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AstraZeneca was “crowned” Britain’s first £200bn firm this week, according to fawning media reports as they announced record profits following their Covid vaccine and, coincidentally, a push into cancer cures presented as an astute gamble.

“Drug maker has benefited from its bet on developing a portfolio of cancer drugs,” is how the Financial Times reported it. In the Mail Online an “ambitious push into developing a pipeline of cancer drugs pays off.”

How big or daring or plucked out of thin air the gamble or bet was, in reality, I do wonder. The comments by readers were somewhat cynical too.

Ron Davies of Swansea earned top comment in Mail Online for his scathingly ironic: “Fantastic news. I’m so happy for them. In other news I really enjoyed the blood clot I had after the AstraZeneca jab that gave me a heart attack and almost finished me. Thanks again.”

Ballydancer57 of Hull said: “They should be sued by all of us damaged by their ‘vaccine.’” The comments continue in this vein, reader after reader describing medical horror stories they believe are linked to the vaccine.

Truthrunner said: “I never had cancer until I had that awful vaccine. I have now had it twice. Lung and Ovarian. Now this company is into cancer drugs. What does that tell you.”

Dono2, London said: “I was in hospital for three months after my second jab. Inflammation in every part of my body. Nothing works properly any more. They get 200 billion and I get life long inflammatory arthritis.”

We can approve or deny anecdotal evidence like this, which we hear and read every day, depending on our stance. We can believe what these victims say, or we can choose to believe that every single one of these poor people is mistaken, misled, and/or involved in a massive conspiracy to do vaccines down for some unfathomable reason.

Given that the collective view still seems to be that we ought not question the Covid injections too thoroughly, or if we do, we should keep our doubts to ourselves so as not to upset those who have had them, or break myriad public health rules that forbid such discussion, finding hard evidence is always nice for an “anti-vaxxer” like me.

And I have just come across some really rock-hard evidence that has been hiding in plain sight all along.

It turns out the ultimate insider exposé on the jab and its shortcomings is readily available in a paperback at all good retailers, and it is written by two of the vaccine makers.

This surprised me, as someone who has spent the past few years researching, very much against the authorities’ instructions not to, by delving into mind-numbingly difficult research papers.

I had to get into the subject in a big way being thrust into a defensive position after I refused the jab and got labeled “anti-vaxxer”—a term of abuse then, now a badge of honor, increasingly.

But until now I had never read the book Vaxxers, by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, the scientists who designed the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, perhaps because I assumed it would be pro-vax propaganda. Far from it.

I was at a friend’s house for the weekend and during a break from the swimming pool, I found the book on her bookshelves and was amazed to find that these two women spill the beans.

They painstakingly explain how they did it, and what they did it with, down to the last astonishing detail, and they detail all the mistakes, too.

These two ladies were decorated by the British honors system—one Damed, one OBE’d—for inventing the Oxford AZ, or ChAdOx1 nCov-19, which is an adenovirus vaccine.

I can only explain their unguarded candor because they wrote Vaxxers at a time when it was widely believed they had saved mankind, or so they seem to believe. They make the point frequently. “We had made a vaccine for the world,” concludes one chapter. Elsewhere they boast: “We are two ordinary people who…did something extraordinary…. I think we all felt we had done something enormous.” Yes, you certainly had.

If you can’t bear all the self-congratulation, skip to page 70 where they begin describing their process. The first stage is “editing” the spike protein, changing its DNA sequence, adding a “short extra sequence onto the beginning of the spike protein’s code.” The result provokes the body into making a bigger response—that sequence “tells the vaccinated human cell to make larger quantities of the spike protein.” Which is great, if you want more spike protein inside you, I guess.

Then from page 100 you get “Step One: Make the starting material,” which describes the next stage of their recipe and method.

The culinary metaphor is one the ladies use themselves, by the way, so I don’t feel it’s insulting or sexist. They repeatedly refer to the vaccine methodology as like baking bread. They even liken it to sourdough, which is ironic, given how sour this all went for them.

The U.K. government stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine in winter 2021. In May this year, AstraZeneca withdrew the vaccine from sale in other countries.

