Rutgers is Coming for Our Babies

Rutgers will soon be testing Pfizer’s bivalent booster - the shot that was tested on 8-10 mice before the FDA approved its use in the general population - on young children and babies.

https://www.rutgers.edu/news/rutgers-recruiting-participants-pfizer-covid-19-pediatric-bivalent-vaccine-clinical-trial

Partnering with Pfizer/BioNTech, the Pediatric Clinical Research Center at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School will begin to study the bivalent vaccine in children less than 5 years old. The trial will include a substudy of children under 2 who have never received a COVID-19 vaccine and a substudy for children under 5 who have received doses of COVID vaccines.

This is the fourth time Rutgers has served as a COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial site for pharmaceutical companies. In 2021, it conducted trials for Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, and in 2022, it conducted pediatric vaccine trials for Pfizer/BioNTech.

As I’ve said before, Rutgers is in the vaccine business.

Rutgers is in the Vaccine Business

Rutgers Doubles Down on “Obey To Play” COVID Policies Despite Science

In 2018, RU’s medical schools officially launched a partnership with New Jersey’s largest hospital chain, RWJ Barnabas Health, to create “the largest academic health system in the state and one of the most comprehensive in the country."  RWJ Barnabas agreed to make a $1 billion investment in facilities and services over the next 20 years. The alliance also brought the promise of additional revenue by giving Rutgers access to more grants and clinical studies. 

“The focus of health care is becoming population-based rather than individual-based” explained Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences Chancellor Brian Strom in a 2018 interview with Rutgers Today.

“We can go to contract for research with pharma and NIH [National Institutes of Health] and other agencies, saying we have this huge population we can bring, a very diverse population, a major strength that New Jersey has to be able to bring to these clinical trials, [and] with that bring additional revenue,” said Strom in a NJ Stoplight News article.

Parents considering enrolling their children should take a few minutes to understand how the sausage is made, because we’re looking at a pattern of poorly designed studies and $cience by press release.

David McCune, MD, MPH @davidemccune

This White House-vetted press release from Pfizer, is infuriating. Prasad breaks it down, & I want to add my thoughts. This unholy alliance of corporate & WH interests destroys trust, squanders credibility, enriches pharma, & sets a horrible precedent.

open.substack.comPfizer Press Released Bivalent Booster ResultsWatch now (8 min) | What do they mean? (4 fold increase in over 55, but what about 18 to 54?)

Antibody titers are not destiny. That’s why in situations where we haven’t validated a surrogate, we do randomized controlled trials with a clinical endpoint. The White House didn’t want to do that. They wanted to roll this vaccine out on the basis of 8-10 mice. And now they’re playing games…. they’re playing games with these titers. We still don’t have real world evidence - what percent of people are getting boosted or not boosted, are having breakthrough infections… that’s going to be fraught with some confounding, but there’s an easy solution: Make the company that’s making 10s of billions of dollars do the right study before they get to the market, which is a randomized trial measuring clinical outcomes that people care about. (emphasis mine)

That’s the solution. They didn’t do that. They’ve lowered the regulatory bar so Pfizer can trip over it into billions and billions of dollars. And now we’re quibbling about antibody titers, which, it’s very hard to know what it means.

Justin Hart @justin_hart

Pfizer: boy those Bivalent boosters sure make great antibodies! Roll tape: Q&A to Pfizer back in June. VRBPAC member Levy: (paraphrasing) Everybody is measuring Abs, what is the correlate of protection? Pfizer VP: "There is no established correlate of protection." (!)

Bloomberg Markets @markets

Moderna and Pfizer bivalent boosters failed to raise levels of antibodies against BA.4/BA.5 strains any more than four doses of the original Covid shot, a study found

trib.alBloomberg - Are you a robot?

CommonSense MD @CommonSenseMD1

The bivalent mRNA's have NOT been shown to be more effective than the Obsolete Original. I'm seeing in my own practice patients who got the bivalent 4-6 weeks ago and are getting Covid now. Thanks, Pfizer.

These tweets describe the shot Rutgers plans to give our youngest kids. Kids who don’t need these shots because they aren’t at serious risk for COVID.

Parents may also want to spend a few minutes hearing Maddie DeGaray’s story (or you can read it here), since she participated in one of Pfizer’s pediatric clinical trials. Maddie went from being a normal, healthy 12 year old to being paralyzed from the waist down and requiring a feeding tube among other things. Once things went south for her, Maddie was basically dropped like a hot potato by everyone involved and her parents were saddled with staggering medical bills.

Maddie de Garay's story

Please, parents, before you subject your children to this experiment, research. Like you do with your carseats and your pediatricians and your schools. Don’t let your children be Rutger’s guinea pigs.