The Vaccine War : a limited hangout
Review of the new film "The Vaccine War"
Vivek Agnihotri is one of India’s most interesting film directors. He is known for his political films that often challenged mainstream narratives. Buddha in a Traffic Jam showed how political ideologues and vested interests can harm tribal societies. His The Tashkent Files explored controversial theories about the mysterious death of India’s Prime Minister Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri. His last film, The Kashmir Files, was a heart-wrenching tale that captured the pain and suffering of the persecuted Hindu minorities of Kashmir who have become refugees in their own country. The Vaccine War is Vivek Agnihotri’s new medical drama film. The title of the movie is obviously a pun on the chapter “The vaccine wars” in our article A Short History of Big Pharma colonialism in India. The film features Nana Patekar, Pallavi Joshi, Raima Sen and Anupam Kher.
The Vaccine War is based on the book “Going Viral” by Dr. Balram Bhargava who was the director-general of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) during the pandemic. Considering Agnihotri’s prior films, one would have thought that this film would challenge mainstream narratives about the plandemic and vaccines. Big Pharma (together with the military-industrial complex and the media) have been waging a war against the people - the vaccine war. However, this movie is not really about this aspect of the plandemic - it is about the “vaccine war” between foreign and indigenous pharma companies. The film praises the role of India’s medical researchers and of the vaccine scientists at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) during the tumultuous COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of faith in western medicine and in vaccines specifically was lost as a result of the Covid plandemic, and a movie honouring vaccine scientists, of all people, is going to be a hard sell.
The focus of the movie is on India’s indigenously developed vaccine Covaxin. Covaxin is a whole inactivated virus-based COVID-19 vaccine. The film promotes what could be called “vaccine nationalism”, its message is: foreign vaccines bad, indigenous vaccines good. There is of course more than just a grain of truth in this observation : the “foreign” mRNA and viral vector vaccines were really worse than the inactivated or traditional vaccine from India. On the other hand, India has also developed a gene therapy Covid vaccine (the DNA vaccine ZyCoV-D) which is probably just as bad as the Pfizer vaccine. And the vaccine nationalists don’t need to worry, in the next plandemic Big Pharma will have gigantic “indigenous” mRNA factories in India.
However, it is a bit of a stretch to label Covaxin as the “indigenous” vaccine. Bharat Biotech, the company where Covaxin was developed, was heavily funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the international pharma lobby, making its indigenous credentials somehow suspect. The global vaccine industry, especially vaccine research, is in fact heavily funded by a handful of western organizations like the BMGF, NIH, and the Wellcome Trust. And even though vaccines (smallpox inoculation) may perhaps have been invented in Ancient India, modern vaccines are different in many ways. Modern vaccines and the vaccine industry are in fact one of the pillars of western medicine. The modern history of mass-vaccination (and even of forced vaccination) in India began in the colonial period, with western medicine. Also pandemic and vaccine policies in many countries are dictated by supranational organizations like the WHO, and not so much by "indigenous" leadership.
But is Covaxin safe? It probably is true that Covaxin is safer than the mRNA (Pfizer, Moderna) and viral vector (Covishield/Astra Zeneca) vaccines. But all Covid vaccines were developed in "warp speed", and it is simply not possible to develop a safe vaccine in “warp speed”.
India has not been immune to vaccine deaths and injuries. Mark Crispin Miller has been documenting many vaccine deaths in India, as does Twitter handle Jab Injuries India. Denis Rancourt estimated that the Covid vaccination campaign in India caused the deaths of 3.7 million people. Side effects of the Covid vaccines are many and include myocarditis, even in children and young adults. Vaccine injuries and deaths have also been reported with Covaxin. Unsurprisingly, Covaxin includes harmful ingredients, including alhydroxyquim which was used for the first time in a vaccine. According to a RTI document available at the AIM website, this vaccine even uses new born calf serum during production. Often, cows are brutally tortured to harvest calf serum. The use of cow ingredients in vaccines certainly raises moral questions for Hindus, even more so if the vaccine is “indigenous”.
