The Problem with Covid Vaccines

You don't get what you paid for.

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Taxpayers originally spent $18 billion on six different Covid vaccines. Those vaccines are now utterly abused by Big Pharma CEOs and controlled to maximize profits rather than protect us from disease. You know that saying, you get what you pay for? Well, with Covid vaccines, that's not exactly true. For $18 billion, we should expect something a little better than a mediocre shot rolled out once a year to combat a virus currently generating a million cases a day, in late summer, and responsible for somewhere around 20 million chronic health conditions.

So, you actually don't get what you pay for.

Not even close.

If you want to see the end result of privatizing an essential public health tool, just read this piece on "the race" between Pfizer and Moderna to develop a combo Covid-flu shot. That's where we are. Instead of cooperating to save lives, our top two vaccine providers are also fighting over who owns the rights to it. Meanwhile, you can only wonder what they're doing behind closed doors to suppress access to and awareness of vaccines like Novavax.

We're in the middle of yet another huge wave of a disease that causes substantial harm to survivors, and public health officials in charge of its approval are dodging questions and running from transparency about when they'll finally let us get the vaccines sitting in boxes in warehouses, waiting for a green light.

Every year, the FDA spends months hemming and hawing over vaccine formulas that start waning before they're even released. A large majority of the public doesn't get a Covid booster anymore. Thanks to a persistent media campaign since late 2021, most people believe Covid poses no threat to them. Booster rates have fallen to 7 percent for adults and 2 for children.

Is there any wonder why?

It's harder than ever to find information on vaccine effectiveness. The FDA doesn't follow a consistent policy on review and approval, making them vulnerable to charges of favoritism toward companies like Pfizer, who shower D.C. with tens of millions of dollars through their lobbyists. All combined, pharma companies spend $378 million just on lobbying Congress to protect their patents and give them contracts, favors, grants, awards, you name it.

It's pay to play public health.

Let's dive right into what we know about Novavax, a vaccine highly regarded by a number of experts and public health activists. Currently, the FDA can't or won't say when they'll finally approve the updated shot, even when they unofficially plan to approve Pfizer and Moderna in the coming days.

You can find a good breakdown of the studies on Novavax by Daniel Park, an epidemiologist at George Washington University. He cites a 2023 study in the Journal of Infection indicating that participants who received a Novavax booster saw fewer breakthrough infections. As they conclude, "the lowest risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection was observed in the NVX group, which elicited the highest humoral and cellular immune response overall across the study groups." That's Novavax after an initial Pfizer shot. They add that, "the success of the vaccine's performance may be attributable to the presence of the novel Matrix M adjuvant, previously shown to enhance immunogenicity." In short, they think it does a better job pumping up your immune system.

Park also refers to a 2023 study in Science Immunology showing that the Novavax shot can do a better job at reducing transmission. As the authors write, "Novavax vaccines blunted viral replication in the nasopharynx at day 2... These data have important implications for Covid-19 vaccine development, because vaccines that lower nasopharyngeal virus may help to reduce transmission."

Here's several more studies:

Don Ford explains what's so great about the Matrix-M compound that enhances your body's immune response to Covid:

Novavax’s vaccine uses a saponin based adjuvant that augments our immune systems in very beneficial ways… Saponins have been shown to be useful for fighting COVID.

It has a complex immune reaction that has been shown to stop infection in animals studies. The effect of this adjuvant should not be underestimated.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has partnered to use Matrix M in Malaria vaccines and the first one is already headed to market.

It’s also showing promise in influenza vaccines…

It's widely known that people who get the Novavax shot report fewer side effects, a trend that's also backed by studies like this one.

A 2024 study in Vaccine, once again, found fewer breakthrough cases in patients who received two doses of Novavax. As they report, infection rates rose from 7.9 to 11.2 percent at 90 days, versus a rise from 8.6 to 11.3 percent for Pfizer's vaccine.

As Don Ford also notes, everyone from Eric Topol to Ashish Jha have endorsed Novavax. If nothing else, substantial evidence exists for making Novavax available at the same time as the mRNA shots. The FDA should also be working overtime to approve this option for children under 12, and giving everyone the information they need in order to make a decision.

At every opportunity since 2021, the FDA has bungled vaccine rollouts. They kept parents with children under five waiting almost an entire extra year for any kind of vaccine. (I remember it well.) They've routinely dragged their feet approving boosters, and they refuse to acknowledge the considerable mistake of treating Covid vaccines like flu vaccines, making them available to most of us once a year.

There's no excuse.

The political adoration and favoritism for mRNA vaccines has a history. Back in 2021, Novavax got buried in the media frenzy over new technology. As Hilda Bastian writes in The Atlantic, they didn't get the attention they deserved. It's hard to test vaccines because of so many external factors:

Pandemic-vaccine success, as I wrote last year, was never just about the technology. You needed a good vaccine, sure—but to get it out the door quickly, you also had to have a massive clinical-trial operation going, and it had to be situated in places where the virus would be spreading widely at just the right time. Even if your candidate worked amazingly well, if you weren’t testing it in the middle of a huge outbreak, you’d have to wait a very long time for the evidence to build.

