Just for FM1
I am a concerend citizen and a father of two children!! There seem to some major issues with this type of vaccine and the authorities close their eyes and are not taking their responsibility as they should.
There only seem to be major issues because you are influenced by antivax propaganda. Or, your definition of vaccine issues is inflated relative to virus issues. Do you have evidence the authorities do that? Is this not taking responsibility?
or this?
or this
Being a concerned citizen is exactly what now defines anti Vaxer. No questions no concern or you are an anti Vaxer. The true stupidity of members here here yelling anti Vaxer is that most of us have been vaccinated. We took the jab on a leap of faith with the understanding that no infection, no transmitting no hospital and no death, right jed, you claimed that many many times and none is true, but we show concern and jed and Thomas call us anti vaxers .
I think that is what many complain about. Antivaxxers, many of them, get vaccinated and then spend their time trying to persuade gullible other people not to get vaccinated. Believe me, those antivax videos and conferences get reported and find their way into social media stories that stop vulnerable people from getting vaccinated. i'm sure you do not intend that. get real, it happens, which is why most people are careful about speculation and most definitely careful about not spreading lies.
Now I can see, FM1, that you feel whether the vaccine is good enough to prevent delta spread is a big deal. Not sure about US, but the regulators, and in the Uk, we all took the vaccine because we personally don't want to get ill. A benefit is we are less likely to transmit it to others. All that is true. No-one said they knew how long the vaccine would last - 6 months is a good deal in that context, and it looks like some protection lasts at least 12 months.
If you had covid before then the benefits are smaller for you personally, but they remain real. and teh downside, possible side effects, are much lower probability than the increased covid nasties downside of not being vaccinated.
The authorities believe that. Maybe you don't and you believe antivaxxer propaganda about how the vaccines are bad. That is your choice. Don't blame others for it, or assume most scientists will have views that align with the outliers.
Good point made in this video about how mainstream scientists think about nothing but the possible emergence of new variants, and how when dissenting just one person scientific views were given at conferences, as used to be, they were useful. They make everyone else thing, challenge assumptions. But they are usually wrong. The problem with the internet is that those outlying probably wrong views are given equal platform with the what most people think more usual views. The people listening are not scientists at a specialist conference, and have no way to put things into perspective.
And back to preventing delta spread. In the Uk it is preventing a massive increase in infection which would overwhelm our hospitals. it is not giving us true herd immunity - because we have a lot of the younger population not vaccinated, and because delta is very high transmission, and because the vaccine is not perfect (all three).
Personally I am worried about high infection rates leading to new variants. That would happen with or without vaccine: escape variants emerge (like delta) because they outcompete the original when an epidemic is past its natural peak and most people have immunity. The vaccine is not well adapted to delta so is actually not much giving preference to new escape variants - which is good. i'd rather we had a vaccine that could shut down infection completely - but that seems unlikely. Anyway, you need the whole world shutting covid down completely to prevent new variants. It ain't gonna happen.
Two Scandinavian countries have declared that their health authorities will place at least a temporary pause on using the Moderna mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine due to safety concerns based on reports of side effects such as myocarditis. The Swedish health agency’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, went on the record stating, “The connection is especially clear when it comes to Moderna’s Spikevax, especially after the second dose.” While the health authorities here acknowledge the incidences are rare, there is enough concern to issue the halt, at least temporarily for young people.
And this proves my point that the regulators look really carefully at all the risks. This pause may or may not continue, it shows regulators doing their jobs. Of course in trms of personal benefit when you have multiple vaccines it is easy to stop one for a given age-group - since they do not end up unvaccinated and at risk!
Vaccine works very well and do have side effect but they are small. But the risk is small also with covid for the young population. Comparing small probabilities are difficult and unknowns like long term effect means that vaccinating the young population can be questioned without being anti vacc in general.
Absolutely.
My beef with the antivaxxers here is that they are not engaging with the literature and doing a careful estimate of these risks. They are using partial data and pure speculation without checking its validity. I would not mind if noone else was doing this, but it is exactly what the regulatory risk surveillance reports do, and there is also a lot of data available in the literature which shows these antivax memes plain wrong.
Of course the COVID risk goes down with age. The vaccine risks are miuch smaller, and much more difficult to determine age dependence.
The more you subgroup the questions: what are the risks for children between ages of 8 and 9 - The more difficult it is to get accurate data, but having said that you can look at overall slopes of curves and make estimates.
The main problem in estimating risks is that many vaccine side effects will be indistinguishable from normal illness, and they happen well below the natural background, so you cannot work out a signal is there without enormous numbers. And the COVID risks are similarly low.
My stance is that I reckon everyone in the world will catch COVID within 5 years, and most within 3 years, if unprotected. So these small vaccine risks can be compared against the (better understood and larger) COVID risks.
If your child is vaccinated they may with very low probability die. But if not vaccinated they may also die from COVID, with a higher, but also very low, probability.
In terms of uncertainty the possibility of uncertain vaccine risks is dwarfed by the possibility of uncertain long COVID risks.
The UK regulators are doing a best effort personal risk comparison, and they go down to age 12 quite happily, but say the (health) personal benefits are not clear at age 12. They are by the way not saying the vaccine has the same risk as COVID at that age - they are saying we do not yet have enough data to be sure the vaccine risks are lower than COVID risks. With time, that will change. 6 months ago the UK regulators were unwilling to allow vaccine for anyone younger than 18.
That is pretty typical of what regulators in different countries do - and they all take different decisions. their decision is also affected by likley COVID rates. If you reckon your children will NOT catch COVID you are less likley, as a regulator, to reckon giving them vaccine is personally advantageous.
