KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 3 – Vaccine-hesitant groups have weaponised an inquiry by Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) – which reported the expiry of 8.5 million coronavirus vaccine doses – to spread misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.
The PAC, in its report on Covid-19 management that was tabled in Parliament last Monday, found that 72.8 million vaccine doses have been given, comprising 88 per cent of the country’s projected need for 83.3 million doses.
However, 8.5 million Covid-19 vaccine doses – worth more than half a billion ringgit at RM505 million – expired by last June 15, despite an 18-month extension of the doses’ expiration date from the date of manufacture.
The PAC attributed the Covid-19 vaccine wastage to poor demand for booster vaccination, due to the lack of vaccine mandates; fear of vaccination side effects amid misinformation; and delay in Malaysia receiving the vaccines as ordered due to extremely high global demand.
“Why relentless push for vaccine booster despite known failure?” read the title of a joint media release by the Malaysian Alliance for Effective Covid Control (MAECC) and the Malaysian Council for Health (MCH) that was distributed on WhatsApp last Tuesday.
“As reported by the PAC, the loss of 8.5 million doses of Covid vaccines worth RM505 million due to expiry date and the 104 ventilator machines that failed to function is a crying shame.
“The PAC must look beyond counting the number of unusable vials and machines. The most important question is how and why was the decision made on an experimental vaccine that did not do what was claimed and yet did more harm.”
MAECC and MCH claimed that “plasmid DNA contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40) genes” was found in Covid-19 mRNA vaccines.
“SV40 is an oncogenic DNA virus known to cause cancer and immune dysregulation. It is also suspected to cause AIDS,” said the vaccine-hesitant groups, citing a preprint paper by David Speicher et al published last month.
Health Feedback, a worldwide network of scientists that does fact-checking in health and medical news coverage, said that a dossier submitted by pharmaceutical company BioNTech to the European Medicines Agency in 2020 showed that data on residual DNA in the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines was made known to the regulator.
Recommended guidelines for acceptable levels of residual DNA were already established by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“There’s no reliable evidence showing that DNA in vaccines integrates into our DNA or increases the risk of cancer. There are, in fact, several vaccines predating Covid-19 vaccines containing DNA, such as the chickenpox vaccine. These have been shown to be safe,” said Health Feedback.
MAECC and MCH – who claimed that they were “not against vaccination programmes, rather we are against unsafe vaccines” – said Malaysia’s Covid-19 vaccination programme should have been halted immediately pending safety determinations.
“Why then was there relentless coercion by our previous health minister for Malaysians to take the booster shots towards the end of 2022? Was he driven by the nearing expiry date of the vaccines or the genuine need for the vaccination programme? The PAC has to provide an answer,” said retired Captain Wong Ang Peng, on behalf of the MAECC secretariat and MCH.
The statement was co-signed by Dr Suresh Rajoo (Society for Advancement of Hormones and Healthy Aging Medicine Malaysia); Dr Paramjit Kaur (Malaysian Association for the Advancement of Functional and Interdisciplinary Medicine); Connie Lee Yoke Kwan (Malaysian Society of Complementary Medicine); Saroja Theavy Balakrishnan (Society of Natural Health Malaysia); Prof Dr Chong Wee Fong (Naturopathic Medical Association Malaysia); Nadzim Johan (Muslim Consumers Association Malaysia); as well as Dr Ab Aziz Al Safi Ismail, Asri Yusoff, Dr Noorazman M. Samsuddin, Dr Vijaendreh Subramaniam, and Dr Selvam Renggasamy on behalf of MCH.
In comments on the Speicher 2023 paper cited by the Malaysian anti-vaxxer groups, Dr Leong Hoe Nam, an infectious disease physician at Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital in Singapore, said DNA was expected in the mNRA vaccines as DNA is converted to RNA.
“It is like when you prepare bird’s nest. You can have some bird feathers inside. But does it cause effect? Most of the time, no. Sometimes, you have allergic reactions,” Dr Leong told CodeBlue.
He also pointed out that the authors acknowledged themselves in their paper that the significance of the presence of DNA in mRNA vaccines was unknown.
Dr Leong also said it was not proven that a higher presence of DNA correlated with adverse effects from vaccination, adding that this should be investigated in a larger study.
“We all know that the Moderna vaccine has more effects, but in this study, Moderna had lesser DNA. Is this ‘quick and dirty association’ valid? Or an over-reading of the tea leaves in the cup?
“I think it is an important study and it is for the FDA and government agencies to see if these results can be replicated. On the validity of the study, this is a preprint, which means it has not gone through scientific rigours. Many preprints do not get published because they failed the scientific peer review.”
The PAC’s report – aside from stating the reasons for the unuse of 8.5 million Covid-19 vaccine doses that expired last June (comprising about 10 per cent of 83.3 million projected needed doses) – did not state if the committee found the wastage to be acceptable, or if the PAC believed that an oversupply of vaccines in a health crisis was preferable to a shortage.
Singapore’s Straits Times reported last March that a similar 10 per cent of Singapore’s Covid-19 vaccine stock had expired, according to the Health Ministry’s response in October 2022.
In the Philippines, wastage of Covid-19 vaccines was estimated to hit over 50 million doses by the end of March.
Indonesia’s deputy health minister reportedly said in October last year that 40.2 million doses of expired vaccines were to be disposed of immediately.
In Vietnam, about 1.15 per cent of Covid-19 vaccines (257,549 doses) received between March 8 and February 27 in Ho Chi Minh City have expired.
South Korea has reportedly discarded 12.9 million doses of expired vaccine; a stockpile of 42.6 million doses in distribution centres was set to expire between April and September this year, The Straits Times reported last March.
In Japan, 46.1 million doses of vaccine for the original Covid-19 strain held by the national government were discarded on expiry, following Japan’s new policy from February to roll out vaccines specific to the Omicron strain.
