Hey CDC we are going to need to change another definition- independent = someone who previously worked for Pfizer 😂 https://t.co/IW7uH9x8q6
— Robert Malloy (@bobbypaintsstuf) December 17, 2022
Kathryn Edwards . . . remember her name.
It's easy to think of the mistakes, screw-ups, failures, even crimes of the pharmaceutical industrial complex as just a loosely banded bums or keystone cops. Conflict of interest is the operating principle of big medicine.
ICANDECIDE explains:
Of the original five members, we knew of one early on because a CBS article revealed in September 2020, apparently by mistake, the inclusion of Kathryn Edwards, MD, a professor at Vanderbilt University. In case you missed our earlier briefing about her, here’s a brief recap: She was a paid advisor to Pfizer directly before joining the DSMB. She has also received payments, speaking fees, or funding from numerous pharmaceutical companies, including Moderna, Merck, and Smith-Kline Beecham, while Sanofi provided her with trips to Paris, Dublin, Amsterdam, and Cancun, among other destinations. Nice work if you can get it!
But surely she would be forthcoming about all such connections, right? Well, in her July 2020 presentation to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), titled COVID‑19 Vaccine Safety Considerations, the conflict conveniently was never disclosed despite the fact that she had been on a COVID-19 DSMB for over 3 months at that point!
Now, we finally have the names of the other DSMB members too. But before we look at them, here’s a reminder of what NIAID director Anthony Fauci, told an interviewer in September 2020. The DSMBs, he said, are “beholden to no one, not to the president, not to the vaccine companies, not to the FDA. Not to me.”
Well, this certainly doesn’t stand up in the case of Kathryn Edwards, but how accurate is Fauci’s pronouncement when it comes to the other members of Pfizer’s DSMB reviewing vaccine trial data? Here’s a thumbnail sketch:
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