One more thing: the UK decision here was based on medicine and did not consider indirect benefits: less time isolating off school, less chance of infecting carers who might be worse affected, and this in turn could affect the life chances of the child, those ar valid extra considerations. it is the same argument as the (valid) argument against lockdown that it damages child schooling and possibly development - in fact it tends to affect socially deprived children hard, and well supported at home children not at all.
The antivaxxers here are not doing a balanced best effort risk assessment. You may argue that not enough effort is put into that, but if you dig into the literature there is lots. It is just that sensible people working in this area give all the caveats on their data, and put it into context. No-one wants to fuel antivaxxer hysteria.
There is a proper debate about whether age 9 the vaccine or COVID will end up more risky to children in medical terms, I can't get very excited because the risks in both cases are so very low.
The risk balance for anyone 18 or over is very strongly on the side of vaccine saving lives, and also more important nasty long-term damage from MIS-C, long COVID, etc.
Could I just ask:
(A) Does anyone dispute that those who have been double vaccinated within the last 6 months have a reduced risk of mortality, ICU, hospitalisation of at least 5X compared with naive (never infected) individuals (that is 80% protection compared with those not)?
(I am deliberately understating the case by quite a big factor to be uncontentious)
(B) Does anyone dispute that the risk of dying from delta COVID the first time you catch it, in a Western population, averages > 0.5%
(again I'm understating the real average IFR for unvaccinated populations with delta by a large factor to avoid contention)
(C) In order to get so-called natural immunity (that is COVID-infection immunity) you need to catch COVID and therefore bear the risk from B) or A) according to whether you were vaccinated first
(D) A third COVID jab resets immunity at least to what it was immediately after 2nd jab. We can't yet be sure, but there is every indication that immunity will last at a high level for another 6 months after it, replicating 2nd jab. It might be a bit better.
(E) The average death rate from the COVID vaccine (3 jabs total) is less than 125 : 100,000
I chose this because it is actually the background death rate of a Western population over 6 weeks, counting 14 days from each jab. The crude death rate (whole population) for the UK is 10 per 1000 people per year, so over 1.5 months (1/8 year) we expect 1.25 people to die out of 1000. In other words, for 2 weeks after each shot you run double your normal risk of dying. So just counting deaths close to a vaccine jab, if you vaccinate the whole population, you will get that many deaths from other causes.
(this is an overestimate of vaccine risks by a factor of 100 - 10,000. I am making it to show that even under these ridiculous assumptions, underestimating benefits and overestimating risks, whole population vaccination is beneficial).
Now, if you argue with A,B,C, D or E please could I hear quantitative reasons? Not just - here is a reason things might be a bit less good, but here are the numbers I claim about how much less good.
Otherwise, given all antivaxxers are capable of doing basic multiplication and division, we have:
Without vaccine, given everyone catches COVID within 2 years (reasonable), 0.5% of population die prematurely from COVID. In the UK that is approx 345,000
With the vaccine, given everyone is vaccinated before catching COVID, 0.1% (not 100% protection) + 0.125% (that assumes vaccine death rate as high as whole population background - which is what antivaxxers who ignore background claim) = 0.225%
Thus in this case, even accepting antivaxxer memes which are provably wrong by a factor of 100 or so, the vaccine is saving 50% of the overall (COVID + vaccine) deaths.
This also illustrates why the antivaxxers are wrong about vaccine risks. The whole population background death risk is quite high - even over a period of 6 weeks we get 0.125%. That is dominated by older people, who are more likely to die, of course. Just as the COVID death rate is dominated by older people.
VAERS, given a new vaccine, will tend (as it should) to record any suspicious death close in time to a vaccination. VAERS is meant to find possible unanticipated low level side effects, and a new vaccine could do anything. So we expect a VAERS recorded COVID vaccine death rate close to the background death rate - multiplied by the window of time considered close enough to a vaccine to be suspicious (e.g. 2 weeks after, or 4 weeks after, whatever).
So, anyway, I'd be interested in all the antivaxxers here (I'm sorry, but while it is a known thing that all antivaxxers say not me - I'm not an antivaxxer) the last few pages, endorsed by many here and refuted by exactly 1 (Jed) with minimal help from Alan, have been pure antivaxxer propaganda where every single story is first cherry-picked and then slanted in a way that sounds bad about vaccines. Typical of this is the phraseology use to describe the reduction in vaccine efficacy over time which Jed rightly pointed out is highly biased: 95% protection = ultralow protection.
I've heard of IgG, IgA, IgE, IgM and IgD. Never heard of IgN and IgS.
And my apologies - i elided S-IgG as IgS, N-IgG as IgN
Where: S = spike protein, N = nucleoprotein
From:
THH
Another industry tactic, making excuses. You and jed are very forgiving of experts errors and mistakes that have cost lives! Maybe you two are the real death cult members!
In this case, viewing a one-off contamination event due to a broken machine when we have billions of doses of a new vaccine produced as normal, any normal person would reckon this is expected.
Otherwise, I tend to be forgiven of mistakes made where there was no time to think things through and so much was initially not known.
Some of the mistakes were politicians covering their own backs - or saying whatever was politically good. That is nothing to do with experts.
Suppose you make a case for experts being bulpable as you expect (criminally negligent)?
The only criminal behaviour I can see is people who increase vaccine hesitancy knowing the consequences.
Thanks for your posting with evidence from an other part of the world. If you find such evidence in Germany AND Japan, it could well appear somewhere else and I would call it "universal".
So it seems even the manufacturing process is experimental.
This is giving confidence and trust for the jab a real boost!