The mRNA vaccines were sound, but they were also in the right place at the right time. The company who developed them, BioNTech, managed to get a lot of help from Pfizer in organizing and running their clinical trials. Pfizer also tends to pull the government's ear harder, given their lobbying machine.

Pfizer was doing it to secure a windfall in profits. We paid for the vaccine's development, and they made a fortune off us.

And so, the mRNA vaccines have stuck.

We have a vacuum of direct comparisons between vaccines, which makes it harder for us to know who benefits from which combination of vaccines and how often we should be doing boosters. The consensus seems to land on twice a year. I know, I know. Good luck getting Americans or westerners to roll up their sleeves twice a year for a shot they already don't really want. But that's what it would take for these vaccines to actually protect people.

That's why we need a new generation of vaccines, and it's why scientists have been working on them. For example, the University of Houston has developed a nasal Covid-19 vaccine that promises enhanced protection. In fact, they developed a vaccine and a nasal spray. The vaccine is a "pancoronavirus nasal vaccine that can protect against infection and disease by all members of the coronavirus family." The nasal spray works as a "broad-spectrum immune activator for controlling infection against multiple respiratory viruses." They published on both of them in Nature.

We need them yesterday.

The NIH is currently working with BARDA and other agencies on Project NextGen to expedite clinical trials and review for better vaccines. Not to sound ungrateful, but they could get a move on. If Operation Warp Speed could deliver mRNA vaccines in less than a year, then it makes you wonder why it's taking twice as long to get these vaccines.

The U.S. spent $18 billion on Warp Speed vaccines.

Project NextGen has gotten half that much.

There's a smattering of various NextGen vaccines in the works, which makes sense when you remember that the government funded a wide range of vaccine projects back in 2020, because there was intense public pressure. One of the most promising NextGen vaccines (MPV) has finally started human clinical trials.

That pressure has obviously waned about as much as the vaccines themselves. Consider it a side effect of calling Covid "mild" every day for nearly three years. Nobody cares anymore, and that's sad. They should care. They should care an awful lot, because Covid is causing massive waves of death and disability. Politicians and corporate media simply turn a blind eye to it.

There's very little incentive for companies like Pfizer to propel research on new vaccines when they've essentially cornered the demand that still exists. They're not going to let go of the little bit of income they can still squeeze out of producing vaccines that conform to the notion of a minimum viable product, a product with just enough features to pass for customers who really, really want it.

Yep, the minimum.

If you can stomach putting yourself inside the head of a Pfizer CEO, then you can see why they would be just peachy with Covid spreading all year long as the CDC reduces the isolation period just in time for the start of the school year. As they themselves have celebrated during earnings calls, it means more drug sales. They want us to get sick so we take Paxlovid, if we can find it. They also don't mind if we happen to develop heart problems, brain damage, diabetes, or metabolic disorders from our mild infections. They and their friends are always working on more drugs to treat those conditions.

Endless Covid is a dream come true for Big Pharma.

On that note, some of us find it odd that the anti-vaxxer crowd, so opposed to Big Pharma as they are, can't see this conspiracy.

I mean, it's right there...?

Regardless of which vaccine you choose, we can agree on a few things. First, nobody should have to squint through screenshots of quarterly earnings reports to determine the effectiveness of an essential, life-saving vaccine while waiting for the FDA to do its job.

That's just ridiculous.

As the Canadian Covid Society outlined in a recent letter, governments around the world need to do a much better job at access and public awareness when it comes to Covid vaccines.

Second, it was a huge mistake to privatize vaccines. It may have helped expedite clinical trials. Since then, it has completely corrupted the review and approval process, risking and ruining countless lives from grandmas and grandpas to little brothers and sisters. Shame on these profit seekers. The FDA doesn't want to look like they're giving any single vaccine maker an edge, and I guess they don't want Pfizer to throw a hissy fit and sue them over approving Novavax or Moderna first, cutting into their precious market share. Regardless of the motive, it's costing lives.

Privatizing vaccines has also likely sabotaged Project NextGen. We obviously can't prove anything beyond the shadow of a doubt, but it sure does look odd that our public health agencies keep suppressing information about masks and Long Covid while joining the corporate media to push vaccines-only on us all the time, while normalizing mass infection.

Who does that benefit?

Do Pfizer and Moderna want shared custody of a monopoly on Covid vaccines and treatments, regardless of how much they resemble a Happy Meal toy?

Finally, it would be a lot easier to trust the CDC and the FDA if there weren't such a lack of transparency and such misinformation coming from these offices. How are we supposed to trust the recommendations of agencies that have been wrong so many times over the last four years, and don't even acknowledge it?

That's the worst part.

We don't need to argue over which vaccine is better. Nonetheless, more people need to at least see the case for Novavax. They need access to it. We also need to be joining forces to press for more transparency and accountability from the FDA, the CDC, and its various committees and organizations.

If there's one last thing we can agree on: Most of us can't wait until Pfizer finds a shiny new drug to obsess over, so we no longer have to worry about giant pharma companies interfering in what should be an objective, transparent process divorced from shareholder meetings and earnings reports.

We paid for the development of these vaccines.

We deserve better.

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