It does not seem fair. This week, Johnson & Johnson was called out by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for problems with Johnson & Johnson’s experimental coronavirus vaccine. While experimental coronavirus vaccine competitors Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech skated by without censure despite their shots appearing likely to cause the same problems, the FDA put out a warning regarding the Johnson & Johnson shot.
With this sort of singling out of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine for criticism, which has happened before as well, it seems appropriate to ask: Are Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech teacher’s pets of the FDA?
Megan Redshaw provides details in a Monday Children’s Health Defense article:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will announce a new warning on Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) COVID vaccine saying the shot has been linked to Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS), a “serious but rare” autoimmune disorder. The Washington Post attributed the news to “four individuals familiar with the situation.”
…
Federal officials identified the 100 suspected cases of GBS among recipients of the J&J shot through the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) — a federal monitoring system that relies on patients and health care providers to report adverse effects of vaccines.According to the most recent data from VAERS, between Dec. 14, 2020 and July 2, there were 398 reports of GBS with 187 of cases attributed to Pfizer, 159 to Moderna and 76 cases to J&J.
What’s that? The FDA will warn people of the risk from taking the Johnson & Johnson shot but do nothing regarding the same potential risk from taking competitors’ shots? Are we seeing favoritism here from the FDA?
This is not the first time such apparent favoritism for Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech has arisen related to warning people of the risks from experimental coronavirus vaccine shots. In April, the FDA temporarily halted the giving of Johnson & Johnson’s experimental coronavirus vaccine shots, expressing concerns about people given the shots experiencing blood clots. Regarding that development, I wrote in an April 13 article:
One thing that is odd is that the Johnson & Johnson experimental vaccine shots have been subjected to this temporary halt, but shots of the experimental vaccines of Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have not. Many reports of injury and death after Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech experimental vaccine shots, from the early days onward, have come in as well. Could the different regulatory outcomes be because the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech shots use mRNA technology and are not even vaccines under the normal meaning of the term while the Johnson & Johnson shot is more in line with the traditional vaccines approach? Are we seeing regulatory favoritism for the new mRNA shots?
Then, on April 23, the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the resumption of giving Johnson & Johnson experimental coronavirus vaccine shots along with the addition of a new warning about health risks related to taking Johnson & Johnson’s shot.
There seems to be a pattern here: The United States government lets slide risks from two companies’ shots while investigating and warning about the similar risks from another company’s shots, as well as even halting the giving of that company’s shots. Are we seeing here favoritism for certain companies, or is it, as I suggested in April, favoritism for the new mRNA technology shots over the more traditional shot Johnson & Johnson offers? The experimental coronavirus vaccine shots pushers in government and media keep telling people to “follow the science.” However, the apparent favoritism for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech shots over the Johnson & Johnson shot suggests that something other than the science is being followed by US government regulators.