You maybe need to look at exactly from where the German evidence came? I'd bet it is the same Japanese batches that have been recalled and were highly advertised. No-one covers thi stuff up and like any food when things are contaminated they get recalled.
In this case I doubt much harm was done, given the nature of the contamination.
With billions of jabs some will go wrong!
THH
I think W needs to view this. It is a useful video.
I don't often talk about agendas - people seem to think I have one. I reckon you deal with content not motives.
But in this case Geert Vanden Bossche makes me break this rule.
Geert is the TSN op-ed editor - we can now see where a lot of there sentiment comes from. And its not pretty.
We have a pretty good idea where the other traffic is coming from though, having run a few backlink checks on his domain. Almost every single anti-vaxx website, alternate health website, covid conspiracy website, and even radical, Republican funded qanon styled sites have adopted Vanden Bossche, propelling him overnight to international digital stardom and enabling (which is their actual goal) the dissemination of his divisive articles and videos to a large audience. They believe they’re using Vanden Bossche to further their own agendas.
I suspect exactly the opposite is true. I think, and I’m not alone in this assumption, that Vanden Bossche has an ulterior motive and its financial. As we’ve already stated, he is intelligent and driven, but not by an altruistic desire to save his fellow man from the impending vaccine catastrophe he has prophesized.
Rather, it is to sell the world an alternative vaccine, designed and developed by none other than Vanden Bossche himself.
If you think this is a ridiculous proposition, we suggest your read up on the disgraced Andrew Wakefield, the king of the vaccine con and arguably the founder of the anti-vaxx movement. Ironic that both mens’ attempts to enrich themselves have led to a slavelike following of individuals apparently devoid of independent thought. In fact, Wakefield may very well have provided a blueprint for Vanden Bossche’s scam, the two appear similar.
Vanden Bossche has created the ultimate medical con, one that is sufficiently complex to prevent his victims (the general public) from understanding it and they are therefore dependant on accepting his individual and professional credentials which on the surface appear beyond reproach. Vanden Bossche maintains an air of absolute conviction and professional dependability throughout, selling himself and by association, his ideas.
It would have been possible for him to explain his concept in far simpler terms, but it’s noticeable that these simpler phrases are retained for the shock statements, the warnings, and the “dire consequences”. The paper he created was never intended for professional dissemination and would have been ripped to pieces by his colleagues. It was designed entirely for you, dear reader. for the general public, to flummox and confuse, and judging by the interest he has generated, it’s been a spectacular success.
When it comes to this kind of work, never trust the man, trust the science. And science has proven him to be an incontrovertible fake.
And Vanden Bossche has a limited supply of it. In another six -12 months, the glaring flaws in his arguments are going to become apparent as the world does not succumb to his predicted supervirus. Also, his new conspiracy fans are a fickle mob, driven by whatever is trending on social media. In two months’ time, he’s going to be old news and it may very well be this aspect that has prompted America to do almost nothing to counteract his wild claims.
The statistics shown above indicate just how mistaken the American approach to Vanden Bossch has been. Since early April and probably well into June, he will continue to spread disinformation and distrust in the vaccines at an unprecedented rate, encouraging millions to reconsider getting vaccinated and contributing to the American failure to reach herd level immunization. Of course, Vanden Bossche can’t be credited with single-handedly contributing to America’s vaccine hesitancy.
There has been a continuous and sustained attack on vaccines almost since the idea for rapid vaccine development was first floated in early 2020. What we do know is that Vanden Bossche offer s a unique opportunity to study this model of medical quackery that is driven by greed and personal enrichment. His website and strategy show just how vulnerable international medical strategies can be to a concerted and well-supported propaganda attack.
America is about to discover just how much money they are going to have to fork out to try and undo the impact of one, Geert Vanden Bossche. Money that could have spent on healthcare, saving lives. Ensuring a mother from a disadvantaged community received enough pre-delivery care to save her and her child. Somehow, I doubt Vanden Bossche has trouble falling asleep at night. He just doesn’t seem the type.
Whoever is tasking with holding these quacks and con-artists accountable in a post-pandemic society (people will demand it), may not view him as kindly. He has blood on his hands and his words and advice continue to claim lives.
I've been invited to make an appointment for a booster- booked on Thursday 8.30am. I will be there.
The only reason for delay is if you reckon things will be worse in 6 months time when the ooster (maybe) begins to wane! But then we will have better drugs, and maybe a better vaccine...
These people are truly and honestly concerned about what is going on. They present visible evidence i.e. (stainless steel?) particles in vaccine ampules, obviously a manufacturing problem.
Having something like that in a soda drink and it will be immediatley banned from the shelf!
There are contaminants regularly found in food and medicines. The batch gets recalled, not the whole product, unless it is some universal problem. And problems with new equipment get fixed. I'm not saying it is good, but when getting a new vaccine out a bit faster saves 1000s of lives, and your customers are telling you this, it is probably not the time to halt production for 12 months while working out a policy to ensure broken parts in a machine never again cause problems? I guess it is a matter of a sense of proportion, and I've never denied that antivaxers feel strongly. They must know, at some level, that vaccines are saving 100s of 1000s of lives, so they must be very very upset about something to be speaking against them in this way.
But the antivax stuff was not that but the hysteria about thrombocytopenia, where everyone has been looking at and quantifying the risks (except this group of anti-vaxxers, who are talking them up without looking at the useful research done). The regulators look really carefully and cautiously at balance of risk when agreeing to vaccinations. The unvaccinated COVID risk remains very high (except for the 20% or so of people in the UK with strong prior infection antibody response). Anyway gibe it another 6 months - we are getting better treatment, slowly, as we understand the disease more. I thought the link FM1 posted about long COVID and clots, if correct, was a positive development.
