Oxford Vaccine Group
The Oxford Vaccine Group (OVG) is a vaccine research group within the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Oxford.1)
Bread and Circuses: Who’s Behind the Oxford Vaccine for COVID-19? Posted on November 25, 2020
Over the past week the race for a vaccine for COVID-19 has approached the finishing line, with the Oxford Vaccine Group looking to be the first to cross in the UK. This has occasioned a huge and relentless promotional campaign by the Department of Health and Social Care. In doing so, it has drawn on three media-friendly figures, in particular, to guarantee the safety of the vaccine: Dr. June Raine, Professor Andrew Pollard and Professor Jonathan Van Tam.
The latter became a social media hit earlier this month after he compared the public’s adherence to Government lockdown restrictions to footballers holding their nerve for a ‘penalty shootout’; and likened the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccine to a ‘train coming round the bend’, with ‘the guard making sure it’s safe to open the doors’ equated to the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.
Despite its status as a executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care, over the past decade the MHRA has received $7.15 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), which in June this year invested $1.6 billion in GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation. Ten years ago in January 2010, the BMGF invested $10 billion in vaccine production as part of its call for a ‘Decade of Vaccines’. However, Dr. June Raine’s association with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is more than financial. In March 2015, she attended a lecture on ‘Global health changes and overcoming regulatory challenges’ delivered by Dr. Dan Hartman, Director of Integrated Development for the BMGF, at the tenth MHRA Annual Lecture. 6 months later, in September 2015, at a forum on ‘Real world evidence’ held by the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, Dr. Raine stated that, as regulation becomes increasingly proactive in planning active surveillance, ‘the world of reactive regulation is the world of the past’.
Last year, Dr. Raine claimed £5,035.69 in expenses to attend a BMGF meeting regarding the Smart Safety Surveillance (3S) project in Seattle. In the same year, the MHRA received a grant worth £292,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Two years before that, in 2017, Dr. Raine’s predecessor as Chief Executive Officer of the MHRA, Dr. Ian Hudson, received £980,000 from the BMGF, before leaving in September 2019 to join the Foundation as Senior Advisor, Regulatory Affairs, Integrated Development, Global Health. The Office of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments found ‘no particular risk of impropriety’ in this revolving door between a senior civil servant in a regulatory government agency funded by global investors in vaccines and a full-time, paid role in with the same investors.
2. Professor Andrew Pollard
This conflict of interest between producer and regulator is also present in the many roles of Professor Andrew Pollard, who is both Director of the Oxford Vaccine Group producing the COVID-19 vaccine in partnership with the British-Swiss pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, and at the same time a member of the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) Scientific Advisory Committee, which advises the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) that guarantees the safety of vaccines in the UK. The Chair of the NIBC Committee, Professor David J. Webb, is an MHRA Board Member.
Dr. Pollard’s employer, the University of Oxford, where he is Professor of Paediatric Infection and Immunity, has received $11.64 million for vaccine development from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation over the past 3 years, and $208 million in grants over the past decade. In 2016, the BMGF gave $36.9 million for research into vaccine development by a team that included the Oxford Vaccine Group, which was headed by Professor Pollard. In addition, Professor Pollard’s own Laboratory is also funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
As Director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, which in 2013 affiliated with the newly-created agency Public Health England, which itself has received $7.46 million in grants from the BMGF, Professor Pollard developed the Meningitis B vaccine Bexsero. Under pressure from the Secretary of State for Health, who at the time was Jeremy Hunt, following his appointment that same year as Chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), Professor Pollard mandated the use of Bexsero for UK children, despite significant safety signals for Kawasaki Disease and the rarity of Group B meningococcal disease. There were 5 cases of Kawasaki Disease in 4,340 trial infants, and more than one-third of infants had high fever the day of vaccination, including 8 who had seizures.
In 2015, production of the vaccine was taken over by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the British pharmaceutical company that in 2009 had developed the Pandemrix vaccine in response to the threat of swine flu, which was predicted to kill 65,000 people in the UK. In September 2010, an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association JAMA showed that the risk of serious illness resulting from swine flu was no higher than that from seasonal influenza, and in actuality, swine flu killed 457 people in the UK. The ‘independent’ modeller who made these predictions was none other than Professor Neil Ferguson, who 11 years later estimated half a million deaths from COVID-19 in the UK, and whose long-discredited predictions are still being used to justify inflicting an equally unnecessary COVID-19 vaccine on the British people today.
A senior figure at GlaxoSmithKline throughout this period was Dr. Patrick Vallance, who joined the company in 2006 as head of drug recovery, rose to head of medicines discovery and development in 2010, and finally, in 2012, was appointed President of Research and Development. In 2018 he left to become Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, was knighted the following year, and in 2020 was appointed Chair of the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies, in which capacity it emerged Sir Patrick left GSK with shares worth £6.1 million at their current value, and still had £600,000 worth of shares in the company, which has deals to supply 60 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine to the UK Government and 100 million doses with the US Government.
Professor Jonathan Van Tam, who Chairs the SAGE SPI-Modelling subgroup responsible for the lockdowns and other restrictions, is also the UK’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, a position he assumed in October 2017. Before that, Van Tam was in the pharmaceutical industry, joining the British multinational pharmaceutical company SmithKline Beecham as an Associate Director in 2000; moving to the Swiss healthcare company Roche as Head of Medical Affairs in April 2001; and finally, in February 2002, taking up the position of UK Medical to Aventis Pasteur MSD, the vaccines division of the French multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi. In 2004 Van Tam returned to the public sector, joining the newly-created Health Protection Agency Centre for Infections, where he was Head of the Pandemic Influenza Office until October 2007.
According to Tom Jefferson in an article published in the British Medical Journal in December 2017 about the revolving doors between public and private positions in healthcare, Professor Van Tam is a regular attendee at conferences organised by the LEuropean Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI), a well-known, industry-funded lobbying group. Indeed, his predecessor as Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor John Watson, was a founding member of the ESWI. And as head of the Pandemic Influenza Office, Professor Van Tam bears responsibility for decisions that were heavily criticised in 2013 by the Public Accounts Committee regarding the overlapping roles of pharmaceutical companies, lobbyists and regulators in the production, trial and use of the influenza antiviral drug Oseltamivir (Tamiflu).
This was one of the highest revenue earners for its manufacturer and Van Tam’s former employer, Roche. From 2006, the UK Government spent millions stockpiling Tamiflu in response to estimates that bird flu would kill 200 million people worldwide, and up to 710,000 people in the UK. In reality, around 600 people have died worldwide, and not a single person in the UK even contracted bird flu. Once again, the modeller who made these highly lucrative predictions was Professor Neil Ferguson2)3)