To: Tamura Norihisa, Minister of Health
From: Consumers Union of Japan
14 January 2021
Open Letter of Inquiry Regarding the COVID-19 Vaccine
On 8 September 2020, Consumers Union of japan (CUJ) sent an open letter of inquiry to your ministry regarding the new coronavirus vaccine. Since we did not receive a response after the deadline of 23 September, we contacted you twice to request a response. You replied that you were “working on it,” but we have yet to receive a response. Therefore, we are now sending you another letter of inquiry as follows.
Your Ministry has reached an agreement with Pfizer Inc. of the United States, AstraZeneca of the United Kingdom, and Moderna of the United States to supply a vaccine (a new type of biovaccine) as a countermeasure against COVID-19 infection, and has already announced that you hope to start vaccination in February. This vaccine is a completely new type of vaccine that has never been used before, and it will be administered on a large scale at a stage when its efficacy, sustainability and safety are not well understood.
Vaccines have been causing health problems, especially in children, due to adverse reactions. Vaccines, unlike drugs, are given to healthy people. We need to be more cautious than ever. Moreover, this time, large-scale vaccination is being considered. In particular, we have strong concerns about the possibility of increased adverse reactions among medical professionals, the elderly, and those working in facilities for the elderly, who will be effectively forced to be vaccinated. For this reason, we would like to ask the following questions.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, but we would appreciate your response in writing by 29 January 2021. The answers will be shared within and outside our organization.
Notes
1. Unlike conventional vaccines, the vaccine for COVID-19 infection (the new biovaccine) is a human genetic recombination in which genes are introduced into the body. Moreover, the effectiveness and sustainability of the vaccine have hardly been confirmed, and the harmfulness of the vaccine is not well understood. This is clearly a human experiment. Please tell us why you are in such a hurry to conduct this kind of human experiment.
2. The current vaccination program is effectively forcing medical personnel, the elderly, and people working in facilities for the elderly to be vaccinated. This is causing a lot of concern among people working in hospitals and facilities and their families. The new biotech vaccine is still at the stage of human experimentation, and we believe that de facto compulsory vaccination is a human rights violation.
3. The human immune system is complex, and if the new biotech vaccine, which works in a way that has never been experienced before, interferes with this complex system, there is a risk that it will cause allergies, hypersensitivity, and autoimmune diseases. There is also a risk of antibody-dependent enhancement of infection (ADE), which is an increase in viral infection, and vaccine-related respiratory disease (ERD). What do you think about this point?
4. The real picture of COVID-19 is still unknown, and problems such as the rapid decline of immune response in infected people have been pointed out. In addition, mutant viruses are appearing one after another. Even if the new biovaccine is effective, there are concerns that it will soon lose its effectiveness, and that vaccination may lead to more mutated viruses. What do you think about the need for drastic measures from a long-term perspective rather than vaccination?
Activists from Japanese consumer organizations and farmers’ groups protested again against the unregulated GABA tomato on Earth Day 22 April 2021. Sanatech Seed is introducing its genome-edited tomato this spring without any safety checks and no mandatory labelling. “It is a genetically modified food and consumers have no idea if it is safe or not, and no way of avoiding it, once it reaches the market,” said one of the speakers at the protest action outside Sanatech’s offices in central Tokyo. This is the second effort to stop the release of the GMO tomato, which is said to be engineered to have “high levels of GABA” without much research to support the claims.