Objective To assess the association between covid-19 vaccines and risk of thrombocytopenia and thromboembolic events in England among adults.
Design Self-controlled case series study using national data on covid-19 vaccination and hospital admissions.
Setting Patient level data were obtained for approximately 30 million people vaccinated in England between 1 December 2020 and 24 April 2021. Electronic health records were linked with death data from the Office for National Statistics, SARS-CoV-2 positive test data, and hospital admission data from the United Kingdom’s health service (NHS).
Participants 29 121 633 people were vaccinated with first doses (19 608 008 with Oxford-AstraZeneca (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) and 9 513 625 with Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT162b2 mRNA)) and 1 758 095 people had a positive SARS-CoV-2 test. People aged ≥16 years who had first doses of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 or BNT162b2 mRNA vaccines and any outcome of interest were included in the study.
Main outcome measures The primary outcomes were hospital admission or death associated with thrombocytopenia, venous thromboembolism, and arterial thromboembolism within 28 days of three exposures: first dose of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine; first dose of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine; and a SARS-CoV-2 positive test. Secondary outcomes were subsets of the primary outcomes: cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), ischaemic stroke, myocardial infarction, and other rare arterial thrombotic events.
Results The study found increased risk of thrombocytopenia after ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination (incidence rate ratio 1.33, 95% confidence interval 1.19 to 1.47 at 8-14 days) and after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test (5.27, 4.34 to 6.40 at 8-14 days); increased risk of venous thromboembolism after ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination (1.10, 1.02 to 1.18 at 8-14 days) and after SARS-CoV-2 infection (13.86, 12.76 to 15.05 at 8-14 days); and increased risk of arterial thromboembolism after BNT162b2 mRNA vaccination (1.06, 1.01 to 1.10 at 15-21 days) and after SARS-CoV-2 infection (2.02, 1.82 to 2.24 at 15-21 days). Secondary analyses found increased risk of CVST after ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination (4.01, 2.08 to 7.71 at 8-14 days), after BNT162b2 mRNA vaccination (3.58, 1.39 to 9.27 at 15-21 days), and after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test; increased risk of ischaemic stroke after BNT162b2 mRNA vaccination (1.12, 1.04 to 1.20 at 15-21 days) and after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test; and increased risk of other rare arterial thrombotic events after ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination (1.21, 1.02 to 1.43 at 8-14 days) and after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test.
Conclusion Increased risks of haematological and vascular events that led to hospital admission or death were observed for short time intervals after first doses of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 and BNT162b2 mRNA vaccines. The risks of most of these events were substantially higher and more prolonged after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after vaccination in the same population.
TrialSite Op-ed author Geert Vanden Bossche
Geert Vanden Bossche is a scientist who published an open letter warning of global catastrophe due to deadly variants of COVID-19 selected for by mass vaccination. His argument sounds a lot like an argument Andrew Wakefield once made for MMR. There’s even grift likely involved!
I’ve frequently discussed how in the age of the pandemic, at least in terms of antivaccine misinformation and pseudoscience, everything old is new again. Over the last several months, I’ve listed a number of examples of this phenomenon of antivaxxers recycling hoary tropes to apply them to COVID-19 vaccines; for example, claims that vaccines kill, cause infertility, cancer, autoimmune disorders, and Alzheimer’s disease, and are loaded with “toxins,” among several others, such as the claim that they “alter your DNA.” One such claim that I hadn’t yet seen is a another favorite antivax claim, although admittedly it’s a rather niche claim in that you don’t hear it too often. Specifically, I’m referring to the abuse of evolutionary theory by antivaxxers to claim that vaccines select for more deadly variants of pathogenic viruses and bacteria, making mass vaccination programs dangerous or even potentially catastrophic. Such claims are generally an offshoot of another favorite antivaccine claim, namely that the diseases being vaccinated against are so innocuous that vaccinating against them is overkill and allowing infection and “natural herd immunity” to occur is better, a trope that has also been resurrected about COVID-19, a disease that’s killed well north of 500K people in just the US in a little over a year. This brings us to our topic, a misinformation-filled “open letter” by a scientist named Geert Vanden Bossche that went viral over the weekend. It’s been accompanied by a video interview posted to—where else?—antivaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense website. Reading the letter, what it reminded me, more than anything else, is an article that Andrew Wakefield wrote about the MMR vaccine and measles, published a few months before the pandemic hit. (Truly, those were simpler times.)
What are the True Numbers?
It is difficult to ascertain the true figures for post-vaccination deaths around the world. This is in part due to inaccessible data systems and in part due to a lack of standardization across health ministries on the definition of post-vaccination.
Data from the UK from January to July 2021 record events within 21 days of vaccination, rather than the 14 days in the German data above. The government site reports that nearly 19,000 people died within 21 days of the first COVID vaccination dose and over 11,000 within 21 days of the second dose. In these figures, the proportion of deaths attributable to the virus itself reduces from 23.5% for those having one dose to 1.6% for those having received two doses. Causes of death in the remaining cases, and any possible link to the vaccination they received, are not detailed.
The UK data is a great source for mining. But why do these antivax types (& TSN) not join up the dots and look at that 30M UK self-controlled study? It allows links to vaccination or COVID events to be strongly inferred because of the strength of the self-control - no problem with confounders. For blood clots it has exactly the detailed figures they say they want. And more. vaccines do cause these things. At very low levels. COVID causes them at much higher levels.
They would do more use if they read the literature and took an interest in working out real numbers...
People using emotion instead of fact on these matters really annoy me. Sheesh!
