This document is part of an archive of postings by John Ray on Dissecting Leftism, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written.
This is a backup copy of the original blog
Below is the backup of this blog for February, 2024. To access the backups in earlier years, click here
29 February, 2024
Top Cardiologist Reports 47-Fold Increase in Serious Myocarditis Post Covid Vaccinations
Dr. Dean Patterson, a leading consultant cardiologist in Guernsey and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, has written to the U.K. medical professional regulator the General Medical Council (GMC) calling for an investigation into harms from the COVID-19 vaccines, in a letter first published on Dr. Aseem Malhotra’s website.
February 19th 2024
Charlie Massey
Chair of Executive Board
The General Medical Council
Dear Mr. Massey,
I am writing to express my enthusiastic support for Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a distinguished medical professional who, through his dedication to improving public health and promoting evidence-based medicines, has inspired numerous medical professionals to speak out in support of non-pharmaceutical management of chronic illness. He has been attacked for his stance in the past, in respect to his views on sugar and statins. He today again stands accused of spreading dangerous misinformation by a group of medical professionals who appear dedicated to reducing science and medical practice to an echo chamber.
It is indeed a sad irony that Dr. Malhotra has been labeled an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist, as he himself took the initial COVID-19 vaccine, recommended it to others and even his father. He later realised that serious safety signals were being reported and understandably has concerns that the COVID-19 vaccine may have contributed to accelerated fatal acute myocardial infarction in his father.
Over the past 18 years, I have been a partner, consultant cardiologist and general physician at the Medical Specialist Group and Princess Elizabeth Hospital in Guernsey with a population of 63,000. Here I am proud to say, we provide a consultant-only service which leads to exceptional continuity of care compared to the NHS where multiple tiers of doctors working shifts care for patients.
In my personal experience, the COVID-19 vaccine has caused me intolerable concern for patient safety here in Guernsey. In my 33 years of medical practice, I have never witnessed such harm from a therapeutic intervention. I lost a female patient due to myocarditis aged 42 in 2021. A 63-year-fit woman died from myocarditis one month after her booster vaccine in 2022 after getting breathless within one week of the injection. In addition, I personally cared for a 20-year-old male with severe myocarditis which developed within 24 hours of his second Pfizer vaccine. In the first year of the rollout, I diagnosed 20 patients with myocarditis and 15 cases of pericarditis, including one death (42 year-old) and another who required an ICD (79-year-old male). In the 16 years prior to this, I would on average diagnose two to three myocarditis cases per year, with serious cases being limited to one every three to four years. The U.K. ONS data for England and Wales show 250 hospital admissions for myocarditis over 10 years. This equates to two per 10 years for Guernsey. In the first year of the rollout, we had 10 hospital admissions for myocarditis. In the second year of vaccine rollout, I have seen another 18 myocarditis cases, including the death of the 63-year-old woman listed above.
In addition, I have noticed an increase in the number of heart failure and acute myocardial infarction cases. I am currently auditing the ambulatory ECG data as I believe there has been an increase in arrhythmia burden. Incredibly, the side-effects don’t stop there, as we have seen a doubling of the stroke numbers recently with an increase in overall thrombo-embolic disease since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.
I am therefore writing not only in support of Dr. Malhotra’s views on this matter but also to inform you that the medical establishment appears blind to the harm. I am extremely concerned that medical practice itself will be irreparably damaged by the fallout from the mishandling of the Covid vaccine side effects. Dr. Malhotra must be supported in his efforts to shine a light on this.
While the GMC is mandated to protect patients and regulate doctors, currently the GMC finds itself in a regulatory vacuum where it, like many mainstream doctors, is unable to openly support what should be an urgent independent investigation into Covid vaccine safety.
It is my opinion that the side-effects being detected are the tip of the iceberg. Healthcare professionals are quite poor at reporting Yellow Card cases, while the NHS doctors are overburdened and unlikely to spend 30-45 minutes submitting a Yellow Card incident. This is particularly the case when the same doctors have been indoctrinated with the statement that the Covid vaccines are safe and effective, while the evidence for this safety and effectiveness from double blind placebo controlled studies is extremely weak.
The initial Covid studies were due to complete in Q4 2023 and we await the final report, notwithstanding the major flaw that most of the placebo group have been vaccinated in 2021. A paper published very recently (K. Faksova, et al., ‘COVID-19 vaccines and adverse events of special interest: A multinational Global Vaccine Data Network cohort study of 99 million vaccinated individuals‘, Vaccine, 2024) shows significant side-effects based upon this known under reporting.
Cardiologists in the main continue to blame COVID-19 infection as the cause for the harms I am seeing. However I have not diagnosed a single case of post-COVID-19 myocarditis prior to the vaccine rollout in Guernsey. The U.K. Government website from 2021 to date states that Covid causes myocarditis. The evidence it lists for this is flawed. One study it uses as evidence by Buckley et al. (‘Prevalence and clinical outcomes of myocarditis and pericarditis in 718,365 COVID-19 patients‘, Eur J Clin Invest. 2021) concluded that myocarditis had a prevalence of 5% in Covid patients. This study used data from the USA EMR records, which is poisoned by the flow of money. It is well documented that hospitals in the USA were paid $37,000 if a patient with Covid was admitted to ICU. ICU admissions would be promoted in patients with ‘multi-system involvement’. A rise in troponin, however insignificant, would be the rationale for diagnosing myocarditis and the accompanying $37,000 payment when the patient was admitted to ICU.
It is well known within the cardiologist circle pre-Covid that patients with sepsis often have a rise in troponin and the rise is proportional to age and co-morbidities and not indicative of myocarditis or a heart attack. In 2020, Guernsey had 20,000 Covid cases, which according to the paper by Buckley et al. would lead to 1,000 cases of myocarditis, but I have not diagnosed a single case of myocarditis prior to the vaccine rollout.
Dr. Melissa Heightman, a UCL Long Covid expert, is on record when speaking at the Acute and General medicine conference in 2022, stated that after MDT with cardiologists about the late gadolinium being seen on CMRI scans, they concluded it was just the usual background noise.
In the paper by Buckley et al. above they reference a paper by Puntmann et al. (‘Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)’, JAMA Cardiol. 2020) which erroneously concluded that 78 of 100 subjects recovered from mild Covid without cardiac symptoms had myocardial involvement on their cardiac MRI scans.
The correct interpretation is that the abnormalities seen were due to the same background noise referred to by Dr. Heightman, amplified further by the study done in Germany using 3 Tesla MRI scanners.
In the U.K. we use in the main 1.5 Tesla MRI scanners. More power equals more noise!
It is my opinion that the GMC must not only support whistleblowers like Dr. Malhotra, but urgently put in place the following:
* A working group to investigate the COVID-19 vaccine safety. May I suggest you speak with Dr. Yvonne Young from the UKHSA and Dr. Melissa Heighten (UCL) to invite their views on this matter? I am part of a growing group of doctors who would like to be part of this investigation, as I am sure Dr. Malhotra would be.
* A helpline to support doctors afraid of speaking out.
* A helpline to support those who are vaccine injured. Clearly the GMC should seek support from the MHRA and U.K. Government with funding for this work.
* A panel should be established to open discussion and reporting the above strategy in the media, in a calm unbiased manner to avoid undue stress on the general population and the healthcare system.
In conclusion, I wholeheartedly endorse Dr. Aseem Malhotra and believe that his unwavering commitment to advancing a more patient-centric, evidence-based approach to healthcare makes him a valuable asset to the medical community. I am confident that his contributions in relation to exposing the truth about the COVID-19 vaccine safety will continue to have a lasting impact on the health and wellbeing of countless individuals. There are many doctors and healthcare professionals who will openly endorse my view, but sadly there are a silent majority who will only endorse my view quietly in private conversation.
Unfortunately, medicine finds itself standing at crossroads. There are significant seeds of division. The question for you is therefore: are you going to heal these wounds or empower the irreversible split of healthcare that beckons in an increasingly uncertain future?
