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Claim 2: The results from mRNA vaccine trials over the past 20 years have been so bad that no such vaccines have ever been licensed.
A few seconds later, Cahill says in the video that “adverse events and deaths over the last 20 years related to RNA vaccines have been so significantly bad that zero vaccines have been licensed for coronavirus ever”.
It should be noted that there have only been a small number of clinical trials of messenger RNA (or mRNA) vaccines over the years, partly because the approach is relatively new – a handful of scientists first began exploring RNA vaccines as a possibility about 30 years ago.
No mRNA vaccine has been approved before now, because scientists have had to overcome a number of obstacles to produce a vaccine that is effective.
These obstacles included things like how to modify mRNA in a way that would not produce a violent immune response, how to encourage a person’s immune system to accept a vaccine’s mRNA, and getting cells to make protein to fight the new disease.
There have been several breakthroughs over the years, but research into mRNA vaccines ramped up after the arrival of Covid-19 last year, partly helped by the huge amount of scientific collaboration that has been going on across the globe over the past year.
Two mRNA vaccines against Covid-19 – the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna jabs – have been approved across the world in recent weeks, including by the European Medicines Agency.
But multiple studies of other mRNA vaccines in humans have already taken place over the last few years.
Vaccines for rabies, Zika and influenza were tested in humans, and despite not being licensed, none of those who participated in the studies showed any long-term adverse effects (though there were some moderate cases of inflammation).
More recently, larger trials by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna involving tens of thousands of people were hugely successful.
Both companies’ Covid-19 vaccines were found to be over 90% effective in clinical trials.
In the video, Cahill speaks about mRNA vaccine trials conducted on animals to draw the conclusion that such vaccines are unsafe for humans.
But it is misleading to suggest that adverse results in previous mRNA vaccine trials make the Covid 19 vaccines unsafe, particularly when widespread testing of such vaccines has been carried out on humans.
TheJournal.ie
A bottle of Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine
Source: AP
Cahill also cites studies of mRNA vaccines which she claimed resulted in deaths and serious illness in animals and people.
In one study, she suggests that up to half of all animals in a trial “got seriously ill or died”. In another, she says that children and babies were hospitalised, and in another case, she says two babies in a study of 35 children died.
Cahill does not specify in the video which studies these results come from, but TheJournal.ie could find no evidence that such studies exist.
A search of the US National Library of Medicine database, which contains results of over 360,000 clinical trials in 200 countries, did not return any results for mRNA vaccine trials in children at the time of publication.
A clinical trial on the effectiveness of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine in children aged 12 and over was later added. However, no results were posted by the time the video featuring Cahill was shared on social media.
A similar search of the EU Clinical Trials Register, which contains details of almost 40,000 trials since 2004, also returned no results for trials of mRNA vaccines in children at the time of publication.