Better in their words…

A new paper appears in the journal Vaccine, and is the largest analysis (to date) of COVID19 vaccine safety. It looks at 99 million individuals with solid vaccination records and compares the rate of adverse events after vaccine to the historical, baseline rate before. It raises major concerns.

First, let us be clear, the benefit of COVID vaccination is small, uncertain or not present in several populations. For instance, there is no reliable evidence anyone who had COVID previously had a further reduction in severe disease from getting a dose (or 7 doses) of vaccine.

The theoretical absolute benefit of vaccination depends on the baseline risk so the *upper bound* absolute benefits to healthy people under 20, 30 or 40 were always minuscule— bordering on zero— and possible not present. Available data lacks power to show a benefit in 20 year olds.

Worse, there is not even one reliable study that shows a benefit in children. This means- that for these populations- even rare safety signals can tilt the entire balance. We have previously shown that boosters and dose 2 of mRNA vaccines were, on balance, harmful to young men because the risk of myocarditis was greater than the further upper bound absolute risk reduction in severe COVID19 outcomes.

Many other researchers have gotten this question wrong because they use *EHR documented COVID19 infections* as the denominator for COVID19 bad outcomes, which misses the vast denominator of asymptomatic infections and infection that don’t prompt EHR visit. Eating at McDonalds looks deadly if your denominator is all the people who ate there and ended up in the ICU with food poisoning. If your denominator is all people who ate there, and never went to the hospital, food poisoning is rare. Most COVID19 papers use the first denominator for COVID19 infection.

Now let us look at the paper. It has 2 huge limitations. While the denominator (vaccination) is solid, the numerator is weak. It is EHR detected cases of these clinical outcomes across different systems. The biggest problem is that MANY cases of adverse events are likely NOT TO BE CODED. The authors will argue that not coding these events should occur both before and after vaccination and ergo there is no bias (the method looks only at the relative change), but this is incorrect.

It is likely there is differential missing data. That some of these events are missed much more often after vaccination. For instance, the myocarditis due to vaccination is different than myocarditis after a cold. Doctors may not recognize it as such, and be more dismissive. Some diagnoses— like splanchnic vein thrombus— may be increased in populations where you are less likely to consider that diagnosis (young healthy people) and rates of angiography and imaging (needed to diagnose it) may occur less likely. In other words, vaccination could cause a huge increase in abdominal pain from clot in a group of people in whom you would not normally suspect that in— and this analysis assumes doctor’s work it up with the same vigor as they would do for an older, frailer population pre vaccination, and they code it the same. Ergo, all the signals here are, in my view, LOWER bound estimates. I think the truth will be worse.

Second, this analysis does not stratify by demographic group. The increased risk of myocarditis you will see is ACROSS ALL AGES AND GENDERS. That is a big error, when we know it is a problem that plagues young men. Doing this will mask the harm signal. If the increased risk is 3 fold, it may be 100 fold in the demographic that is facing the harm. This is a classic mistake in the field that we have published on.

For this reason, every time we see a signal, we should assume it will be worse. And we should think that it doesn’t take much harm to tip the benefit-harm balance in young people, or people who already had COVID. Here is what researchers find.

Everything yellow or red are concerning, significant safety signals.

Increases in cerebral vein clot were known and I wrote about them at the time

Now, we see concerning signals for

• Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP)
• Febrile seizures
• Myocarditis/ pericarditis
• Racing heart – SVT
• Bells palsy (facial paralysis)
• Pulmonary embolism
• Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis and more

My overall thoughts. A few years ago a vaccine safety researcher told me she worried tinnitus was linked to COVID19 vaccination. Yet, she had to abandon the project because the political pressure to not find safety signalswas too high. We repeatedly see researchers saying that COVID19 is still worse than vaccination, but this is dishonest. Vaccination was worse for young men, and that can be easily shown mathematically.

One mistake these people make is they consider the rate of harms post-covid only among people sick enough to present to the doctor with COVID, but this inflates the rate of harms, as I explained. A second mistake they make is lumping 20 year old men with 80 year old women (this paper also makes this mistake), which minimizes the extent of the harm.

I suspect there is widespread dishonesty in the COVID19 vaccine safety literature. There is a strong political effort to not admit that our vaccination policies harmed some populations, and these were known at the time and not just in retrospect. For this reason, the current paper is deeply concerning. It shows that COVID vaccines are capable of lowering platelets, causing clots, damaging hearts and resulting in partial paralysis.

Imagine a 20 year old man who had covid and was doing fine, and then their college forced them to get the shot, and they suffered bell’s palsy or myocarditis. This man suffered net harm. The mistake was known not in retrospect but at the time. I know because I published a paper saying so in the summer 2021 (before mandates). Public health should be ashamed of itself for harming people in pursuit of a misguided policy goal, and worse, for obfuscating the data, and not admitting error. With time and distance, I suspect most academics will see the wisdom of my argument.

I encourage everyone to read my comprehensive paper.

The full paper below from Vaccine below; If you believe in this Substack, considering subscribing.