Sincerely,
Dr. Dean Patterson MBCHB, FRCP
Pathologist Dr. Clare Craig writes on X that, assuming Dr. Patterson saw all the cases on the island, “that would equate to 35,000 myo- and pericarditis cases in U.K. and 200,000 in USA”.
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Australia: Queensland Supreme Court finds some Covid vaccine orders unlawful
They were the three words of the week, if not of the year: ‘vaccine’, ‘mandates’ and ‘unlawful’. That was the key takeout from the decision handed down this week by the Queensland Supreme Court in a case largely financed by mining gazillionaire and political agitator Clive Palmer. Specifically, the Covid-19 vaccine mandates, implemented in the form of directions given to Queensland police and ambulance service workers, were made unlawfully, the court has ruled, partly because they didn’t take into account those workers’ ‘human rights’.
The news, of course, is to be welcomed. It is the first crack in the dam wall and will hopefully be followed by significant class actions and further court cases. Ideally, one might hope that certain senior politicians, senior bureaucrats, doctors and corporate heads will wind up in prison for their collective roles in the grotesque Covid abuse of power, following a royal commission. However, there is the chance that the Queensland case will be overturned on appeal, as the powers-that-be attempt to reassert their censorship and crushing authoritarianism over what remains the most disgraceful period in our history.
Alone – and we really do mean alone – among the Australian mainstream media, indeed in many instances the world media, The Spectator Australia fought from the very beginning against the vaccine mandates, the lockdowns, the mask mandates, the school closures, the banning of perfectly good (and cheap) alternative treatments for Covid and the fraudulent claims being made about the safety of the mRNA ‘vaccines’. Dismissed as conspiracy theorists, extreme right-wingers, anti-vaxxers and a whole list of other pejoratives, this magazine and its astonishing collection of writers can hold their heads high – Rebecca Weisser, Ramesh Thakur, Julie Sladden, Kara Thomas, Alexandra Marshall, David Flint, David Adler, James Allan, Rocco Loiacono, Robert Clancy, Rowan Dean and many others. Of course, there were a miserable handful of writers, and readers, who were appalled by our Covid scepticism and took their writing skills or subscriptions to other media outlets more in tune with their views. They are not missed.
On 22 May 2021, as powerful voices and commentators within the Australian media frantically urged the government to introduce vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, we wrote on this page:
So we will be blunt on this particular occasion: if Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Health Minister Greg Hunt or any members of the federal or ‘national’ cabinets seek to impose a ‘vaccine passport’ that restricts the freedom of movement and liberties of Australians, they will potentially be guilty of human rights abuses and even crimes against humanity.
Any number of conventions and laws exist that make it a criminal offence for a government or its bureaucrats to coerce or make mandatory any form of medical treatment against the will of the individual. Such laws and conventions were brought in as a direct result of the atrocities of the second world war and the revolting medical experiments conducted by not only the Nazis but other totalitarian regimes against their own people.
Make no mistake; a ‘vaccine passport’ denying liberties and restricting the free movement of Australians within their own country will be the most sinister and disgraceful act by an Australian government against its own people in our history. This is for one simple reason: governments and bureaucracies have no right to enforce or to coerce an individual to take a medical treatment or drug against the individual’s better instincts or judgment.
In any free society, the government’s role is to persuade, not to coerce or to mandate.
It is a fine line between encouraging or incentivising vaccination and coercing it, but telling traumatised Australians that they can, for example, only visit their loved ones or carry on their normal business if they inject a certain drug is completely unacceptable and indeed reprehensible. Persuasion is all very well. Coercion and emotional or financial blackmail are not.
Then on 3 July 2021, we wrote:
"It is on the coronavirus that an absence of any genuine political convictions on the part of the PM and his advisers is most apparent. Devoid of a bedrock of political philosophy to stand upon, the government makes it up as it goes along, reacting, presumably, to internal polling as much as to media hysteria. It is not a pretty sight"
Kudos to Queensland Judge Glenn Martin for having the courage and moral fortitude to put into law what was always self-evident to any self-respecting conservative. The vaccine mandates trashed every ethical, moral, medical and human rights principle in a free democracy.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/mandatory-vindication/
*************************************************28 February, 2024
The Excess Death Disappearing Act
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the United Kingdom has unfurled a new methodology for calculating excess deaths.
At the helm of this change is Julie Stanborough, ONS’s deputy director for Data and Analysis for Social Care and Health, and a seasoned veteran in the realm of government statistics. She spun her numerical narratives previously for the Cabinet Office during the COVID-19 crisis, and before that, in the labyrinthine corridors of HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions.
Ms. Stanborough has promised a regime of continuous refinement for these newly minted estimates of excess deaths, now intriguingly tagged as “Official Statistics in Development.”
She said, “In the spirit of continuous improvement, we will regularly review estimates of excess deaths produced by the new methodology, with further refinements being undertaken if necessary. As such, the new estimates will be labelled as Official Statistics in Development while further review, testing, and development work is undertaken.”
In place of the old method, Ms. Stanborough has ushered in a statistical model that she explains will rely on age-specific mortality rates.
The ONS is now posing the question—how many deaths would we expect there to be within the context of an evolving population?
The introduction of the new calculation method, has been dissected with clinical precision by health campaigner John Campbell, revealing startling disparities between the old and new figures, with the latter method significantly reducing the count of excess deaths.
David Dickson, a forensic investigator, has unveiled an even more shocking revelation, accusing the ONS of erasing some 68,000 excess deaths from the 2023 records through this statistical manoeuvre.
This open-ended commitment to iterative adjustment begs the question: What necessitated this methodological metamorphosis in the first place?
The recalibration of numbers has cast the pandemic’s mortality in a starkly different light, artificially amplifying the lethality of the pandemic year in comparison to the previous counts of excess mortality.
The complexity of the new model equation is seemingly decipherable only by someone such as Rainman, raising suspicions about the motivations behind such opaque adjustments.
Ms. Stanborough has said, “It’s important to note that excess deaths estimates are just that—estimates. They cannot be counted on an individual basis, as can be done for death registrations. They are estimated using statistical techniques and, as a result, there is no single ‘true’ measure of excess deaths.”
Thus, while statistical manipulations may have obscured relative increases in mortality, the immutable facts of absolute death counts remain more resistant to concealment.
Dr. Thomas Binder has pointed out that a similar strategy of adjusting excess mortality expectations was previously employed by StatSchweiz in Switzerland, particularly affecting younger demographics.
Lifting the Shroud
Amidst this backdrop of statistical shuffling, a rigorous investigation by Denis Rancourt, Maurine Baudin, Joseph Hickey, and Jérémie Mercier has pierced through the fog with their illuminating study on COVID-19 vaccine-associated mortality across the southern hemisphere.
Their empirical scrutiny of the vaccination campaigns across 17 countries has revealed a damning narrative: the mass vaccination efforts have failed to demonstrably impact all-cause mortality rates, contradicting the prevailing vaccine discourse.
The study has meticulously correlated the timing of mortality spikes with the aggressive rollout of vaccine boosters, challenging the purported benefits of COVID-19 vaccinations.
Far from reducing mortality, the data suggested a sinister association between vaccination campaigns and subsequent increases in death rates.
This revelation has cast a long shadow over the global push for COVID-19 vaccinations, demanding a sober reassessment of their safety and efficacy.
Mr. Rancourt and his team’s findings not only have questioned the utility of these vaccines in curtailing the virus but also have shone the spotlight on the critical need for a more discerning and empirical approach to public health policy.
As the narrative around excess deaths and COVID-19 vaccines has continued to evolve, the ONS’s new methodology for calculating excess deaths has added another layer of complexity to an already convoluted debate.
With politicians like UK MP Andrew Bridgen advocating for inquiries into excess mortality, the ONS’s adjustments now threaten to obscure these crucial investigations, potentially eroding public trust in governmental transparency.
