Healthcare Reform: Remove Conflicts of Interest (UK Edition)

Removing the Jesters from the King's Ear

It is no secret that within the healthcare industry there are numerous conflicts of interest, but none are so evident as the ones that advise government on setting healthcare policy, the classic case of putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

Take for example the “advisors” for the UK government over the last few years:

Patrick Vallance - Former President of GlaxoSmithKline R&D, who holds £600,000 in shares in vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline.

Jonathan Nguyen-Van-Tam - Former Associate Director for SmithKline Beecham, former head of medical affairs at Roche, former medical director at Aventis Pasteur MSD

John Irving Bell - Formerly Board of Directors for Roche, the company that manufactures (faulty) PCR tests, with £773,000 in shares

Chris Whitty - Former interim board for Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an organisation who take money to produce vaccines, of which the UK government spent £160 million in 2022.

Even from here the average member of the public can see the glaring conflicts of interest. Two of the advisors literally hold direct financial interests in the form of shares worth over half-a-million each, and one has been to more pharmaceutical companies than a prostitute at a brothel.

These are not merely political appointments by the current political party in the UK, but an ongoing trend happening to many nations around the world, not an exception, but a rule.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI)

The conflicts of interest don’t simply reside with political appointments in the UK either. Conflicts can be spotted on the UK’s vaccination “review” committee. In-fact, one was so egarious and glaringly obvious it prompted their temporary recursal from COVID-19 meetings (emphasis to quotes added):

[…] it was agreed that the JCVI Chair (Professor Andrew Pollard), who is involved in the development of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine at Oxford, would recuse himself from all JCVI COVID-19 meetings.

This is made worse by the fact that the Deputy Chair is also from Oxford University

Professor Anthony Harnden, Deputy Chair (University of Oxford)

Not only is impartiality absent, but they are proactively either involved in the products they are meant to be ‘independently reviewing’, or have financial ties or interests in said products or the organisations making said products.

The JCVI’s token effort to recuse the most glaringly obvious conflict of interest within their ranks belies a question of why they’re even allowed to get involved in product development and have financial ties to related organisations in the first place.

It is nearly impossible for the public to veto any possible conflicts of interests because they have to be self-disclosed, and typically such individuals disclose little, if any, of their prior work history.

For example, Dr Kevin Brown on the JCVI simply writes their history as:

[…] a consultant medical virologist working at Public Health England. His area of expertise is in vaccine-preventable viral infections and he has been a virologist for more than 30 years.

A virologist for 30 years working where? Financed by who? Taking part in what, if any, studies? It is extremely unlikely Dr Kevin simply walked into one high paying job straight away and perpetually worked in that one job for 30 years non-stop, and the sparseness of the prior history belies questions. We know more about Patrick Vallance than we do about Dr Kevin Brown.

Other ties are harder to suss out. For example, Professor Lim Wei Shen does not currently declare any conflicits of interest. They declare they work at the Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre, and yet the BMJ in “This Week” reported that:

Lim’s “institution has received unrestricted investigator-initiated research funding from Pfizer for a study in pneumonia in which Professor Lim is the chief investigator (non-vaccine related).”

If Lim Wei Shen is able to get away by not declaring this financial conflict of interest on JCVI’s form, who else? Well, it turns out there’s another culprit on the JCVI’s list, Adam Finn, quoting the BMJ again (emphasis added):

[…] the JCVI reports him as having “no personal payments from manufacturers of vaccines” but adds that he is a local principal investigator for the Oxford-AstraZeneca covid vaccine. In disclosures for the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020 and in a disclosure the same year to The BMJ, Finn reported a study grant from GlaxoSmithKline(GSK). And in 2019 he published a study disclosing that his institution received funding from various drug companies and that he was president of a medical society whose annual meeting received sponsorship from vaccine manufacturers.

The JCVI similarly brushed similar conflicts of interest under the carpet for Maarten Postma, with Maarten in an email to the BMJ claiming that:

I think we decided we felt these are not relevant

Not relevant? You think financial ties to the vaccine industry you’re supposed to regulate are “not relevant”? The fact he claims the JCVI said this is alarming, and given other members have similarly not declared glaring conflicts of interest, it is evident covering up conflicts of interest is the norm, not the exception, within the JCVI.

Postma’s list isn’t casual either, it reads like the exact horror list of ‘giant conflicts of interest’ (emphasis added):

[…] Postma disclosed grants and honorariums from more than a dozen drug companies, including AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and GSK. He also disclosed grants and personal fees from various pharmaceutical industries and financial support from the flu vaccine company Seqirus in studies he had published in recent months

He couldn’t have sold out to more conflicts of interest if he tried. Over a dozen drug companies? What the hell? He literally takes personal fees from pharmaceutical companies and the JCVI felt it was “not relevant” to disclose this blatant bribery bordering on conflict of interest?

But Wait, There’s More!

As the BMJ continues to report, it adds another particularly damning line, quoting again:

The JCVI’s and FDA’s disclosure policies require advisory members to disclose matters going back only 12 months

Remember how Dr Andrew Wakefield was lambasted for years over his particular publication which dared to criticise the false god that is vaccines, and lost his job in the process? This is why he lost his job. It is infested with the very people he unintentionally criticised. And yet, the pharmaceutical sell-outs want their records scrubbed clean after only a mere 12 months.

That’s because they don’t like the idea of being open and transparent, exposing all their ugly conflicts of interest that would righly cause the public to question their decision making skills and demand they’d be fired and for reforms of such horrible practices. Postma only gets away with getting direct ‘personal fees’ from Pfizer & Co simply because after 12 months it’s not considered ‘relevant’. It’s relevant to me, is it relevant to you?

What is relevant is the permanent, perpetual harms this bias system causes, allowing bribed pharmaceutical stooges and lackeys to eat up power from within whilst the public are desperate to try to hold them to account.

Any serious vaccine induced injury lasts longer than 12 months, and there is no valid justification for such a cut-off date. All cards must be on the table, and conflicts of interest removed from any such decision making capacity. The experts’ interests should lie with protecting the people, not fatting up their own ‘personal fees’ and ‘financial awards’.

The public can campaign for reforms for this system to bring greater transparency to the UK government overall when it comes to healthcare decision making. Demand the government remove people with conflicts of interest from power.

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