In recent years, the German public received 40 million vaccinations annually, administered to protect them from influenza, mumps, measles, and other long-established illnesses. In any given year, approximately 20 people die within 14 days of vaccination. Between January and July 2021, following the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines, 80-90 million vaccinations (of any sort) were administered – and 1,230 people died within two weeks of injection. This is a 20-fold rise in vaccine-related deaths within a short amount of time, even after considering that vaccination numbers have doubled.
And have they actually looked to see whether this is expected from the demographics?
The key cause of deaths following vaccines is that people die - but old people die much more than young. So it is not the number of vaccinations, but the number of vaccinations of much older people, that is relevant here.
Of course because background deaths dominate in all these things you need to look at all the other things affecting these...
Here is a great resource looking at the rates at which all these nasty things appear to happen... without vaccination. It is very dependent on age and sex and country.
Objective To quantify the background incidence rates of 15 prespecified adverse events of special interest (AESIs) associated with covid-19 vaccines.
Design Multinational network cohort study.
Setting Electronic health records and health claims data from eight countries: Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, mapped to a common data model.
Participants 126 661 070 people observed for at least 365 days before 1 January 2017, 2018, or 2019 from 13 databases.
Main outcome measures Events of interests were 15 prespecified AESIs (non-haemorrhagic and haemorrhagic stroke, acute myocardial infarction, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, anaphylaxis, Bell’s palsy, myocarditis or pericarditis, narcolepsy, appendicitis, immune thrombocytopenia, disseminated intravascular coagulation, encephalomyelitis (including acute disseminated encephalomyelitis), Guillain-Barré syndrome, and transverse myelitis). Incidence rates of AESIs were stratified by age, sex, and database. Rates were pooled across databases using random effects meta-analyses and classified according to the frequency categories of the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences.
Results Background rates varied greatly between databases. Deep vein thrombosis ranged from 387 (95% confidence interval 370 to 404) per 100 000 person years in UK CPRD GOLD data to 1443 (1416 to 1470) per 100 000 person years in US IBM MarketScan Multi-State Medicaid data among women aged 65 to 74 years. Some AESIs increased with age. For example, myocardial infarction rates in men increased from 28 (27 to 29) per 100 000 person years among those aged 18-34 years to 1400 (1374 to 1427) per 100 000 person years in those older than 85 years in US Optum electronic health record data. Other AESIs were more common in young people. For example, rates of anaphylaxis among boys and men were 78 (75 to 80) per 100 000 person years in those aged 6-17 years and 8 (6 to 10) per 100 000 person years in those older than 85 years in Optum electronic health record data. Meta-analytic estimates of AESI rates were classified according to age and sex.
Conclusion This study found large variations in the observed rates of AESIs by age group and sex, showing the need for stratification or standardisation before using background rates for safety surveillance. Considerable population level heterogeneity in AESI rates was found between databases.
And here is why it is tough to get real data on these very rare events. A good read.
During the 2009 H1N1 influenza (or swine flu) pandemic, public-health agencies in Sweden and Finland raised the alarm about an increased rate of narcolepsy — a chronic and debilitating sleep disorder — in children who had received a dose of Pandemrix, an H1N1 vaccine.
Incidents of narcolepsy were reported at a rate of about one case per 18,400 vaccine doses, significantly higher than would be expected by chance2. Public-health officials became concerned that a component of the vaccine used to increase the body’s immune response, called an adjuvant, could cause an unintended immune response that triggered the disease. If the adjuvant did contribute to the increased risk of narcolepsy, it would be an important consideration when designing future vaccines. Early studies suggested that Pandemrix did increased the risk of narcolepsy in certain age groups, but the results were too variable to draw broad conclusions.
More than ten years after that pandemic ended, scientists still don’t fully agree about the nature of the link between Pandemrix and narcolepsy. In 2018, vaccinologist Steven Black at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Ohio and a group of international colleagues published a study concluding that adjuvants alone are not associated with an increased risk of developing narcolepsy3.
The researchers compared background rates of narcolepsy in seven countries with the rates reported for groups vaccinated with Pandemrix and two other H1N1 vaccines containing adjuvants. They controlled for prevalence of the H1N1 virus in each country, and considered that reports of narcolepsy increased across Europe after people became aware of its potential association with the vaccine. “We did not find any evidence of increased risk within the countries that we studied, except in Sweden where the signal had been originally detected,” Black says.
Display MoreGerman Press Conference on Post-vaccine Deaths Censored
https://trialsitenews.com/germ…-vaccine-deaths-censored/
Public faith in the vaccination protocols mandated by governments around the world is waning in response to censorship of material deemed to promote anti-vaccine agendas. TrialSite has been covering news related to post-vaccination deaths and the responses from vaccine companies and governments around the world. In September, another group of experts hosted a press conference in Germany to discuss post-vaccination deaths and microscopic analysis of the vaccines that may have caused them.
In recent years, the German public received 40 million vaccinations annually, administered to protect them from influenza, mumps, measles, and other long-established illnesses. In any given year, approximately 20 people die within 14 days of vaccination. Between January and July 2021, following the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines, 80-90 million vaccinations (of any sort) were administered – and 1,230 people died within two weeks of injection. This is a 20-fold rise in vaccine-related deaths within a short amount of time, even after considering that vaccination numbers have doubled.
It is this trend in post-vaccination deaths that led a group of doctors and scientists to take a closer look at the autopsy reports from these post-vaccination mortalities. These facts were presented by Professor Dr. Werner Bergholz at a press conference held on September 20 at the Pathology Institute in Reutlingen, Germany. “We have to ask: do we have a risk, or do we have a problem? The answer is, very clearly, yes – we do have a problem,” he stated in his opening remarks at the press conference.