This latest episode in the annals of public health statistics serves as a poignant reminder of the adage, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
In the end, the quest for truth in the age of COVID-19 has become ever more entangled in the webs of statistical reinterpretation, leaving the public yearning for clarity amidst a sea of numbers.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-excess-death-disappearing-act-5595747
*******************************************************CDC Reveals ‘Changing Threat’ of COVID-19
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Feb. 23 that hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 are overall on the decline in recent years despite some episodic episodes of elevated transmission.
“Severe outcomes from COVID-19 have substantially decreased since 2020 and 2021,” the agency said. Hospital admissions in the United States for COVID-19 have dropped by more than 60 percent from the peak in 2021, and have also decreased to just 900,000 hospitalizations in 2023—from 2.5 million in 2021.
“The decline in deaths associated with COVID-19 is even more dramatic than the drop in hospitalizations. In 2021, over 450,000 deaths among Americans were associated with COVID-19, while in 2023, that number fell to roughly 75,000,” it said.
The federal agency further noted that COVID-19 infections have stayed at a level similar to previous years, but the chance of being hospitalized has dropped.
“While other factors are involved, the increase in the percent of the population with COVID-19 antibodies indicates that rising population immunity is partially responsible for the decline in severity,” the agency said. “In January 2021, only 21 percent of people aged 16 years and older had COVID-19 antibodies.”
At the same time, the CDC said that hospitalization rates have dropped across all age groups. But it stressed that certain older adults, infants, pre-existing medical conditions still appear to have a higher risk of developing a severe case of COVID-19, adding that adults aged 65 and older accounted for 63 percent of hospitalizations and 88 percent of in-hospital deaths from the virus for the first half of 2023.
More than 90 percent of that group had “multiple pre-existing medical conditions,” and it also noted that infants aged six months and younger have higher rates of COVID-19 hospitalizations, the CDC said.
Despite the positive update, the CDC warned that the virus is a “public health threat” and again recommended everyone, including infants and pregnant women, to take one of the updated booster vaccines. It once again suggested that people wear masks and improve ventilation in closed areas.
On Feb. 16, the CDC said that the 2023–24 respiratory illness season appears to have peaked but stressed it is “far from over.” It noted that hospitalizations for COVID-19, influenza, and RSV have dropped in recent weeks.
“However, respiratory disease activity remains elevated, and some flu activity indicators have increased again,” according to the agency’s update. “Test positivity for flu rose nationally in late January and has leveled off since but continues to increase in parts of the country. Emergency department visits for flu have been going up in some areas of the county.”
Notably, the combined peak for hospitalizations associated with the three viruses “was not as high” as the previous season, adding that there were also “fewer reports of healthcare strain” for 2023 and 2024. Overall hospitalizations and deaths for the flu and COVID-19 were lower, too, it added.
Major COVID Study
This month, researchers from the Global Vaccine Data Network—an arm of the World Health Organization—looked at about a dozen medical conditions considered adverse events of special interest in a population study of 99 million people who were vaccinated.
“The size of the population in this study increased the possibility of identifying rare potential vaccine safety signals,” lead author Kristýna Faksová of the Department of Epidemiology Research, Statens Serum Institut in Denmark, said in a news release. “Single sites or regions are unlikely to have a large enough population to detect very rare signals,” she added.
Cases of a type of heart inflammation known as myocarditis were found in first, second, and third doses of the Pfizer mRNA shot, while the rate was higher in Moderna’s second shot, according to the research.
Pericarditis, which is inflammation of the pericardium, saw a 6.9-times higher risk in people who took AstraZeneca’s vaccine, while there was a 1.7-fold to 2.6-fold chance of developing the condition after taking Moderna’s first and fourth dose, respective, it found.
“This unparalleled scenario underscores the pressing need for comprehensive vaccine safety monitoring, as very rare adverse events associated with COVID-19 vaccines may only come to light after administration to millions of individuals,” the authors wrote.
They also found an increase in Guillain-Barré syndrome for those who received the AstraZeneca shot within a few weeks, and higher-than-anticipated cases of disseminated encephalomyelitis, a form of inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, among people who got the Moderna first vaccine dose.
“Moreover, overall risk–benefit evaluations of vaccination should take the risk associated with infection into account, as multiple studies demonstrated higher risk of developing the events under study, such as GBS, myocarditis, or ADEM, following SARS-CoV-2 infection than vaccination,” the authors concluded.
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27 February, 2024
Study Finds Hearing and Balance Disorders Among COVID-19 Vaccinated
More cases of hearing and balance disorders have been observed after people received COVID-19 vaccines, according to a recent study, which asked vaccinated people to remain alert to such complications.
The Australian peer-reviewed study, published in the Vaccine journal on Feb. 22, aimed to determine whether there was an increase in “audiovestibular events” following COVID-19 vaccination in south-eastern Australia. Audiovestibular refers to conditions related to hearing and balance disorders.
“Healthcare providers and vaccinees should be alert to potential audiovestibular complaints after COVID-19 vaccination,” the authors said.
Increase in Incidences of Vertigo, Tinnitus
Researchers found a rise in vertigo and tinnitus cases after vaccination. Tinnitus is a condition that makes an individual hear sounds like humming, ringing, or rushing, in the absence of external stimuli. Vertigo makes people feel like they’re spinning, and can result in dizziness.
“Our study found an increased relative incidence of vertigo in the 42 days following mRNA vaccines, and an increased relative incidence of tinnitus in the 42 days following both Vaxzevria adenovirus vector and mRNA vaccines,” researchers wrote.
“We are the first to confirm this increased relative incidence of tinnitus and vertigo post COVID-19 vaccines,“ they stated. They speculated that the audiovestibular events may be an ”immune mediated injury” triggered by the COVID-19 vaccines.
No Rise in Cases of Hearing Loss
In the same study, the researchers reported that there was “no increased relative incidence in hearing loss” in the 42 days following any COVID-19 vaccine.
They noted that the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data and studies conducted on the Finnish and Danish health care registry have found “found no association between sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) and COVID-19 vaccination.”
As such, the authors concluded that their analysis “supports the opinion that there is no increased incidence of hearing loss following COVID-19 vaccines.”
The authors pointed out a limitation—that their study could not account for any concurrent COVID-19 infections, which other studies have suggested could be associated with audiovestibular events.
“COVID-19 infection is an important potential confounder of the association between COVID-19 vaccination and audiovestibular events,” they wrote.
Researchers collected vaccine-related data from two databases in Australia, selecting 45,350 records via SAEFVIC, and 4.94 million records via POLAR, for the time period from January 2021 to March 2023.
SAEFVIC is the central spontaneous reporting service for adverse events following vaccinations in the Australian state of Victoria. The POLAR platform collects and processes general practice data on behalf of Primary Health Networks in Australia. Multiple researchers in the study declared receiving funding from the Department of Health, Victoria. SAEFVIC is funded by the department.
Out of the 45,350 SAEFVIC records, researchers identified 415 cases of vertigo, 226 incidences of tinnitus, and 76 hearing losses. From the POLAR platform, 13,924 reports of vertigo, 4,000 incidences of tinnitus, and 3,214 hearing losses were identified.
Researchers recorded the impact of two types of vaccines—AstraZeneca’s adenovirus vector vaccine and mRNA-based vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
The researchers found an increase in vertigo incidence following mRNA vaccines, and an increase in tinnitus incidence following both AstraZeneca and mRNA vaccines.
The reporting rate for audiovestibular events was found to be higher for AstraZeneca shots compared to the mRNA vaccines. In addition, more audiovestibular events were identified after the first dose of AstraZeneca than its second dose, while no such difference was observed for the mRNA vaccines.
Sudden Deafness
SSNHL, commonly known as sudden deafness, refers to an unexplained, rapid loss of hearing either at once or over a few days, caused by damage to the inner ear or the nerve from the ear to the brain. The condition usually affects only a single ear.
Researchers noted that some studies did find an association between Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine and SSNHL, but that the population or the effect size in those studies “was very small.”
One such study was published in February 2022—a cohort study of over 2.6 million patients in Israel. Of the 2,602,557 patients who received the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, 91 cases of SSNHL were reported. Of the 2,441,719 people who received the second dose, 79 SSNHL cases were identified.
