The controversial vaccine maker who raised $1 million for an Australian COVID-19 vaccine candidate with no public data proving its effectiveness, is seeking more donations while also railing against the “new world order”.
Nikolai Petrovsky designed COVAX-19, a COVID vaccine that sought to be the first and only approved Australian-made shot. Last year he garnered attention — and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations — by refusing to get an approved vaccine despite his work’s mandate and by publicly smearing the reputation of approved and proven mRNA vaccines. As a result, conspiracy and anti-vaccine communities widely shared Petrovsky’s interviews.
Despite touting promising results and claiming his vaccine had been administered millions of times in Iran, both Petrovsky and the acting chair of the Human Research Ethics Committee told participants in Australian trials last year that they should seek an approved vaccine, The Australian reported.
The committee’s acting chair, David Evans, told participants last year that the committee was “not aware of any scientific evidence of efficacy of the COVAX-19 vaccine to meet Australian TGA standards”.
Petrovsky and his company, Vaxine, have continued to run trials and hype up the vaccine. International press reported that Petrovsky had announced that he had adapted COVAX-19 for animals. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) fined him $13,320 for unlawful advertising of the vaccine on Facebook and YouTube. He also appeared as a witness for a challenge to vaccine mandates where he said the shot does not reduce COVID-19 transmission.
Petrovsky and his partner, Sharen Pringle, stopped accepting donations for the vaccine’s development after they reached their $1 million target in February. Since then, they have offered only a few updates about the progress of their trials.
Public clinical trial data lists two current trials for COVAX-19 in Australia. Neither has reached the stage of recruiting participants. Both are supported by the not-for-profit Australian Respiratory and Sleep Medicine Institute (ARASMI), an organisation that lists Petrovsky as a member of its research committee. ARASMI did not respond to questions about its participation in the trials.
In an update this month, Pringle claimed that they obtained a six-month extension on lodging their application of vaccine approval with the TGA to “collect additional data to further strengthen the application”. While lashing out at media reports about the vaccine, Pringle blamed the “new world order” as the reason for scrutiny of their unapproved vaccine.
“We are not just challenging the federal and state health departments and the mRNA vaccines, but the World Economic Forum and behind them the massive vested interests that are really pulling all the political strings here in Australia and in most Western countries under cover of the pandemic,” she wrote.
Pringle encouraged those receiving GoFundMe updates to donate to ARASMI for supporting the clinical trials: “Thank you all for your kind and supportive comments.”
The pair did not respond to a Crikey interview request through Vaxine.
The heady aroma of pure charlatanism….
And again – it is clear you spent quite some quality time drafting that brilliant response.
“I love the smell of snake-oil in the morning……………….”
It is concerning that a journalist from such a prestigious media source can have an article accepted that contains such poor journalism. So let’s just do some fact checking :
> The controversial vaccine maker who raised $1 million for an Australian COVID-19 vaccine candidate, with no public data proving its effectiveness
So please tell me how a local company with comparatively no help/funding from the government is going to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of their vaccine next to no funding. Good on the folks the helped fund the Australian trials that are currently underway on an absolute shoe-string.The major vaccine players are doing this with billions of dollars of funding. The output of their research might be considered somewhat wanting.
>, is seeking more donations
Please note that the company’s seeking donations was in the form of contributions to the Australian Respiratory and Sleep Medicine Institute (ARASMI), a government-accredited charitable research organisation that supports local Covid-19 research
audited annually, which reports its activities to the Australian government as required for such organisations, and all its board members provide their time free of charge.
>Nikolai Petrovsky .. garnered attention .. by refusing to get an approved vaccine despite his work’s mandate
I believe that given the faith he had in is company’s vaccine he felt compelled to administer doses of his own vaccine to add moral weight to his belief in the medicine. The demand for him to be additionally injected with novel vaccine on top would have added much greater risk to his personal health due to the unknowns of such a combination of treatments.
>and by publicly smearing the reputation of approved and proven mRNA vaccines.
Unlike the ‘author’ of this article, Professor Petrovsky has spent decades navigating the complexities of vaccine development,
Is the author at all aware of the nuanced statements that Petrovsky actually made regarding what was, and what was not know about the novel mRNA vaccines? Decades of experience required to make the nuanced statements and I’d guess zero experience of the author who can just rattle off some piece of the lazy narrative.
>both Petrovsky and the acting chair of the Human Research Ethics Committee told participants in Australian trials last year that they should seek an approved vaccine,
Yes and as someone who has made vaccines his life’s work, Petrovsky believed that where no other safe alternatives were available, the benefits might well out-weigh the risks for the most vulnerable members of our community.
>[as for] blamed the “new world order”
It would seem certainly reasonable that they might well be asking what on earth could be motivating such a single- and bloody-minded campaign to prevent a local Australian company from being able to provide a safe and effective vaccine to the world.
Could go on but – Hey – you get the idea – have the adult journalists left the room?
“….the Australian Respiratory and Sleep Medicine Institute (ARASMI), a government-accredited charitable research organisation……”
It’s a registered charity.
There is absolutely zero “Government Accreditation” in being a registered charity.
The IPA is a registered charity.
Are they “Government-accredited”?
In short, terrible, terrible journalism.
Ahh Cam I must confess that I am a conservative in one area only and that is Australian culture. Shot is an Americanism and all those that use it in Australia should be the recipients being shot in a literal sense.
Agree but I find ‘jab’ unappealing – can anyone think of a suitable one syllable word?