Coverage of the conference went viral, but filming and video footage was soon removed from YouTube, cited as anti-vaccination content. It is available on some sites with English translation.
Meet the Panel
The chief speakers at the press conference are all well-known experts with a lifetime of experience in pathology and quality management:
Professor Dr. Arne Burkhardt taught at the universities of Hamburg, Bern, Tübingen, and is a visiting teacher at Nihon University in Japan and the Brookhaven National Institute. He was a practicing pathologist and has published over 150 articles. He was also the head of the Institute of Pathology in Reutlingen for 18 years.
Professor Dr. Walter Lang was a pathologist for 17 years at Hanover Medical School and eventually headed a private institute for pathology, also in Hanover, which specializes in transplant pathology, extra-gynecological cytology, thyroid tumors, and lung pathology. He performed consultation diagnostics for 12 primary lung clinics and performed liver pathology exams for numerous clinics.
Professor Dr. Werner Bergholz is a former professor of electrical engineering who focuses on quality and risk management at Jakobs University in Bremen. Before teaching, he had 17 years of experience working in chip production management at Siemens.
Are these deaths caused by the COVID vaccine?
Doctors and scientists are working closely to study the vaccines, their side effects, and if the deaths that happened after vaccination are related to the vaccine itself. Around 33% of the global population has been vaccinated with at least one shot against COVID-19, but there’s still a lot of things we don’t know about the vaccines.
In the press conference, the results of studies from Germany, Austria, Japan, and America were presented. Researchers sought to establish whether the risk of COVID-19 is higher than established side effects of vaccination and whether the vaccines had any non-declared components.
Autopsies of 8 people who died after the COVID-19 vaccination were discussed. While there was no single common symptom or cause of death, several findings pointed to immune complex formation, which could be feasibly linked to vaccination. The findings included:
Reduction of immune capacity
Influence of cancer growth
Vascular damage like endothelitis, vasculitis, and perivasculitis
Erythrocyte clumping
The assembled experts demanded answers and explanations for their findings. They are asking the public to think and see if the risks of these vaccines are outweighed by the protection the vaccine promises.
What are the True Numbers?
It is difficult to ascertain the true figures for post-vaccination deaths around the world. This is in part due to inaccessible data systems and in part due to a lack of standardization across health ministries on the definition of post-vaccination.
Data from the UK from January to July 2021 record events within 21 days of vaccination, rather than the 14 days in the German data above. The government site reports that nearly 19,000 people died within 21 days of the first COVID vaccination dose and over 11,000 within 21 days of the second dose. In these figures, the proportion of deaths attributable to the virus itself reduces from 23.5% for those having one dose to 1.6% for those having received two doses. Causes of death in the remaining cases, and any possible link to the vaccination they received, are not detailed.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that between December 14, 2020, and September 27, 2021, more than 390 million doses of COVID vaccinations were administered. In the same timeframe, 8,164 deaths among vaccinated people were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). This equates to 0.0021%, leading the CDC to conclude that “COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.”
Foreign Bodies Found in Vaccines
At the same press conference, an Austrian research group presented microscopic analyses of hundreds of vaccine bottles from Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca. Their study’s first discovery was foreign bodies found in the vaccines, which they claim the vaccine manufacturers did not declare.
In August, 39 vials of the Moderna vaccine in Japan were found to be contaminated with metal. Shortly after, black and pink substances were spotted in syringes and vials of the vaccine in a vaccination center of Okinawa and Gunma. After these reports, Japan suspended the use of Moderna vaccines, recalled 1.6 million vaccines, and signed a replacement deal with Novavax. Some 3,790 shots from that batch had been administered before these contaminants were discovered. As TrialSite recently reported, deaths occurred in at least two patients after receiving their second doses from this batch, and the cause is being investigated by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Public Welfare (MHLW), Japan. However, though the vaccines belonged to the same batch, they did not belong to the lots that had rubber or metal contaminants in them.
In September, 95 vials of unused Pfizer vaccine in Japan were found to have floating contaminants, five of which had already been distributed to vaccination clinics. After visual inspection of the remaining vials from the same batch, the officials of Japan gave them the all-clear as there was no visible sign of contamination.
In June, human proteins were found in the AstraZeneca vaccine. These are thought to be due to the human kidney cell line used in vitro to replicate the adenovirus vector for the vaccine. The presence of human proteins could trigger an immune response in the vaccine recipient, and experts believe that this could be the cause of the rare blood-clotting side effects of the vaccine.
Besides the impurities found in these vaccines, they also reported adverse side effects.
Pfizer and Moderna
A US citizen died due to thrombocytopenia, a condition where the blood has a lower number of platelets which could cause mild to serious bleeding internally or externally. There are 20 reported cases of thrombocytopenia developing after vaccination.
Myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis, an inflammation of the outer lining of the heart, were also reported after receiving the second dose of the vaccine. This is most likely to occur in adolescents and young adults.
AstraZeneca
In a study conducted by researchers in Greifswald, Germany, of 11 patients who died 5-16 days after vaccination, one had a brain bleed, nine had blood clots in the brain, three had blockages in the lung artery because of blood clots, and the remaining four had other types of blood clots. None of them received any anti-coagulants to prevent blood clots.
The difference between these deaths and those with classic blood clotting diseases was the severity of symptoms. Those who developed the disease because of autoimmunity had a higher frequency of intravascular coagulation, which was also observed in the autopsied patients. This is being referred to as vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT) to prevent confusion with heparin-induced thrombocytopenia.
A response from the vaccine companies?
The vaccine manufacturers and government officials have already offered an explanation for some of the incidents reported in the press conference.