While the “effect size is very small,” the researchers of that study said their findings suggest the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine “might be associated with increased risk of SSNHL.”
Tinnitus Takes Toll on Quality of Life
Back in 2021, Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group in Rochester, Minnesota, developed tinnitus after receiving his second shot of the COVID-19 vaccine. While he experienced ringing in both ears, the situation was worse in the left ear.
“It was like someone suddenly blew a dog whistle in my ear … It has been pretty much unrelenting,” he said in an interview with MedPage Today in March 2022. The outlet did not specify which vaccine he received, however it noted that, “Given his personal situation, [Mr. Poland] will look to protein subunit vaccines that are in development but not yet authorized by the [Food and Drug Administration], such as those from Novavax, Medicago, and Sanofi.”
At the time, Mr. Poland said there could be tens of thousands of people affected in the United States and potentially millions globally.
“What has been heartbreaking about this, as a seasoned physician, are the emails I get from people that, this has affected their life so badly, they have told me they are going to take their own life,” he told the outlet.
The World Health Organization said in 2022 (pdf) that, up to February 2021, it received 367 reports of tinnitus following COVID-19 vaccination, including 56 that were grouped with hearing losses. The majority (293 cases, or 80 percent) received the Pfizer vaccine. More than 70 percent of the total tinnitus cases were among females. Over a third of the reports were from healthcare professionals.
From the 367 cases, 97 incidents (26 percent) were recorded as serious. This included 59 cases classified as “other medically important condition,” 33 as “disabling/incapacitating,” and eight reports as “caused/prolonged hospitalization.” Two incidences were reported as “life-threatening.”
The organization also separately reported 164 cases of hearing loss, of which 104 cases (63 percent) were found among females.
In an interview with The Epoch Times, Mary, who declined to disclose her last name, said that she started experiencing tinnitus an hour after the first Pfizer shot in 2021. When she contacted the pharmacy where she was vaccinated, Mary was told that tinnitus wasn’t a side effect.
Even after taking steroid therapy as recommended by a physician, her condition didn’t improve. “I complained about it so much in the beginning … especially in the first couple of weeks,” she said. ‘I cried. I broke down.”
Despite facing difficulties, Mary could not openly discuss her concerns with her family, friends, or health providers. “I felt comfortable saying that I had tinnitus, but I was afraid to tell people that it started an hour after the vaccine ... I didn’t want people to think that I’m an anti-vaxxer,” she stated.
“But it’s my own experience, and the fact that I was afraid to say that is really sad.”
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Australia: Leftist health commentator admits some Covid vaccines had serious side effects after largest ever study released
See:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X24001270?via%3Dihub#s0090
ABC health expert Norman Swan has admitted the Covid vaccines produced unexpected side effects but considers them to be akin to 'winning the lotto three times in your lifetime'.Dr Swan was commenting on the largest ever study done into adverse reactions from Covid vaccines which was published last week.
'They uncovered side effects they hadn’t quite expected and they did show up as a signal there,' Dr Swan told ABC interviewer Jeremy Fernandez on Monday.
However, Dr Swan stressed that the side effects seen in the study's 99million subjects who received Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca shots were 'rare'.
He said Guillain-Barre syndrome was a side effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine that received particular attention in the study.
He described it as a 'descending paralysis of the body that affects the nervous system'.
'Usually in most people it is a temporary phenomenon but it can be quite serious at the time,' Dr Swan said.
An unexpected side effect of the Moderna vaccine was acute disseminated encephalomyelitis.
'So, this is essentially a brain inflammation usually seen in children but in this case in older people, these are largely 20 to 60-year-olds,' Dr Swan said.
'He described the condition as 'self-limiting and quite nasty'.
Dr Swan said that this condition was still extremely rare with only seven cases seen out of 10million injections.
He likened the probability of getting it to 'winning the biggest lotto three times in your lifetime'.
Asked how applicable the study was to Australians, Dr Swan said it included Aussies and people from similar countries such as Canada.
Dr Swan has been a strong advocate for getting the Covid vaccines despite initially dismissing their likely efficacy and saying those who took them were 'guinea pigs'.
In July 2022 the Scottish-born medical commentator revealed he had caught Covid for the second time despite having four jabs.
The study Dr Swan was citing involved an international coalition of vaccine experts who looked for 13 medical conditions among 99million vaccine recipients across eight countries.
They confirmed that the shots made by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are linked to significantly higher risk of five medical afflictions including Guillain-Barre syndrome.
But the study also warned of several other disorders that they said warranted further investigation, including the links between a brain-swelling condition and the Moderna shot.
However, the team says the absolute risk of developing any one of the conditions remains small.
They said 13billion doses of vaccines had been administered and there have only been 2,000 cases of all conditions.
Their research was published in the journal Vaccine.
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26 February, 2024
Voters, Not the Doctor’s Union, Will Elect or Reject Vaccine Critic
Tasmania goes to early polls on March 23. The centre-right Liberal Party has selected Dr. Julie Sladden, a registered general practitioner and emergency medicine doctor since 1997, to contest the northern electorate of Bass.
The Australian Medical Association (AMA) wants her deselected.
AMA Tasmania vice president, Dr. Annette Barratt, says Dr. Sladden’s candidacy is “untenable.” Premier Jeremy Rockliff is standing by her.
Dr. Sladden closed her practice in 2021 because of strong objections to the COVID-19 vaccine.
Writing in the Spectator Australia in 2022, she explained that as a well-travelled doctor, she was more vaccinated than most people.
When the COVID vaccines arrived on the scene, she calculated her COVID infection survival rate was 99 percent.
Early data showed comparable transmission rates between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, but also some worrying safety signals with no long-term toxicity, carcinogenicity, genotoxicity, or fertility studies.
She concluded that for her, “the risks did not outweigh the benefits, especially if it meant I could still infect my patients.”
Her efforts to communicate her concerns to Tasmanian politicians mostly fell on deaf ears. That is when, as far as the health establishment is concerned, she became an “anti-vaxxer.”
She has penned many thoughtful, informative, and well-written articles since then.
Her six-month-old article for Brownstone on “The Vax-Gene Files,” co-authored with Julian Gillespie, remains the 10th most popular article on that site. My respect for her grew with her work with the Australians for Science and Freedom that I helped to establish.
There is a legitimate debate to be had on the efficacy and effectiveness of COVID vaccines in preventing/reducing infection and transmission, on the age-disaggregated harms-benefits equation, and on the science and ethics underpinning mandates, as opposed to recommendations and guidance.
This worldwide ongoing debate is being conducted by well-qualified and highly credentialed people.
Dr. Barratt believes “COVID vaccines have saved lives and continue to do so.” This remains the prevailing opinion in the medical establishment.
But many experts share doubts about the net benefits of universal COVID-vaccination and have come together in groups like the Australian Medical Professionals’ Society (AMPS), the Health Advisory & Recovery Team (HART) in the UK, and the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) in the United States.
These alliances were needed because critics of COVID-19 interventions felt the full force of stifling intellectual conformity. Regulators threatened dissenting doctors with professional disciplinary action.
Although the threat was carried out in only a few instances, the modest numbers do not invalidate the tactic.
On the medical freedom side, that which is beyond question is not science but dogma. Science is a work in progress, not an encyclopaedia of facts. The long arc of science bends towards truth, but progress is neither linear nor irreversible.
Scientists have a responsibility to subject the existing consensus to searching scrutiny in line with empirical observations. They must have the corresponding right to challenge the prevailing dominant narratives.
Diversity viewpoints on contested elements of knowledge, and rejection of attempts to suppress dissenting voices, provide necessary guardrails against reverses of knowledge.
On the political freedom side, it’s extraordinary that anyone should seek to deny a duly selected candidate, of any political party, the opportunity to contest an election. Pre-selection is a matter solely for the party concerned. Voting is a matter for the citizens of Tasmania.
Who appointed the AMA as the custodians of Australian democracy?
