Covid Inquiry Module 4 Hearings
Core Participants' Opening Statements 14th-15th January 2025
The long awaited Module 4 (Vaccines and Therapeutics) of the Covid Public Inquiry finally got under way on Tuesday this week, after being postponed for unspecified reasons last year. They will run for nearly 3 weeks, with the last session on Friday 31 January. UKMFA had applied to be Core Participants on the back of our tireless work over the Covid era, lobbying Ministers, Regulators and other decision-makers to warn of serious safety concerns around the Covid vaccines, from as early as November 2020, and the serious violations of medical ethics and informed consent resulting from the way the jabs were rolled out.
Baroness Hallett denied UKMFA Core Participant status, but (along with the groups HART, Perseus and Children’s Covid Vaccine Advisory Council) we were invited to submit a detailed Witness Statement in early 2024, for the consideration of the Core Participants and Inquiry team. With the postponement of the module and after learning that there was no guarantee that our 50-page Witness Statement, with 70 references and exhibits) would be published on the Inquiry website, as this would be “at the discretion of the Module 4 solicitors”, we took matters into our own hands and set up The People’s Vaccine Inquiry along with the other groups listed above who had challenged the Government vaccine rollout policies, in order that all the important public safety information in our statements could be put into the public domain. You can find all the groups’ People’s Vaccine Inquiry Witness Statements and short video presentations on the PVI website.
We were delighted that groups representing the Covid vaccine injured and bereaved were granted Core Participant status and it was with great interest that we have watched the initial statements from the lead counsel and various Core Participants this week on the Covid Inquiry YouTube channel. HART have produced a good summary of the first morning’s session on Tuesday 14th January, with the Lead Counsel Hugo Keith KC’s opening statement and an Impact Video.
The afternoon session on Tuesday 14th January and morning session on Wednesday 15th January brought the opening statements of the Core Participants, which (as well as the 3 vaccine injury groups VIBUK, Scottish Covid Vaccine Injury and UK CV Family) include Covid bereaved groups from around the UK, groups representing special interests such as the Traveller Community, Ethic Minorities, Disabled People, Migrants and Clinically Vulnerable Families, The Department of Health, the British Medical Association and the MHRA. It is notable how different the perspectives are. The rest of Wednesday 15th January was given to the cross examination of Core Participants by the Inquiry Counsels. Things that stood out were:
The representative from Clinically Vulnerable Families felt that it was to be regretted that children were not vaccinated SOONER and that it was a failure of the UK Government that under 5s were never vaccinated - as both of these measures could have protected clinically vulnerable people in families. He felt the JCVI was too cautious and too slow re authorising the jabs for children and that the impact on family members should have been considered as much as the impact of the jabs on the child. He also regretted the low uptake of the jabs in children. This is obviously in violation of fundamental principles of medical ethics as well as basic morality, that a child would be vaccinated and take on all the risk of the injection for the sole purpose of protecting someone else. It is sad to see that the morally bankrupt argument that it is acceptable to use children as human shields is still, regrettably, alive and well in 2025.
Speaker after speaker framed their comments in the well worn, unevidenced and propagandistic mainstream talking points that: vaccines were “the only way back to normal”; that pandemics can only be overcome with mass vaccination; that the rollout was overall one of the biggest successes of the pandemic; the jabs had broken the link between infection and severe disease; the jabs had saved millions of lives globally; that vaccine hesitancy was a bad thing; and the dangers of misinformation and disinformation to vaccine confidence and public health.
The MHRA spokesperson caused some surprise by opening with an apology to those injured and bereaved by the vaccines, before going on to repeat the 14 million lives saved globally claim and the unevidenced assertion that the vaccines had “allowed the UK to return to normalcy”.
Anna Morris KC, speaking powerfully for the 3 vaccine injured groups in her opening statement, clearly laid out the key points their groups wished to cover during the Module including;
the scrutiny of regulatory data
whether indemnification of the pharmaceutical companies from liability for harm was because the reality of risk of harm was understood
what level of risk to an individual was considered by the authorities to constitute an acceptable risk
whether political pressure had led to safety assessments being less rigorous than they should have been
the question of whether those vaccinated had the information on risks from the vaccines to give valid informed consent
whether the post authorisation safety surveillance system was effective and able to pick up and react quickly to safety signals
why GPs and doctors had not been instructed to ask as standard the Covid vaccine status and date of vaccination of EVERY patient presenting with new symptoms after the vaccine rollout began, so that correlations could be flagged up
whether the products given in the rollout differed to those in the trials
and the fact that their voices have been so cruelly silenced over the last 4 years.
She pointed out that those she represented “present what is an uncomfortable truth for many; that vaccine injury and death are part of the pandemic story” and that the injured and bereaved are “neither anti-science nor anti-vaccine but are real people with real experiences”.
We will document key points from the cross examination of key Core Participants by the Inquiry Counsels over the next few days and weeks.