Why Dame June should stay on at the MHRA

Revolving doors are an easy way out.

This article was originally posted on 28 February 2024. We are posting it again as a prelude to the forthcoming MHRA series. At the end of the series, we will ask you whether Dame June should stand in front of Parliament and be accountable for her actions.

In the summer of 2023, we expressed our doubts about the UK MHRA’s ability to carry out its role of pharmacovigilance in an impartial way. Specifically, the MHRA seemed unable to follow through with deaths reported following Covid immunisation (see Readings).

We wrote in a Mail Online article, “In September 2020, the MHRA signed a contract with a firm called Genpact (UK) for the extraction of data from the Yellow Card reports. Although heavily redacted, the statement of works is clear: “to extract ADR data from the Covid-19 related yellow cards…for selected data fields…”

The background to TTE’s observations was a reader’s complaint about the lack of follow-up…