Did Australia’s COVID-19 policy interventions represent the greatest triumph of public policy, with an unprecedented high number of lives saved as a result of timely, decisive, and appropriate measures instituted by governments acting on the science- and evidence-based advice of experts? Or will they prove to be the biggest public policy disaster of all time?
The 2020–22/23 years were among the most disruptive in many countries, including Australia. The herd panic of early 2020 led to an abandonment of good process, an abandonment of carefully prepared pandemic preparedness plans, and a centralisation of decision-making in a narrow circle of heads of government, ministers, and health bureaucrats and experts.
The rules and regulations made on the run represented a hysterical mix of ignorance, incompetence, and/or malfeasance. The damaging health, mental health, social, educational, and economic consequences will continue to impact public life well into the future.
Core Principles
The doctor-patient relationship in Western societies has long been governed by four important principles: the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship; first, do no harm or at least, avoid doing more harm than good; informed consent; and prioritising the health outcomes of the patient over that of any collective group.
All four principles were gravely compromised with COVID.
Colleges and bureaucrats operating at a remote distance are not better placed than the doctor to assess the best interests of the patient.
The AMA should have been at the forefront of vigorously defending the sacrosanct principles that have delivered Australians among the best health outcomes in the world.
Instead, Dr. Barratt and the AMA are betraying authoritarian instincts in seeking to remove Dr. Sladden as a duly pre-selected candidate.
Little wonder that some doctors express concern the AMA has morphed from a union representing doctors into a bureaucratic institution run by careerists. Often, in my opinion, they seem more interested in attacking other doctors than representing the best interests of the diverse group.
They are free to challenge Dr. Sladden to a debate and argue their case for mandatory vaccines.
Good luck with that in the current political environment, with only 3.3 percent of 18-64 year olds choosing to be boosted in the last six months.
The criticism of Dr. Sladden is a bad development for the health of Australian democracy.
In fact, it is the AMA that owes the people of Tasmania an apology for this unwarranted intrusion into the electoral process.
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UK Health Advisory Team Calls For Suspension Of Covid Boosters
Britain’s Health Advisory and Recovery Team co-chair Dr. Claire Craig, supported by the UK Medical Freedom Alliance, and Children’s Covid Vaccine Advisory Council, issued this joint open letter to Victoria Atkins, MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care on February 6, 2024
This letter was appended with dozens of physician-scientist signatures.
To: The Right Hon Victoria Atkins, MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
CC: Dame Jenny Harries, CEO UKHSA; Professor Sir Christopher Whitty, CMO; Maria Caulfield MP
Dear Ms Atkins
Re: Urgent Review of Excess Deaths
Firstly, congratulations on your recent appointment as Secretary of State at the DHSC.
Your three months in office have given you time to see for yourself how much the NHS is struggling; with rising waiting lists, low staff morale and the devastating strike action. You will also be aware of the ongoing and concerning excess deaths in the UK, recently debated in Parliament.
The fact that this is occurring in many Western countries and across all age groups, particularly younger adults for whom there were no excess deaths during 2020, should trigger alarm bells and prompt an urgent investigation.
In addition, in parallel with increased deaths, there has been a significant rise in levels of sickness and disability recorded throughout the working age population.
This has resulted in not only increased demands on the health service, but also has impacted the health and resilience of NHS staff themselves, with resulting high levels of staff sickness and absence, causing additional strain on an already struggling system.
The causes of excess mortality and morbidity are likely multifactorial, including the physical and mental impacts of lockdowns, delays in accessing treatment and long-term effects of Covid-19 itself.
However, a fourth potential factor appears to be being deliberately ignored: that is, any possible role of the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. The timing of the rise in disabilities and deaths should make the vaccinations a definite suspect. As early as November 2020, many scientists and doctors, including those in UKMFA, were highlighting the potential risks of a rushed vaccine.
Until this question has been thoroughly investigated, it is premature and reckless to be talking of using mRNA technology for future prophylactic vaccines (we take no view on the development of mRNA vaccines for their previously-intended role as therapeutic anti-cancer agents).
We are concerned that the Government is focused on the business opportunity for the UK, offered by the expansion of use of these technologies, but are ignoring potential risks to public health from these products, particularly to the immune and cardiovascular systems.
The failure of COVID vaccines to stop viral circulation is obvious to all. The obviousness of this failure, along with growing concern about the products’ safety – evidenced by poor uptake among those eligible – is undermining public trust in vaccination more generally, including where it is indubitably useful.
We have written repeatedly to the MHRA, the CMOs, the JCVI, and to your predecessor, regarding the many risks of rolling these vaccines out to children. Members of the Pandemic Response All Party Parliamentary Group also wrote a letter in January 2022, over two years ago, regarding increased all-cause mortality in 15–19-year-old males.
The first three signatories on this letter were all asked by Baroness Hallett to provide Witness Statements for Module 4 of the UK Covid-19 Public Inquiry; these we have recently submitted, only to learn that the date for the Module 4 hearings has been inexplicably and disappointingly postponed, likely until after the general election.
In the interim we therefore call upon you to suspend the booster programme, pending an immediate review into all aspects of Covid vaccine safety, as outlined in our letter to the MHRA a year ago.
The health of the nation’s citizens is of paramount concern and must surely be a high priority for an incoming Minister.
We entreat you to apply the precautionary principle regarding the use of these products, which have been linked (in published scientific literature, adverse event databases and real-world epidemiological data) to numerous short- and long-term safety issues, particularly after multiple doses.
Pausing their use is now becoming widely recognised to be the only rational, responsible and morally justifiable course of action.
We wish you well in the challenging job you have ahead.
Yours sincerely
Open letters such as these are important all over the world because they prompt actions that should be taken, provide notice to the public that concerns are real, and take away plausible deniability for political leaders concerning the Covid vaccine safety debacle.
https://principia-scientific.com/uk-health-advisory-team-calls-for-suspension-of-covid-boosters/
*************************************************25 February, 2024
Effect of Higher-Dose Ivermectin for 6 Days vs Placebo on Time to Sustained Recovery in Outpatients With COVID-19. A Randomized Clinical Trial
The article below appeared in JAMA, a prestigious medical journal. Like previous similar articles, it found no benefit for Ivermectin in treating Covid-19.
The study is carefully done but overlooks a major caution for Ivermectin usage. While some clinicians claim benefit for Ivermectin at all stages of the disease, well-informed researchers are clear that benefit is to be found only if Ivermectin is given immediately after symptom onset. The study did not examine that. A 7 day treatment window was allowed. N would probably have been too small for useful analysis if the proper restrictions were observed so we await an experimental study before firm conclusions can be drawn
Susanna Naggie, et al.
Question Does ivermectin, with a maximum targeted dose of 600 ?g/kg daily for 6 days, compared with placebo, shorten symptom duration among adult (?30 years) outpatients with symptomatic mild to moderate COVID-19?
Findings In this double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled platform trial including 1206 US adults with COVID-19 during February 2022 to July 2022, the median time to sustained recovery was 11 days in the ivermectin group and 11 days in the placebo group. In this largely vaccinated (84%) population, the posterior probability that ivermectin reduced symptom duration by more than 1 day was less than 0.1%.
Meaning These findings do not support the use of ivermectin among outpatients with COVID-19.
Abstract
Importance It is unknown whether ivermectin, with a maximum targeted dose of 600 ?g/kg, shortens symptom duration or prevents hospitalization among outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19.
Objective To evaluate the effectiveness of ivermectin at a maximum targeted dose of 600 ?g/kg daily for 6 days, compared with placebo, for the treatment of early mild to moderate COVID-19.
Design, Setting, and Participants The ongoing Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines 6 (ACTIV-6) platform randomized clinical trial was designed to evaluate repurposed therapies among outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19. A total of 1206 participants older than 30 years with confirmed COVID-19 experiencing at least 2 symptoms of acute infection for less than or equal to 7 days were enrolled at 93 sites in the US from February 16, 2022, through July 22, 2022, with follow-up data through November 10, 2022.
