Was this Deceptive Trade? Paxton v. Moderna
Amid ongoing reports concerning the integrity of Big Pharma, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced that he plans to investigate companies’ potential manipulation and misrepresentation of Covid vaccine trial data.
Paxton’s investigation centers around Texas’s Deceptive Trade Practice Act according to his announcement to the New York Post.
Under 17.46(b)(24) of the DPTA, Paxton must answer two questions to determine whether Big Pharma companies acted unlawfully.
1) Did the company fail to disclose known information concerning its Covid vaccine?
2) Was that failure intended to induce the public into getting the product?
Alex Berenson’s recent report on Moderna’s vaccine trials provides a case study that indicates affirmative answers to both questions.
The Case Against Moderna
Did Moderna fail to disclose known information concerning its Covid vaccine?
Last week, Berenson reported that Moderna “hid serious side effects” when it published its clinical trial results for the Covid vaccines.
Moderna opened its vaccine (“P201”) trials with 600 volunteers in May 2020 and published its results in February 2021.“No serious adverse effects were observed,” the company boasted at the top of the report. But that was a lie.
“In all, during the placebo-controlled phase of the trial… seven of the 400 healthy volunteers who received a two-shot regimen of Moderna’s vaccine suffered side effects,” Berenson writes. “The problems included a heart attack and two miscarriages. In comparison, the 200 people who received a placebo shot without any mRNA had no serious side effects.”
After the trial ended, more participants came forward with devastating results, including an additional miscarriage and several cardiovascular issues. In total, 14 volunteers reported serious side effects.
The company never issued a public statement disclosing the true results of the trial. As Berenson writes, “The company never updated the Vaccine paper with any of these reports. On December 30, 2022 the federal clinicaltrials.gov website quietly posted final safety data from P201, including all the serious adverse event reports.”
Moderna failed to disclose known information from the trials for 22 months. In the interim, the United States administered over 200 million doses of the Moderna mRNA vaccine while the true results remained concealed. Those 22 months were highly lucrative for the emerging pharmaceutical company.
Was that failure of disclosure tended to induce the public into getting the vaccines?
From the time of Moderna’s Covid vaccine trials in 2020 to the release of the true results at the end of 2022, the company’s revenue increased by over 2,000 percent.
In 2020, Moderna’s total revenue was $800 million. In 2021, Moderna published the “no serious adverse effects” paper, and the company’s revenue skyrocketed to $18.5 billion. Over 95 percent of that revenue came from the Covid vaccine.
In 2022, Moderna made $18.4 billion from the Covid vaccine alone. That year, CEO Stephane Bancel received a $926 million “golden parachute” – 15 percent more than the entire annual revenue of the company before the trial began.
When the true results came out at the end of 2022, it was too late. Millions of Americans had already received Moderna shots and been denied the right to learn the truth about the product they were taking.
Berenson’s report indicates that Paxton has a strong case against Moderna under the DPTA. The company concealed known adverse effects from the product that accounted for 95 percent of its revenue. Meanwhile, the most powerful forces in the country – including the White House, the news media, and pharmaceutical companies – pushed Americans to get the product by insisting that it was “safe and effective.”
Would pregnant women have been less likely to receive the shots had they known that there was a greater chance of miscarriage? Would men have been less inclined to rush to a vaccine center had they known that the product increased their risk of death from cardiovascular complications? If not, then why would Moderna conceal the information for 22 months while it raked in $40 billion in revenue from Covid vaccines?
Suing vaccine makers is notoriously difficult by design. Alone among private producers, they are indemnified against nearly all harm thanks to government privilege. That makes them mostly off-limits for legal liability from vaccine injuries. Eliminate that provision and the companies would not likely even be in business at all, which tells you all you need to know. However, deceptive claims are a separate issue. Finally we might have here a perfectly crafted legal position to hold these run-amuk companies accountable.
The Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life.
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