Nikolai Petrovsky's update on his unapproved Australian vaccine COVAX-19 (Image: Supplied/GoFundMe)

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.