Interventions Participants were randomly assigned to receive ivermectin, with a maximum targeted dose of 600 ?g/kg (n = 602) daily, or placebo (n = 604) for 6 days.
Main Outcomes and Measures The primary outcome was time to sustained recovery, defined as at least 3 consecutive days without symptoms. The 7 secondary outcomes included a composite of hospitalization, death, or urgent/emergent care utilization by day 28.
Results Among 1206 randomized participants who received study medication or placebo, the median (IQR) age was 48 (38-58) years, 713 (59.1%) were women, and 1008 (83.5%) reported receiving at least 2 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine doses. The median (IQR) time to sustained recovery was 11 (11-12) days in the ivermectin group and 11 (11-12) days in the placebo group. The hazard ratio (posterior probability of benefit) for improvement in time to recovery was 1.02 (95% credible interval, 0.92-1.13; P = .68). Among those receiving ivermectin, 34 (5.7%) were hospitalized, died, or had urgent or emergency care visits compared with 36 (6.0%) receiving placebo (hazard ratio, 1.0 [95% credible interval, 0.6-1.5]; P = .53). In the ivermectin group, 1 participant died and 4 were hospitalized (0.8%); 2 participants (0.3%) were hospitalized in the placebo group and there were no deaths. Adverse events were uncommon in both groups.
Conclusions and Relevance Among outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19, treatment with ivermectin, with a maximum targeted dose of 600 ?g/kg daily for 6 days, compared with placebo did not improve time to sustained recovery. These findings do not support the use of ivermectin in patients with mild to moderate COVID-19.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2801827
*********************************************Large COVID-19 vaccine study finds risks
A Leftist take on the matter from "Salon"
Even while the COVID-19 vaccines have been hailed as one of the greatest achievements in modern science, they have been swirled in misinformation perpetuated by anti-vaccine figures and organizations who question their efficacy and robust safety record. The shots have even been wrongly blamed for high-profile health events, like when LeBron "Bronny" James Jr. suffered a cardiac arrest during practice. While research has shown that a COVID-19 infection is linked to an increased risk in myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart muscle, how — and if — that translates to causation from vaccines has been widely taken out of context.
But now, a new study, published in the journal Vaccine, examined the potential health effects of the coronavirus vaccines. In its international attempt to separate fact from fiction, scientists have found that there are some links between the vaccines and adverse health effects to be aware of — but more research is needed to land on any definitive conclusions.
“What we wanted to do was to see if there was any signal to suggest that COVID vaccines might be associated with an increased risk of certain medical events occurring,” Helen Petousis-Harris, a co-author of the study and co-director of the Global Vaccine Data Network, told Salon. “So what we did was we compared what we would normally expect to see — because these events occur all the time — what would you normally expect to see, and what are we actually seeing.”
The study included 99 million people across eight countries and found that the first, second and third doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines were linked to rare cases of myocarditis. Specifically, people who received a second dose of Moderna vaccine were 6.1 times more likely to have myocarditis. The condition also developed among people who received the Pfizer vaccine while researchers identified that pericarditis had a 6.9-fold increased risk for those who received a third dose of AstraZeneca’s vaccine.
There was also a 2.5-times increased risk of developing the rare autoimmune disorder called Guillain-Barré syndrome linked to those who received AstraZeneca’s vaccine. Separate research has found that COVID itself can cause this syndrome at a rate far higher than vaccines.
Petousis-Harris told Salon in general that the researchers weren’t surprised with the findings, in part because previous research had already pointed to the rare risk associated with vaccination and conditions like myocarditis and pericarditis. But they did pick up something that hadn’t been discussed before: a link between AstraZeneca's viral-vector vaccine and acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, a rare condition that causes inflammation and swelling in the brain and spinal cord.
“And what that enabled was to take the next step, to a different kind of study, to really ask the question: Is this a problem?” she said. “Our colleagues in Australia performed a study in 6 million people, which is in the same issue, to look at that, and found that essentially after the viral-vector vaccines, the risk is about less than one extra case per million doses. So very very rare.”
Notably, the risk was not observed in the mRNA vaccine design.
As Salon has previously reported, COVID-19 vaccines changed the course of the pandemic. The mRNA technology, which was novel at the time, allowed for an effective vaccine to be developed in record time. Yet what the scientific community saw as a historic moment for biotechnology turned into a polarizing debate among American lawmakers who fell for conspiracy theories and misinformation surrounding the vaccines — marking a pivotal turning point for the anti-vaccine movement. Typically, misinformation about vaccines doesn't appear out of nowhere. There is usually a kernel of truth to it, and the misinformation persists because it lacks context.
Unsurprisingly, this study is already being used to justify long-held concerns about the vaccines. But experts say that doesn’t come as a shock and that misrepresenting this study doesn’t tell the whole story about weighing the risk between being unvaccinated and getting infected with COVID-19, and getting vaccinated against COVID-19. For example, previous research has found that the risk of myocarditis is seven times higher from getting a coronavirus infection than getting vaccinated.
Glen Pyle, a molecular cardiologist who investigates cardiac injury associated with COVID-19, told Salon via email the most recent study is “a great example of the continuous safety monitoring that vaccines are subjected to, and it confirms much of the safety work already done.”
“For example, with adverse events like myocarditis it shows that these events are very rare,” he said. “And when we stack these rare risks up against the overwhelming cardiovascular benefits of vaccination, the case for vaccination becomes clear.”
Pyle added that this study highlights the need for public health experts to communicate the risks of vaccination and how common they are in the right context.
“For example, myocarditis is a very rare complication that increases primarily in younger males,” he said. “On the other hand, cardiac arrhythmias are far more common and they increase significantly with infection, but not vaccination — in fact, vaccination decreases these risks.”
He added there are “small but real increases in rare risks after vaccination, compared to large increases in very common risks with COVID-19.”
This strengthens the case for vaccination, and why cardiovascular societies throughout the world recommend vaccination, especially for people with cardiovascular conditions. Petousis-Harris said it’s hard when a study like this is published because “risk communication” is a complex science on its own.
“You have lots of ways you need to communicate this, and I think it's vital to be open and transparent with people, but you also have to work hard at how you are able to present to them,” she said. “I think it's important to empower our people who are health professionals and vaccinators to be able to confidently have those conversations with people and have the tools that they need to help show people what the risks look like.”
She emphasized that any pharmaceutical has risk of side effects.
“Probably vaccines are the safest of all pharmaceuticals by a longshot,” Petousis-Harris said. “One of the challenges is actually expressing how safe they really are. And another challenge is that we have health events happen by chance all the time, and they may or may not be related to a vaccine.”
She added that what has become clear is that it’s been difficult for people to grasp this nuance when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccines.
“People are really interpreting anything bad that happens after the vaccine has therefore been caused by the vaccine,” Petousis-Harris said. Notably, the study only examines links and associations — potential “safety signals,” it’s not definitively declaring a cause. “Ultimately, if the issue is transparency, this is transparent.”
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22 February, 2024
Immunosuppression Prevalence Doubled, Linked to Medication Use and COVID: Experts
Between 2013 and 2021, rates of immunosuppression in adults have doubled, according to estimates from a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) research letter.
In 2021, an estimated 6.6 percent of U.S. adults were immunosuppressed. “This rate of immunosuppression was higher than the previous national estimate of 2.7 percent using the 2013 [National Health Interview Survey],” the authors wrote in their paper.
The researchers estimated immunosuppression prevalence by analyzing National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) results.
Specifically, the authors analyzed responses to five questions. Over 29,000 individuals were asked if they had a health condition or were taking medication or treatments that would weaken their immune system. They were also asked if they had cancer or malignancy, the type of cancer, and their age at the time of cancer diagnosis.
In 2013, over 34,000 people were interviewed, garnering a response from 75 percent of households. In 2021, only about half of the households contacted responded to the survey.
Why the Rise in Immunosuppression?
“Given the documented increase in immunosuppression, studies are needed to understand the causes for this increase,” the authors wrote. However, they mentioned that the rise in self-reported immunosuppression may be due to increased use of immunosuppressive medications.
