The AstraZeneca Files
A look back at AstraZeneca, from the trials to the withdrawal
Dr Ros Jones, retired Consultant Paediatrician, convenor Children’s Covid Vaccines Advisory Council
This article was published on 18th July 2026 in the last edition of The Conservative Woman and reproduced the next day on Kathy Gyngell’s new substack publication, The Right Times.
I am republishing it again here but have removed the links to articles in TCW as sadly these no longer work so have replaced with links to the associated HART articles.
I know I was not alone at my sense of loss at the pending closure of TCW. In the comments below Kathy’s article last week, I wrote “So sorry to hear that Kathy. You have been the absolute go to for publishing all our open letters to politicians and regulators about the recklessness of gene-based vaccines for children for a condition that doesn’t affect them.” Needless to say, Kathy replied with an offer to publish more on the AstraZeneca files, so here I go.
My first wake-up call on the reckless disregard for children came in February 2021 when I was watching the early evening BBC News. A researcher from Oxford University was inviting children aged 6-17 to join a trial of AstraZeneca vaccine, at a time when we had no medium let alone long-term safety data for adults and in the clear knowledge that children were minimally impacted. My email to Professor Andrew Pollard who was leading the trial in Oxford, received an surprisingly prompt reply within 10 minutes, effectively agreeing they did not know if the vaccine was safe for children, hence the trial. He also pointed out that other manufacturers were also doing trials in children, as if that made it okay.
The full correspondence has been published on the HART website.
As someone who has led a number of clinical trials in children, I am well aware of and indeed was required to complete training in Research Governance. The requirements of the Helsinki Declaration and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are very clear that no research can be carried out on children (or indeed on adults who lack the capacity to give their own informed consent) unless there is a clear possibility of benefit to the child.
The irony of this trial was that only a week or two before the Oxford children’s trial began recruiting, had been the first death of a healthy young adult, a clinical psychologist who took the vaccine because he was about to start working at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. Stephen Wright suffered a major stroke due to thrombosis in the cerebral venous system. Deaths the following month in Holland and Denmark lead to suspension of the AZ vaccine and an urgent investigation there. The condition of Vaccine Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopaenia (VITT) was described and AZ was withdrawn for under 50s in most countries in Europe. Here we were told the clots could be co-incidental and no action would be taken unless a larger signal was seen. The children’s trial was initially stopped, but was restarted a few weeks later after AZ had been withdrawn in the UK for under 30s.
It was also about this time that a clear mission creep began to appear in the press. In October 2020, Kate Bingham, the Vaccine Tsar, said that “There’s going to be no vaccination of people under 18. It’s an adult-only vaccine, for people over 50, focusing on health workers and care home workers and the vulnerable.” and this was confirmed in November 2020 by Matt Hancock - “This is an adult vaccine for the adult population.”
But in February 2021, SAGE member Professor John Edmunds was telling Andrew Marr on BBC, that “we can all spread the virus, and so until we’ve all been vaccinated and I include children here, then there is going to be a significant risk of a resurgence … I think there’s an argument for turning to children as fast as we can”. In other words, he was already suggesting a policy which contravened the requirement for a direct benefit to the child, written into international law.
Alerted to the pending approval of Pfizer BioNTech for children, I got together a group of health professionals and academics and we wrote to the MHRA a fully referenced letter in May 2021 outlining our safety and ethical concerns. This letter was published by the Daily Telegraph and with a follow-up article the following day but then surprisingly all my subsequent emails went unanswered. If was only two years later that I learned the Editor of the Telegraph had been approached by the press officer for the MHRA and told that if they published more articles critical of the vaccines, then they would lose their press conference pass (they had already published in March 2021 details of the deaths in Europe from VITT described above). And of course our subsequent letter in June 2021 to Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer, resulted in someone from his department sending it and all our names to the Counter Disinformation Unit.
Since that time, all our open letters have been published on TCW. Here are a few examples from the HART website, all of which and many more were published thanks to Kathy:
Open letter to Chief Medical Officers 06-09-2021
Open letter to MHRA: 14-11-2021
Open Letter to MHRA on vaccines for 0-5s 06-12-2022
By autumn 2021, AZ had effectively been dropped from the UK covid vaccine programme, with no explanation, just ‘not currently available’. The official endorsement of Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines implied somehow that they were safer, even to the point of being ‘SAFE©’. In the US, a legal team obtained a court order compelling Pfizer to release all their safety information regarding their vaccine, after Pfizer and the FDA had initially refused to respond to FOIA requests or delay publication for 75 years. But there was no comparable data trail for AstraZeneca.
In the UK in 2022, HART group worked with Cheryl Grainger and PJHLaw in a FOI request for all the AstraZeneca data, as reported here. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was a belated refusal, followed by a failed appeal, followed by a complaint to the Information Commissioner.
Meanwhile, the Vaccine Injured & Bereaved UK (VIBUK) group began pursuing a legal case against AstraZeneca. Those injured or bereaved, as a result of VITT, are suing AZ for damages.
While our case to the Information Commissioner ultimately yielded nothing, VIBUK’s legal team are gradually obtaining more information from depositions into court. In the latest update on their Crowd Justice funding page, 6th July 2026, they report that their legal team are dissecting no less than 90,000 documents supplied by AstraZeneca. These include “internal communications between key players in AstraZeneca from September 2020 until June 2021 and should provide important insights into what AstraZeneca knew about the side effects caused by their vaccine and when this information was known to them.”
Be assured this information will reach the public sooner or later. I remind readers that in 2020, a senior AstraZeneca executive, when justifying the government indemnity for their vaccine, said “this is a unique situation where we as a company simply cannot take the risk if in … four years the vaccine is showing side effects”.
Finally, a huge thank you to Kathy and her team for going fearlessly where many even in the ‘alternative’ media were reluctant to tread. Publication will continue on her new Substack @RightTimes.
Postscript, the following HART articles give more details from the AstraZeneca files:
AstraZeneca children’s trial breaches Helsinki – HART 31/07/23 (letters from 16/02/2021)
Vaccine update - Worrying new safety signals emerge - 24/06/2021
How to measure vaccine harms - Flawed reporting system doesn’t measure scale of the problem - 11/03/2022
Re: FOIA Request to MHRA on behalf of HART group - Request for data reviewed by MHRA in respect to AstraZeneca products - 18/10/2022
Freedom of information request to the MHRA, for all AstraZeneca data - 01/11/2022
Whatever happened to the AstraZeneca FOI? - The mysterious case of the missing information.... - 08/11/2023
Three years on from the first covid vaccine death - Why did MHRA take no action? - 06/02/2024
Have the MHRA admitted causation for any vaccine harm? From blood clots to myocarditis the answer is still unbelievably ‘no’! - 26/04/2024
AstraZeneca product withdrawn - ‘Rare events’ back in the spotlight - 24/05/2024
Covid vaccine injured - Silent no More - 03/03/2025
"..We can all spread the virus, and so until we’ve all been vaccinated and I include children here.."
And the media/govts took this to mean "..The Vaxx stops the spread of a respiratory virus..."
From the same group of utter $clowns$ at the same time making a vaxx for a cohort(children)with near zero risk.
And I was a fringe nutter to mock this...whilst banned from entering many friends homes..
I watched a mother and child standing Knee deep in the ocean on a sunny/warm and windy day, with masks on at Mona Vale Beach NSW and then walked past an obese guy heading to the beach with a mask on..
And I was the anti science nutter ...
The key information remains NOT whether any "vaccine" was safe and effective, and whether masks worked or didn't, or social distancing or lockdowns.
The key information is that none of it was necessary and they knew or should have.