But back to the method. They took “the pre-baked ChAdOx1 vaccine that Vaccitech had prepared earlier”—see it’s just like Blue Peter—“and combined it with the synthetic DNA that coded for the spike protein”—in a super strong way as they’ve already described. Then they mixed it with some human cell material—“the DNA needed to be inserted into living cells.” So they “introduced the DNA into a special type of lab-grown human cell known as HEK293 cells.”

Sounds all right, doesn’t it? Just science things with codes and numbers.

Now a bit of “transfection,” the method of inserting the synthetic DNA into a human cell, getting it through your cells’ lipid fatty layer that normally acts as a boundary to stop foreign stuff getting into them, because the body is clever like that.

“The DNA for the vaccine cannot get across that membrane into the cells,” they explain. So they “put it in a solution that coats it in a bubble similar to the lipid layer that makes up the outside of the HEK293 cell.”

The vaccine DNA is mixed with the HEK293 cells and the two lipid surfaces fuse together, like “when two washing up bubbles become one big bubble.” See? It’s just like washing up.

But hang on, what actually is this HEK293, you may well ask.

Well, if you persevere to page 212, they explain that: ‘HEK stands for ‘human embryonic kidney.’”

“HEK293 cells all originate from the kidneys of a single foetus aborted in the Netherlands in the 1970s, and have been used to manufacture large quantities of many drugs and vaccines that now save lives.”

They explain the opposition to it as concern generated by “the religious right in the United States” and “devout Catholics.”

The use of HEK293 cells was once opposed by the Vatican, but they dropped their objection after Covid.

If you are uncomfortable with it, the explanation in this book is that it’s all right because “only this one legally aborted foetus was used to generate all the billions of HEK293 cells that will ever be needed.” Feel better?

If, like me, you don’t really think it is okay on the basis that it’s just one, then you should be more feminist, is the authors’ approach.

“In an ideal world it would not be necessary for very many abortions ever to be carried out. So an ideal world is what legislators should be looking to create…. Legislators need to stop rape from happening…”

Feel better now? Also, they explain, they might one day be able to use animal cells, for example from the kidney of an African green monkey. Feel better now?

“In 2020, there was no alternative to using HEK293 cells.” Feel better now?

A lot of the most shocking stuff is in the footnotes in small print, and way into the book. You’ll have to wait until page 205 to get to “a very small number of people developing a rare type of blood clot soon after being vaccinated,” for example, and you’ll have to screw your eyes up to read the footnote below written by Ms. Gilbert that says, in tiny print, “I was of course distressed that our vaccine might be causing harm…. I set about trying to find a plausible explanation…’ But she doesn’t come up with one, not in this footnote anyway.

Elsewhere, on page 108, Gilbert and Green admit they did not fumigate the lab before starting the Covid vaccine work and after suspending work on an Ebola vaccine. “The suite had been fully cleaned and fumigated just before we started the Ebola vaccine manufacture in January.”

Oh, that’s alright, then. “We thought very carefully about the risks that would come with skipping fumigation.” And then they skipped it, because “fumigation would take three weeks.”

The U.K. regulator MHRA, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, “agreed with our approach,” and they add that the relationship between them and the regulator “is a critical part of this story.” Yes, indeed, I bet it is. Try telling the MHRA you’ve been vaccine injured—I tried and failed to register my mother and father’s various tumors, bloods clots, bleeds, and heart attacks since vaccination—and see what they say and do if you want to get a feel for that relationship between vaccine makers and regulators.

Gilbert and Green (they sound like a pair of comic opera composers, don’t they?) also admit it normally takes three to four months to make a vaccine “starting material,” but here they used the “rapid method” and proceeded “at risk,” which means running each stage alongside each other instead of waiting at the end of each stage to see if there are problems before proceeding.

“In the event,” they write, “many things did go wrong.” The strength of doses made in the U.K. compared with those made with a different method in Italy perplexes them greatly, for example.

But, of course, they will say I’m scaremongering simply by quoting any of this.

Scaremongering used to be a word to describe spreading lies, but now it can mean spreading truth.

It is not the scary thing itself that is the problem; it is the knowledge of the thing that is the problem, according to the authorities.

The best I can do, therefore, is suggest you buy this book, and if you decide you’re happy with what it describes, then you’ve put money into two scientists’ pockets whom you will want to reward for their ingenuity, and if you don’t like what you read, then you’ve learned something you will be glad to know.