The use of adalimumab, a drug used to treat autoimmune conditions, has increased 3.5-fold between 2014 and 2021.
Immunosuppression carries significant risks, “including an increased susceptibility to infections, potential organ rejection, side effects of immunosuppressant drugs, elevated cancer risk, and pregnancy-related concerns,” Mohammad Razzaque, professor of pathology at the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, told The Epoch Times.
Immunosuppression occurs naturally with age, but it can also occur due to the individual being on various immunosuppressive therapies. People undergoing such therapies include organ transplant patients and those with autoimmune diseases or cancer.
Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of medicine and preventative medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, reasoned that the rising prevalence could signify progress in science and health.
“There are more and more people being kept alive and are being treated with immunosuppressant agents in the United States, and that treatment is extending life, which means that the proportion of the population that is immunosuppressed is increasing,” Dr. Schaffner said.
Crude data from NHIS have also shown a rise in self-reported rates of cancer. According to 2015 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics, 8.7 percent of adults reported cancer. In 2021, it was estimated that 9.8 percent of adults had cancer.
NHIS' most recent survey in 2022 estimated that a slight decrease of 9.6 percent of adults had cancer.
The COVID-19 pandemic may have also made individuals more aware of their immune health and whether they are immunosuppressed, the research letter authors added.
COVID-19 and Immunosuppression
Studies have shown that the COVID-19 virus can disrupt the function and order of the immune system, leading to immune dysfunction and possible immunodeficiency.
One 2o23 study published in Nature Reviews Rheumatology found that people with a COVID-19 infection are at a greater risk of developing autoimmune diseases, which may be linked to potential immunodeficiencies.
The COVID-19 pandemic may have been particularly challenging to those already immunocompromised.
Immunocompromised people tend to have an increased disease severity if they become infected with COVID-19, and the vaccine appears to be less effective for them. Public health measures put in place during the pandemic may also have created obstacles for these people to access health care and therapies for their immunosuppression, said Mr. Razzaque.
Other researchers and physicians argue that the COVID-19 vaccines may also contribute to immunosuppression and deficiencies, though some research has opposite findings.
Research from Cleveland Clinic suggests that repeated boosting of COVID-19 vaccinations has been shown to put a person at risk of future COVID-19 infections. Another letter to the editor from Columbia University authors published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that people with higher vaccine antibody levels after vaccination were more strongly associated with breakthrough infections.
Most recently, an Australian review suggested that repeat COVID-19 vaccine boosting in immunocompromised individuals may impair immune activation within this population, possibly making them more vulnerable to infections and cancers.
In a research paper, Mr. Razzaque pointed to increased influenza infections reported in people who receive repeat influenza vaccinations, speculating if frequent boosting may be linked to immunosuppression.
Dr. Schaffner said whether increased infections linked to repeat vaccinations are a sign of general immunosuppression is debatable.
“It’s a very debatable issue,” he said, adding that even if there is an increased risk of COVID-19 infection linked to repeat vaccination, there does not seem to be “serious evidence” indicating a “general suppression of the immune system.”
However, works by Nordic researchers Drs. Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn suggest that non-live vaccines, including COVID-19 and influenza vaccines, tend to make the immune system “lazy” and less equipped to fight an infection. In contrast, live vaccines train the immune system to become better fighters.
Gastroenterologist and CEO of ProgenaBiome, Dr. Sabine Hazan, has said that the COVID-19 vaccine may cause immunosuppression by reducing good Bifidobacteria in the gut. She showed that after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination, Bifidobacteria levels dropped by half among her trial participants.
Bifidobacteria are essential for boosting intestinal immunity. Dr. Hazan’s earlier work showed that people with reduced Bifidobacteria in the gut were at risk of severe COVID-19 infections, and therapeutics that replenished the Bifidobacteria, such as vitamins C and D and ivermectin improved patient survival rates.
“The pandemic appears to have influenced what the public thinks about their immune system. There has been a big jump in perceived weakness in the immune system. More research is needed to determine if either SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID-19 vaccine indeed has impaired human immunity according to these perceptions,” Dr. Peter McCullough, renowned cardiologist and internist, told The Epoch Times.
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Nova Scotia Health Authority Rescinds COVID Vaccine Mandate for Health Care Workers
The Nova Scotia Health Authority has announced it will be rescinding its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers due to the pandemic entering its endemic phase and its “commitment to respecting the choices and autonomy of our staff members.”
“Based on the current available evidence, Nova Scotia Health and IWK Health are amending their respective policies,” reads a joint statement released on Feb. 21 by the two health authorities, which was originally obtained by The Canadian Independent.
“Effective February 26, 2024, it will no longer be a requirement for employees, preferred candidates and on-site medical staff to submit proof of primary series COVID-19 immunization.”
The health organizations said the change represented the “evolving landscape of COVID-19 in its endemic phase.” They added that vaccination against the disease remained “highly effective” at preventing disease, hospitalization, and death, and encouraged all eligible residents to receive their boosters.
The organizations said the change in policy means health care workers who did not submit proof of vaccination and were subsequently let go from work would have the chance to “return to active employment.” Nova Scotia and IWK Health will be reaching out to those employees on administrative leave to discuss options for them to return to work.
Many Canadian provinces got rid of their vaccine mandates for health care workers in 2022, with Saskatchewan lifting the requirement on Feb. 14, Manitoba lifting the requirement on March 1, Ontario lifting it on March 14, New Brunswick ending it on April 11, Newfoundland ending it June 1, and Alberta lifting it on July 18.
The province of Quebec backed down from making COVID-19 vaccines mandatory for health care workers back in November 2021, as a Superior Court judge ruled in favour of a group of unvaccinated health care workers.
British Columbia is the only province that still has a COVID-19 vaccine mandate in place for health care workers. In September 2023, a vote was held at the Union of B.C. Municipalities about the mandate, which saw municipal leaders vote against a motion rescinding the policy.
The company Purolator suspended its COVID-19 vaccine mandate on April 13, 2023, asking employees who had been placed on unpaid leave to return to work by May 1. Following nearly a year of arbitration, Arbitrator Nicholas Glass ruled in a Dec. 14 decision that Purolator must compensate employees who were terminated for not receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.
A recent survey conducted by the Public Health Agency of Canada found that one-third of doctors and over half of nurses were reluctant to take the COVID-19 vaccine because they feared potential side effects. The research found that despite many health workers being reluctant, 89 percent received the vaccines, with the most commonly reported reason being a fear of job loss.
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21 February, 2024
COVID Booster Shots Carry ‘Increased Myocarditis Risk’ for Young Adults: Nordic Study
Booster vaccination against COVID-19 is linked to a higher risk of heart inflammation among adolescents, according to a recent study using data from several Nordic nations.
The peer-reviewed study, published in the European Heart Journal on Feb. 15, evaluated the risk of myocarditis among 12- to 39-year-olds after receiving COVID-19 mRNA booster vaccination. Myocarditis refers to an inflammation of the heart muscle myocardium. The study analyzed data from 8.9 million young adults from four nations: Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.
In total, 1,533 cases of myocarditis were identified with the study concluding that the “booster dose is associated with increased myocarditis risk in adolescents and young adults.”
Among males, a third dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine was associated with an “increased incidence rate of myocarditis” within 28 days of inoculation compared to a longer period after the second dose.
The study noted that the association of myocarditis with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines has appeared “strongest in male adolescents and younger males and after the second dose.”
The study was authored by 12 experts from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Swedish Medical Products Agency, Statens Serum Institut, and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare.
Significant Spike in Cases
Cases of myocarditis among vaccinated individuals in the United States spiked within the first year of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, according to a study published in late January that looked at data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
“We found the number of myocarditis reports in VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination in 2021 was 223 times higher than the average of all vaccines combined for the past 30 years. This represented a [2,500 percent] increase in the absolute number of reports in the first year of the campaign when comparing historical values prior to 2021,” the U.S. study said.