The metal contaminant found in Moderna vaccines was immediately investigated and traced back to the manufacturing site in Spain. It was found to be stainless steel. The friction of two pieces of metals incorrectly placed in the production line caused the contamination, according to a joint statement by Moderna and Takeda, their manufacturing partner in Japan. However, they reject the suggestion that this contamination could have led to deaths, as “the metallic particles of this size injected into a muscle may result in a local reaction, but are unlikely to result in other adverse reactions.”
Meanwhile, the Health Minister of Japan declared that the black particles in vaccine vials were pieces of a rubber stopper due to needles being inserted incorrectly in to the vials.
A Pfizer spokesperson explained that the material found in the vials was likely ingredients not fully dissolved and would not affect the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine. They assured the public that they are manufacturing the vaccine under strict protocols to ensure the quality, purity, and potency of the vaccine and also to ensure the safety of the patient and the vaccine’s efficacy. They are already conducting a full investigation regarding the matter.
AstraZeneca explained that the risk of dying from VITT is 1 in a million. For comparison, the Australian Academy of Science reports that the risk of dying from general anesthesia is 18 in a million, death from rock climbing is 3 in a million, death from taking aspirin daily is 100 in a million, and death from giving birth is 67 in a million. Their assurance is that it is extremely rare, considering the benefits of the vaccine.
A Growing Issue?
As of October 5, 6.34 billion doses of the COVID vaccine have been given globally. While systems are in place within each country for reporting of adverse effects, including post-vaccination deaths, database updates are often delayed, and the information is not always accessible.
The decision to remove footage of this press conference from public media does nothing to dispel the sense of censorship, and paranoia among some – surrounding the vaccination issue. TrialSite will continue to monitor this situation and report ongoing findings.
This event is peak antivax hysteria and uninformed speculation, which TSN for whatever reason seems to want to publicise.
Why do we not get a proper discussion of the many different mechanisms to catch vaccine side effects, how they work, what are the current definite safety signals, what are the possible ones not yet firmed up, what are the real death rates. That info is all out there and published by the regulators. That would all be interesting. Instead we get this sensationalist hogwash full of innuendo and (real) FUD.
And the known blood clot issues - it is good to quantify the evidence that now exists - also good to compare it with the much larger risks from blood clots getting COVID. I would not trust these people to quantify anything - just as well we have regulators from many different countries all on the job of doing this.
I do not know how under reported, but I do noticed that the his collegues told they didn't know how to do this. Now he and his colleuges are probably young and the senior doctors may know and make sure there are good reporting, still I would do a research project to investigate this. To understand this guy, you need to see more of his post. His not an anti vaccer, but he have discovered a lot of overuse of medicins and also discusses problems in the system we setup to do our medics. One thing that is obvious are that the test procedures medicines can be gamed by the medical companies and they do seam to take advantage of this, another fact and my personal pet argument is the disatstrous oversubscription of opioids in USA, But there are more subtle discoveries that he discusses such as doctors seam to be bad at basic probability theory. Also he is very keen on teaching the scientific method and how to read studies properly.
Yes, my link about him made that clear. I think he is right that drug companies do game trials as much as they can, but has drug companies are evil as too large a thing in his thought processes. Drug companies do what they can to make money and have power. regulators are there to keep things fair. Maybe the regulators should be more powerful, but it is easy to extrapolate from cases of abuse that the whole system is not fit for purpose.
The opioids thing is a particularly nasty example of what we had in the UK a lot before NICE. Drug companies would give GPs freebies etc and get them to over-prescribe their drugs, or juts prescribe them when the generic equivalents are 1/10th the cost.
That is aggressive marketing which you always get, and it must be controlled as it was not in the US which I think is generally worse about these things.
Actually falsifying test results, or hiding safety issues with a vaccine, is not that likely on a very high profile thing like COVID vaccines - where any bad practice is bound to be found out - and the players doing it are major companies.
And, let me reiterate, our best unfalsifiable info on vaccine safety comes from the mass self-controlled case studies done using UK hospital records. It cannot pick up minor side effects, but will find anything reported to a GP. At least in the UK GPs were very aware of the myocarditis issue, and the blood clot issue.
Great study, uniquely well controlled and large, it would be nice to do the same thing (the data is all there) on a wider range of conditions.
Interesting comment on Goetsche
At the time, I speculated that perhaps PIC had invited Gøtzsche to give a talk on the ethics of vaccine mandates with an appeal that played to his well-known and oft-expressed extreme suspicion of big pharma, which he’s likened on more than one occasion to the mafia. I further speculated that perhaps Gøtzsche didn’t know the true nature of PIC, which was astounding to me, After all, all you have to do is to look at PIC’s Twitter feed, Facebook page, and its list of Directors and Advisors to tell right away that it is an antivaccine group. That implies that Prof. Gøtzsche didn’t bother with anything resembling due diligence before accepting PIC’s invitation to speak. In any event, after the Twitterstorm rubbed his face in the antivaccine nature of PIC and how he would be sharing a stage with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and a veritable rogues’ gallery of antivaccine cranks, Prof. Gøtzsche wisely decided to back out.
Of course, at the time, I had no way of knowing if my speculation was correct or not. Indeed, one particularly annoying woman on Twitter repeatedly took me to task as totally irresponsible for having dared to speculate about what had happened, to which I responded that this is not my first rodeo, so to speak. I’ve seen this sort of thing many times before, in which an antivaccine group tries to entice a real scientist to speak at one of its events under false or misleading pretenses, and therefore knew that this was the most likely explanation for how Prof. Gøtzsche was lured into speaking at the PIC workshop. Because of his well-known anti-pharma opinions, he appears to have been an easy mark for such persuasion.
