Texas Attorney General Investigating Whether COVID-19 Vaccine Manufacturers Misled Public
The highest-ranking prosecutor in Texas is launching an investigation into whether the three top COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers have misled the public.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is probing whether Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson misrepresented the efficacy of their COVID-19 vaccines, the Republican announced on May 1.
The companies may have violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, Paxton said. The state law bars people from disseminating a statement that they know “materially misrepresents the cost or character of tangible personal property, a security, service, or anything he may offer” for the purpose of selling a product or service. It also prohibits representing goods are “of a particular standard, quality, or grade … if they are of another.”
Most of the COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in the United States have been manufactured by Moderna or Pfizer and its partner BioNTech, according to federal data. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine has been the third most popular in the country. No other vaccines were available until 2022.
Also at issue is whether the companies engaged in research to make a virus or pathogen more dangerous by increasing its transmissibility or pathogenicity and misleading the public about doing so.
Paxton sent civil investigative materials to all three companies demanding the production of documents and information within 30 days, including whistleblower reports and concerns regarding COVID-19 vaccine trials.
The materials also demand documents showing the rates of side effects for each vaccine and when the companies became aware of “unexpected or additional adverse events, side effects, injuries and/or deaths” related to their COVID-19 vaccines.
And the companies were also told to hand over documents showing all investigations launched by federal, state, county, and local agencies, including law enforcement officials, related to representations made about the safety and effectiveness of the shows.
“The development of the Covid-19 vaccine, and the representations made by and knowledge of Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, are of profound interest to the public’s health and welfare. This investigation aims to discover the truth,” Paxton said in a statement.
“This pandemic was a deeply challenging time for Americans. If any company illegally took advantage of consumers during this period or compromised people’s safety to increase their profits, they will be held responsible,” he added. “If public health policy was developed on the basis of flawed or misleading research, the public must know. The catastrophic effects of the pandemic and subsequent interventions forced on our country and citizens deserve intense scrutiny, and we are pursuing any hint of wrongdoing to the fullest.”
While the manufacturers are largely shielded from lawsuits due to the 2020 Trump administration Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, , there is an exception for actions or failues to act that constitute “willful misconduct.” That’s defined as an act or omission that is taken “intentionally to achieve a wrongful purpose”, “knowingly without legal or factual justification,” and “in disregard of a known or obvious risk that is so great as to make it highly probable that the harm will outweigh the benefit.”
Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Gain of Function
While being recorded without his knowledge, a senior Pfizer employee said in video released in January that Pfizer was aiming to “preemptively develop new vaccines” by mutating COVID-19.
“If we’re going to do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine—no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating [expletive] viruses,” Dr. Jordon Walker, a director of research and development at Pfizer, told nonprofit Project Veritas. He said that scientists at Pfizer were “optimizing” a process to mutate COVID-19 but were going slow “because everyone is very cautious.”
Pfizer later acknowledged that it had been conducting experiments that involved using the original COVID-19 virus “to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.”
“This work is undertaken once a new variant of concern has been identified by public health authorities. This research provides a way for us to rapidly assess the ability of an existing vaccine to induce antibodies that neutralize a newly identified variant of concern. We then make this data available through peer reviewed scientific journals and use it as one of the steps to determine whether a vaccine update is required,” the company stated.
Dr. Robert Malone, who helped develop the messenger RNA technology on which Pfizer’s vaccine is based, said that the experiments Pfizer described met the definition of gain of function.
“What they’re describing is almost identical to what was apparently done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” or the laboratory from which some experts believe COVID-19 escaped, Malone told NTD. The Chinese laboratory was conducting risky experiments on mice, U.S. authorities have said, and is located in the same city where the first COVID-19 cases were detected.
Walker used the term “directed evolution” while speaking to Project Veritas, which Malone said is so similar to gain of function as to be irrelevant.
Paxton’s civil demand requests all communications and documents related to Pfizer engaging in either gain of function or directed evolution “in the study, analysis, trials, or preparation of the COVID-19 vaccine.” The same demand was made to Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.
