction between individuals contracting and transmitting COVID was lost as governments sought to stop the virus from spreading.
Several top officials pressured the public to get the shots by claiming that people wouldn’t catch the virus or pass it on to others if vaccinated.
“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” Democrat President Joe Biden said in July 2021.
Two months earlier, White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said that vaccinated people become “dead ends” for the virus.
In March 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that data from the CDC suggested that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.”
🚨 BREAKING:
In COVID hearing, #Pfizer director admits: #vaccine was never tested on preventing transmission.
"Get vaccinated for others" was always a lie.
The only purpose of the #COVID passport: forcing people to get vaccinated.
The world needs to know. Share this video! ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/su1WqgB4dO
— Rob Roos MEP 🇳🇱 (@Rob_Roos) October 11, 2022
Roos said his point after Monday’s testimony was that compelling young, healthy people to get the jab to ensure they did not spread it was built on a myth.
The Dutch politician’s video response to the testimony has now been viewed more than 10 million times
“Millions of people worldwide felt forced to get vaccinated because of the myth that ‘you do it for others,’” he says in the video.
“Now this turned out to be a cheap lie.
“This should be exposed.”
However, “fact checkers” have tried to twist Roos’s words in a desperate effort to “debunk” reports about the testimony,
Roos later told The Associated Press he was not claiming Pfizer lied, but that the foundation governments used to press for mandates was bogus.
“I take fundamental rights seriously,” Roos said.
“For governments to infringe on them, they need a massive amount of evidence to prove the necessity.
“In this case, it was not even a part of the Pfizer trials.”
“Fact checkers” from The Associated Press, Politifact, and other groups that have faithfully toed the government line throughout the pandemic were quick to claim that since Pfizer never said it tested its vaccine against transmission — Small’s remark was neither an “admission” nor news.
“Pfizer never claimed to have tested the impact of its COVID-19 vaccine on transmission ahead of its 2020 release, despite misleading claims suggesting the company lied about this issue,” wrote The Associated Press in its “fact check.”
“Posts online are saying Pfizer ‘admitted’ that the company did not test whether their COVID-19 vaccine reduced transmission prior to rolling it out – something they were not required to do, nor claimed to have done,” wrote Reuters.
But even if Pfizer never made the claim, “fact checkers” strongly suggested it.
A fact-check by USA Today in November 2021, titled “Fact check: Vaccines protect against contracting, spreading COVID-19,” quoted Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology and molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale University, saying the vaccine did guard against transmission.
“Vaccines provide significant protection from ‘getting it’ – infection – and ‘spreading it’ – transmission – even against the delta variant,” Iwasaki said.
The protection that the COVID vaccines provide to contracting the virus has also been called into question.
When the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were first rolled out, pharmaceutical companies, government health officials, and political leaders hailed them as powerful and effective.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in April 2021 that early testing showed its vaccine was “100 percent effective against severe COVID-19.”
When vaccinated people started getting Covid, their cases were initially deemed “breakthrough” cases.
Bourla, who got the virus himself in August, admitted in January his company’s vaccine provides “very limited protection if any” against contracting the Omicron variant.
Over the last year, many experts have acknowledged that the vaccines may not stop transmission or contraction of the virus, but may lessen the symptoms and prevent deaths.
Even if true, say some experts, that is scant justification for vaccine mandates and passports.
“It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target,” Nobel Prize-winning virologist Luc Montagnier and constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld wrote earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal.
“Mandating a vaccine to stop the spread of a disease requires evidence that the vaccines will prevent infection or transmission (rather than efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization or death).”