It turns out that I was (mostly) correct. We now have an explanation. So why not just tack the now known explanation onto the end of my original post as an update? Simple. The explanation provides a pretext to discuss a rather interesting issue: Is it ever worthwhile for a science advocate to speak to a pseudoscience organization? First, though, let’s examine what we now know.
More from Stefan's antivax-slanted but partly sensible link
The idea that herd immunity can only be reached with vaccines is perhaps the most laughable idea to be heavily promulgated during the pandemic, at least to everyone with even a little knowledge of immunology and history. Eighteen months in to the pandemic, most countries are at or on the cusp of herd immunity, regardless of how effective they have been at vaccinating their populations. There is no need to force the remaining 15-30% of the population to take a vaccine they don’t want. The end of the pandemic is in sight.
I agree, except when that 15% - 30% clog up hospitals and create scare stories about not enough ICU beds, as well as making it impossible for hospitals to do any other work including cancer screening etc.
That happened in the UK before we were well vaccinated.
Peter Goetzche argued in his book, “Deadly medicines and organized crime”, that no-one should take a new drug that’s been on the market for less than seven years, in light of the fact that it often takes that long for dangers to become known and dangerous drugs to be pulled off the market. In recent months, we’ve learned that the Astra-Zeneca vaccine can cause deadly blood clots in the brain, and we’ve learned that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can cause myocarditis. The authorities say that these events are extremely rare, based on the number of events that are reported to the authorities. But this ignores the fact that most adverse events don’t get reported.
In recent weeks, I’ve personally seen multiple cases of myocarditis that occurred days after vaccination. When I’ve suggested to colleagues that we should report them to the authorities as possible vaccine side effects, the response I’ve been met with has been roughly this: “oh, yeah, maybe that’s a good idea… I don’t know how to do that”. I’ve reported the cases I’ve handled personally, but my guess, based on this reaction, is that most other cases have not been reported. Obviously, if you believe that what actually gets reported is an accurate estimate of the reality, then you will grossly underestimate the case rate.
Just a comment. I agree, non-serious side effects will be under-reported by frontline doctors who do not keep up with things - I am sure there are lots of those. However serious side effects (and myocarditis is serious - normally - though not when vaccine induced) will get to hospitals and specialists who know all about VAM. And in the UK, every GP knows about VAM, every patient gets told about it in a leaflet they get when vaccinated.
So I think it highly unlikely that serious myocarditis cases are under-reported.
The bottom line is, as from that self-control study that cannot be fudged and compared vaccine AEs with COVID AEs on all 30M UK patients vaccinated in given timeframe where everyone seriously ill end up properly recorded in hospital, we know vaccine-induced myocarditis is a much smaller problem than COVID-induced myocarditis, and we know its magnitude. So if you reckon everyone will get one of the other it is pretty clear what to do.
A good discssion and a nice post with a good tone. Some things may be wrong such as we now know that India has an enormously underreported deaths statistic so that claiming heard immunity in India was good is cynical in hindsite. What really surprise
me is that it is probably very common that we underreport issues with drugs. Still we have the medical records so post suggest for a research project that investigate how common myocarditis is by looking at medical records and combine with the vaccine database. All data is still there, Just that we need to dig it up. Kind of understand Wyttenbachs frustration and I start to understand now the logic with the tragic event of Semmelwise. He also mentions that there is a high presure to conform in sience now, would like to understand what the preprint that was rejected actually was, this is an annectote and could or could not be a real concern. Alarm bells and investigation is however prudent. I agree with that putting a unessesary high pressure on covid to mutate is maybe not so good. We hopefully the virus will not evolve to be more nasty but he has a good point that we re plying with fire. Also I am wonderning if he is not underestimating that delta is not the same as the earlier strains and that the statistics is different now with respect to how nasty it is. But still a nice post that will make you think.
It raises a lot of interesting issues but gets some wrong.
Sure, much we don't know, but by now much we do.
Ignoring what it says about what governments say (it depends which country you are in):
(1) True, deaths at any time depend on infection rates which vary enormously. And people tend only to look at deaths
(2) False, the vaccine maybe does not do much good against other strains. We have good figures for VE against delta. VE against infections is not great but still a bit worthwhile in terms of reducing infections. Delta is so infectious it will not be stopped by vaccines alone, practically. VE against serious infection and death is excellent against delta and stays very good for at least 6 months, after which a booster shot puts it back to excellent. By excellent I mean 20X less chance of serious disease. We don't know exactly how immunity decays from vaccination over long times.
Those two facts are enough. It does not matter that you need people to get covid as well to achieve herd immunity. If they are vaccinated first the death toll is 5X - 20X less. Younger people have lower risks anyway, but also have higher relative protection from the vaccine. Which is not the point - absolute reduction in risk is what matters.
Once everyone who is going to catch COVID has done so, then COVID becomes a less severe disease, especially if we have the right drugs to reduce long COVID etc.
Vaccines reduce death getting to that nice place, and also delay it, so that more drugs are well understood thus further reducing harm.
The tone of that link is more "vaccines are a hysterical over-reaction". They do at the margins reduce R which is why governments are keen on them for young people. They also reduce small absolute risks for young people, which is why doctors are keen on them (at least from say 15 up). But mainly they reduce hospital burden and getting very high fraction of vaccinated in older (> 40) age groups is essential for countries wanting hospitals to operate normally and keep their population alive. You still need vaccination below that - for hospitals - because otherwise a very high peak in infections and hospitalisation can still occur, even though the individual risks are small for younger ages. And small does not mean 0.
THH