India has also no reliable vaccine injury reporting system (AEFI). And there are no laws In India to protect victims of COVID-19 vaccine side-effects. To complicate matters, often the media reports don't tell us if the vaccine injured were vaccinated with Covaxin or with the Covishield/AstraZeneca vaccine. As a matter of fact, about 80% of vaccinated Indians received the viral vector AstraZeneca (Covishield) vaccine, not the inactivated Covaxin vaccine. So the vaccine war was actually won by foreign vaccine AstraZeneca, a vaccine which is just as bad as the Pfizer vaccine (if not worse).
The film seems to suggest that the vaccine was necessary to fight the pandemic. But the fundamental problem is that vaccines were not the best tool to use to fight the Covid-19 virus. It would make this article too long to fully explain why, but let me just list some of the main reasons:
Vaccine development takes time (at least six years, often longer) before they can be deemed safe and effective. This cannot be safely done in “warp speed” during a pandemic.
In many cases, natural immunity is the best “vaccine”.
There were better alternatives available (repurposed drugs like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroqine, etc). Also immune responses are most critical at the site of infection (in the nasal mucosa), which the vaccine doesn’t target, that is why a simple nasal wash with a neti pot seems to reduce the risk of infection.
Mass-vaccination has considerable risks, it can lead to ever more volatile waves of infection
Vaccines contain harmful ingredients
Vaccines don’t work for coronaviruses. All previous coronavirus vaccines had failed in animal trials and the vaccinated animals became either severely ill or died after being exposed to the real virus. That is why there never was a safe vaccine for SARS coronavirus or for MERS coronavirus. And the spike protein itself is toxic. And there are too many variants.
Vaccines don’t even work for other respiratory illnesses (the flu vaccine is notoriously ineffective)
There is the risk of serious vaccine injuries, like antibody-dependent enhancement of infection/disease, etc. Pharmaceutical companies don't create cures, they create customers. Critics say that vaccines are one of the primary ways of doing so.
Quality control was lacking due to development and production in warp speed.
Finally, vaccines could be used as a tool for mass sterilization or mass depopulation. As Dr Mike Yeadon said, “Designing delayed toxicity into these technologies is rather simple.”
The film also suggests that the Covid-19 virus was the result of a lab-leak in China, and did not originate from an animal market in Wuhan. This is possible but there are several other theories as well, which the movie doesn’t mention. For instance, it has also been suggested that it was a bioweapon released by the US military, and Denis Rancourt’s conclusion was that since “there is no evidence that there was any particularly virulent pathogen causing excess mortality, the debate about gain-of-function research and an escaped bioweapon is irrelevant.” The movie also shows, without much criticism, the WHO-ordered lockdowns. According to Stanford Professor Dr. Bhattacharya, “it was utterly immoral to conduct this society-wide intervention without the evidence to justify it.”
There is plenty of unwarranted fear mongering about the Covid virus in the film, even young adults are shown as dying from the disease. This mainstream narrative has been criticized. For another view, see for instance Denis Rancourt who concludes that there was no excess mortality due to a virus in 2020, and that excess deaths occurred mainly because of the measures (ventilators, Remdesivir, vaccines...). The movie also cites misinformation about Covaxin's efficiency. At one point, Balram Bhargava says in the film: “only science can win this war”. And right after saying that, he puts on his face mask. This scientist doesn’t know that masks don’t work. In one of the last scenes of the movie, we see a group of school children saying to a vaccine scientist: "Thank you for the vaccine". But the movie doesn't show us any of the vaccine injured children, which include cases of myocarditis.
Not everybody can stomach the pro-vaccine propaganda in the film. It has come under criticism from Covid-19 vaccine skeptics and critics. Indian feminist and intellectual Madhu Kishwar has proposed an open debate on the vaccine issue. IIT-B professor Bhaskaran Raman wrote a critical review. The anti-vaxxer AIM group has called for a boycott. Another critic of the film, Venugopalan Govindan claims that he personally informed Balram Bhargava on the dangers of mass-vaccination but that Bhargava didn’t act. The film is based on Balram Bhargava’s book “Going Viral”.
