By Teresa Gomes Mota, Cardiologist
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – What would the reality of cardiovascular diseases be, the leading cause of death in Portugal and the world, if the media were to dedicate the same amount of time each day as it does to Covid-19?
When I began my professional life as a doctor, I took the Hippocratic oath, which began with “I solemnly vow to consecrate my life to the service of mankind.”
It seemed a bit ambitious to me at the time to imagine that my humble efforts, which would be performed by treating patients on a case-by-case basis, could be considered a service to Humanity.
The current approaches against the Covid-19 pandemic are pushing Humanity and ethical principles over a precipice of very difficult return, with the active involvement of a few doctors and the nihilism or passivity of virtually all the rest, in contradiction to the principles of our profession.
The Portuguese government, like that of most countries in the world, opted early on for a vaccination strategy as the main hope and weapon to fight the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, a respiratory virus, mutant, as are RNA viruses, belonging to a kind of coronavirus for which no vaccine has previously performed safely and effectively.
The vaccines created in record time and authorized for marketing by the leading international drug agencies, only conditionally (or for emergency use) due to insufficient efficacy and safety data, were rapidly produced and distributed globally.
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Promoted daily in the media as safe and effective, people were first invited, then coerced and, in some states, forced to take them, with methodologies comparable worldwide: massive dissemination of the purported advantages for individual protection, for group protection, for the defense of the economy, for education, for the return to everyday life; required to secure the digital vaccination certificate, created to allow travel between countries, but whose scope has been extended to access commercial establishments, events (family, sports, cultural, professional), nursing homes, hospitals, schools.
And in some countries, the abuses of citizens’ rights and freedoms have even gone as far as mandatory injections with these vaccines.
But there are several inconsistencies with respect to these vaccines, which present severe shortcomings in proving their scientific premises if combined with all the pressure exerted on people to get them.
Let’s see:
Vaccines are not sterilizing, they do not prevent contagion or transmission. They do not confer group protection, at best, they confer individual protection to individuals at risk for severe disease and death from COVID-19. Vaccine efficacy in antibody titers declines rapidly over time, in months, and new variants contribute to vaccine escape, i.e., vaccine inefficacy.
Vaccine-induced immunity is lower than that conferred by natural infection. The advantages of vaccinating people recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection, in addition to being scientifically implausible, have not been demonstrated in randomized trials. It is unclear why people who have already had the disease are vaccinated.
The much-heralded safety of vaccines, in the way that a drug’s safety was perceived until 2019, does not exist. These vaccines are particularly deadly, a stain on the history of medicine, which should have already led, in the first two months of their application, to a halt in human vaccination programs until a better scientific explanation of the reasons for the many and varied serious adverse reactions and cases of death that have been reported to drug regulators, namely European and American.
Despite the unprecedented numbers of adverse reactions, there has been no interest from drug authorities in promoting active pharmaco-vigilance, nor in making it mandatory to report deaths occurring in the first 15 days after vaccination, particularly in the most vulnerable groups, such as the elderly and nursing home residents, pregnant women and children. Autopsies of vaccinees, which could help to understand what is going on objectively, are systematically dismissed.
There are no studies on pregnant or nursing mothers, yet health authorities recommend vaccinating these groups as safe and effective.
Covid-19 is benign in children and youths, yet the vaccines, with no long-term safety studies conducted yet, have achieved conditional approval in the US and EU for those over 12 years of age, and upcoming support for children over five years of age is announced.
There are no studies on the interaction of vaccines with other drugs, including vaccines for other diseases, and nevertheless, joint administration with influenza vaccines is being considered; take as an example Portugal, wherein the absence of a recommendation from the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the Directorate General of Health announces that it is waiting for a position from the World Health Organization.
Unlike the additional doses for immunosuppressed patients, the booster doses (third dose) have not been recommended by the EMA due to lack of current evidence of efficacy (which may yet emerge) and limited safety data (a small trial that only included people aged 18 to 55 years). However, the Portuguese health authorities were quick to recommend the booster dose for people over 65.
The vaccines are neither effective nor safe, and yet Portugal, which is among the countries with the world’s highest vaccination rate, in addition to the 15 million doses already administered, will be delivered more than 6 million in 2021 to continue inoculating its population.
Doctors and other health professionals, the leading advocates of people’s s health, are very rarely allowed in the media to challenge the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Suppose they do so in public spaces or on social media. In that case, they are vilified as denialists, obscurantists, advocates of conspiracy theories, and sometimes their accounts are blocked, their articles rejected or unpublished, and they face disciplinary proceedings.
Journalists do not ask the advocates of these biological therapies in experimental stages for everyone’s uncomfortable questions. For over a year and a half, the media has been repeating daily news that spreads fear of the pandemic and optimistic and hopeful messages about vaccines.
By sticking to the official narrative promoted by the political power, day after day, they have managed to convince populations to adhere to vaccination programs despite the many questions of effectiveness and safety that arise. But they haven’t invested time in spreading the word about fundamental lifestyle changes to prevent a poor prognosis when faced with a SARS-CoV-2 infection, such as reducing excess weight or controlling blood pressure, for example.
One cannot help but ask: what particular and intense interest do governments and the media have in promoting vaccination for Covid-19 that has not been previously shown for promoting approaches to highly devastating chronic diseases?
People who have suffered adverse reactions to vaccines and their relatives struggle to share their losses publicly, they may be denialists if they try to or if they organize themselves into patient groups. Pharmaceutical companies are exempt from liability for the harm caused to people by marketing these still experimental drugs.
With honorable exceptions, scientific societies and professional associations have renounced their impartial role of research, scientific validation, monitoring and observing clinical events, medical training, and issuing recommendations to health professionals when they might lead to actions and outcomes against the official pro-vaccine narrative. As far as the pandemic is concerned, for the most part, they sound more like faint echoes of a sound whose origin is indiscernible, which leads one to wonder about potential conflicts of interest.
Doctors who use their minds to study, observe, reflect, decide according to each case and according to their own experience, who, instead of blindly following incongruous norms and with non-existent or dubious scientific bases, follow the Hippocratic principle that features on all cards of the Physicians’ Council – The health of my patient will be my first concern – need to carefully measure their actions and words to avoid being slandered, attacked in their reputation, or having their professional credentials suspended.
For this reason, this article only presents facts that attest to the incoherence of many measures that have been recommended and implemented in the troubled period we are currently experiencing so that each person may draw their conclusions.
But with an even greater conviction than on that day 38 years ago, I reaffirm the oath I took and invite all colleagues to do the same, conscientiously and courageously. Some may prefer the more recent version from which I highlight this excerpt:
“I will not use my knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat.”
Teresa Gomes Mota was born in 1959 in Lisbon. She has a degree in Medicine and a specialty in Cardiology. She was a Cardiology Hospital Consultant at the Pulido Valente Hospital until 2004 and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Medical Sciences of Lisbon until 2007. She is on the Board of Directors of the Portuguese Foundation of Cardiology.
She is the author of dozens of publications and scientific papers in national and foreign conferences. She has developed and coordinated several cardiovascular preventions and health promotion campaigns with the inclusion of thousands of people.
In addition to many educational texts aimed at the population, she has published: “Do outro lado da bata” (From the other side of the scrubs)- Climepsi 2004; “Emagrecer. Eu consigo!” (Losing weigh. I can do it!) – Asa II Editions 2006 (awarded with the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2006 in the Best Nutrition and Health Book category of the Gourmand Portugal Awards). She is a member of several scientific and philosophical societies.
Source: Observador, Portugal
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