This film was obviously made with good intentions. But as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The Vaccine War aims to praise women scientists and India's indigenous pharma industry, and to narrate the story in Bhargava's book Going Viral. But it can also be criticized that it shows a one-sided narrative and ignores many important issues.
One of the chief antagonists in the movie is the journalist Rohini Singh Dhulla. She is shown as a complete lackey and tool of the “foreign” pharma lobby, who is continuously attacking Priya Abraham (head of the National Institute of Virology, NIV) and other vaccine scientists. The film shows how these journalists attacking Covaxin were not neutral critics, but that they were simply lobbying for the allegedly more effective mRNA vaccines. She is also shown selling pictures of funeral pyres of alleged Covid victims - a nice example of how the media was selling fear porn during the plandemic. We also witness in the film how a pharma lobbyist instructs Rohini Singh to lobby for the foreign vaccines and he even sends her a toolkit. Toolkits have infamously been used in India for media manipulation. Countries and politicians all over the world were indeed pressurized to sign secret contracts with Pfizer or Moderna which granted legal indemnity should the Covid-19 vaccines cause harm. And the media played an important part in this effort.
The movie is at its best when it exposes the very real lobbying by journalists and politicians for the Pfizer vaccine in India. Unfortunately, this combination of criticism of mRNA vaccines together with selective pro-Vaccine propaganda makes the movie a limited hangout.
What Big Pharma wants us to believe is:
That we need to combat vaccine hesitancy and that vaccines are the only solution to pandemics
That we need to have the centralized power of the WHO to co-ordinate countries against this menace
That next time we need to do more with quicker and better coordination and control
That if there were problems with the Covid vaccines, we will make much better one’s next time, vaccines that are “indigenous” and based on “The Science”
Like the documentary film The Real Anthony Fauci, this movie should have exposed all these narratives. This would have been expected from the director of some of India’s most politically-incorrect films.
There are many reasons to have pride in the achievements of science in India, of women's scientists and of Indian leadership, but the Covid vaccines are not one of them. If there is something that India did better than other countries during the pandemic, it was the widespread use of alternative drugs (Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroqine, Ayurvedic drugs, et al.) and that India refused the mRNA vaccines (although the viral vector Covishield vaccine is almost as bad). The matter should also not be politicized: countries all over the world fell prey to this hoax because they had to obey by the IHR of the WHO, or were otherwise pressurized. In India, almost all politicians and journalists, left and right, supported the vaccines. And, like the film shows, many politicians supported the worst of the lot (mRNA vaccines).
What India needs most importantly is the ability to act independently during pandemics, and to provide its own "indigenous" solutions and measures to solve them. This will be be impossible once the WHO pandemic treaty comes into place which effectively will mean that nations lose their national sovereignty and become a controlled subsidiary of the WHO. Steve Kirsch said that nations are about "to hand over the keys to the pandemic response to the goofballs at the WHO." This is most urgent because nations have until December 1, 2023 to reject the amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). If approved, the IHR amendments would grant the WHO director-general dictatorial power to declare a public health emergency—even if the member state objects. The 2016 Law of epidemics and emergencies dictates that all signatory States must obey by the IHR. This explains why nations across the world locked down in 2020. The pandemic treaty will demand the fast-tracking of vaccines (100 days to develop vaccines for mass-vaccination), along with liability waivers for vaccine manufacturers. It might be a better idea for India's indigenous medical and public health system to dump the WHO than to build more mRNA factories.
Vivek Agnihotri’s last film was a classic that will stand the test of time. His new film The Vaccine War is unfortunately a disappointment. It may be a faithful screen adaption of Bhargava's book Going Viral, but this is also the movie's greatest weakness: it gets too close to the source material and ignores or downplays dissenting views.
This is a tricky film to review, especially by a non-medico relying on quotes of people who themselves have little knowledge of the virus or its ramifications. I would not comment further.