Roughly 50 percent of myocarditis cases occurred among youths and 69 percent of affected individuals were males. Out of a total of 3,078 COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis cases as of August 2023, 76 percent resulted in emergency care and hospitalization, and 3 percent died.
New studies are being published looking at reducing myocarditis risk when vaccinating adolescents against COVID-19, appearing to confirm the fact that such a risk exists for the shots.
A Feb. 14 study in the journal Vaccines found that extending the interval between the first and the second dose of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines leads to a 66 percent “lower risk of incident carditis among adolescents.”
Carditis is the general term for inflammation of the heart.
The study referred to adolescents as a “vulnerable population” while pointing out that “previous studies indicate an increased carditis risk among adolescents following the two-dose messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccine.”
COVID-19 and Myocarditis
There have been suggestions that COVID-19 infections cause more myocarditis cases than the vaccines.
For instance, a study published by the American College of Cardiology in 2022 said that “overall, the risk of myocarditis is greater after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after COVID-19 vaccination.”
Dr. Daniel Jernigan from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently testified at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. In his testimony, Dr. Jernigan claimed that the risk of getting myocarditis is “much lower among those vaccinated than among those that are unvaccinated.”
However, cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough disputes the claim that COVID-19 infections cause myocarditis.
In a post on his website, he described this argument as “a twisted rationale for giving out COVID-19 vaccines, and in a perverted manner, creating more myocarditis in the population. If SARS-CoV-2 infection caused myocarditis or inflammation of heart muscle tissue, then it would be seen on autopsy in fatal cases of COVID-19.”
Dr. McCullough cited an October 2022 study involving an autopsy of the hearts of COVID-19 infected individuals. The analysis “concluded the virus does not infect the heart,” he said.
The cardiologist called claims of the COVID-19 virus infecting the heart and causing myocarditis “false claims made from automated hospital data and not adjudicated, autopsy proven cases.”
“The COVID-19 vaccines install mRNA in the heart and the Spike protein directly damages and incites inflammation into the heart muscle causing the pathophysiology we see every day in cardiology practice,” he wrote.
Researchers from a Jan. 24 study who looked into the initial phase 3 trials of Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines found that their estimated harms “greatly outweigh the rewards.”
They called on world governments to impose a “global moratorium” on the COVID-19 vaccines “given the well-documented [serious adverse events] and unacceptable harm-to-reward ratio.”
The authors also recommended an “immediate removal” of COVID-19 vaccines from the childhood immunization schedule, pointing out that children were at very low risk of infection.
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Did lockdowns cause more harm than good?
The question of whether lockdowns caused more problems than they solved will be picked over for years to come, even if the official Covid-19 inquiry shows little interest in peering into the matter. The latest contribution, a paper from Lund University in Sweden, provides further evidence that this really is something that a UK inquiry needs to investigate. The paper, published by the Institute for Economic Affairs, seeks correlations between the severity of lockdown restrictions in 25 European OECD members and outcomes in terms of excess deaths, economic growth and public deficits. It seems to provide a fairly clear answer: lockdowns were associated with higher overall levels of excess deaths, poorer economic performance and higher public debt.
It starts by using a marking system for the severity of lockdown, which gives every country a figure of between 0 and 100 – where 0 would be no Covid measures at all and 100 a cessation of all economic and social life. On the this measure the UK comes out at 50, France 48 and Italy 60. Sweden was given a lockdown rating of 39. Interestingly, although Sweden was perceived as an outlier throughout the pandemic, and indeed it did plough a very different furrow in the early weeks, Norway and Finland were given slightly lower overall lockdown scores for the duration of the pandemic, owing to the greater relaxation of measures during the rest of 2020.
Overall, the study establishes a fairly weak positive correlation between severity of lockdown and excess deaths. It establishes stronger negative correlations between severity of lockdown and economic growth, and between lockdown severity and the fiscal cost of the pandemic (as measured by the size of the budget deficit in 2020 and 2021 divided by GDP in 2019).
In other words, lockdowns impacted negatively on the economy and the public finances, as might be expected, but they also appear to be associated with slightly higher rates of excess deaths. The study uses excess deaths rather than Covid deaths because it is trying to assess the total effect of lockdowns: how many lives they saved against how many lives they cost through poverty, loneliness, a failure of people to seek timely healthcare because they had been told to stay at home etc.
There are, however, a number of caveats to be put against these findings. Firstly, as the authors admit, the system for giving countries a lockdown score is largely subjective. This part was not in fact the work of the authors – they used a scoring system developed for an earlier study. Secondly, the study doesn’t account for the fact that different countries had different levels of exposure to the virus – which was bound to spread differently in a country like Britain, which has a high density of population and many interconnections with the rest of the world, than in say Norway, with a much lower population density, smaller urban areas and fewer international flights. Indeed, the pattern of excess deaths in Sweden reflects the number of people who had travelled to the Alps for skiing holidays in early 2020 – the areas where more people went to the Alps suffered higher death rates.
Thirdly, it overlooks the fact that lockdowns were often a consequence of high death rates rather than the other way about – Britain, for example, had two further lockdowns in the autumn and winter of 2020-21 precisely because death rates were high and rising.
Scandinavian countries got by with fewer restrictions because death rates were lower – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they would have ended up with more deaths had they made restrictions tougher. We will never know what would have happened had Britain, say, followed the Swedish approach. Fourthly, there are plenty of other variables which were not measured in this study. You could, for example, see what correlation existed between excess death rates and obesity rates, smoking rates or vaccination rates.
All this said, there is clearly a strong case to be made that severe lockdowns caused more misery – deaths included – than they averted. It is essential that this is properly debated before we plan for future pandemics.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/did-lockdowns-cause-more-harm-than-good/
*************************************************20 February, 2024
Largest Covid vaccine study ever finds shots are linked to small increased risk of neurological, blood and heart disorders - but they are still extremely rare
Covid vaccines have been linked to small increases in heart, blood, and neurological disorders, according to the largest global study of its kind.
An international coalition of vaccine experts looked for 13 medical conditions among 99 million vaccine recipients across eight countries in order to identify higher rates of those conditions after receiving the shots.
They confirmed that the shots made by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are linked to significantly higher risk of five medical conditions - including a nerve-wasting condition that leaves people struggling to walk or think.
But the study also warned of several other disorders that they said warranted further investigation, including the links between a brain-swelling condition and Moderna's shot.
Still, the team says the absolute risk of developing any one of the condition remains small. For instance, 13 billion doses of vaccines have been administered and there have only been 2,000 cases of all conditions.
Dr Harlan Krumholz, director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation and a lead investigator behind the study, said: ‘Both things can be true.
'They can save millions of lives, and there can be a small number of people who’ve been adversely affected.’
Covid vaccines are estimated to have averted more than 19 million deaths worldwide, including three million in the US alone.
Among their discoveries was a twofold increase in the risk of a neurological condition known as Guillain-Barre syndrome,an autoimmune disorder in which the immune system attacks the body's peripheral nervous system, leading to damage to the protective casing around nerve cells.
The report said that of the 23 million AstraZeneca shots administered worldwide, they would have expected 76 cases of GBS - but 190 events were observed, accounting for a 2.9-fold increased risk.
While it cannot be proven that the vaccine caused these events, there is some evidence the vaccine triggers the immune system to attack its own nerves.
Meanwhile, the study also confirmed a threefold higher risk for a type of heart inflammation called myocarditis, though researchers did not give the number of expected cases versus actual cases.
Myocarditis was seen most commonly in young men. It's believed to be related to immune response triggered my the mRNA vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna, which work by instructing cells to produce the same protein that sits atop the coronavirus.
This prompts the immune system to produce antibodies against the spike protein, providing protection against Covid. In rare cases, this immune response may lead to inflammation in the heart muscle.
Typically, the myocarditis instances have been relatively mild, leading to just 28 deaths.
Additionally, both the first and fourth doses of the Moderna vaccine had between 1.7 and 2.6 times greater number of instances of pericarditis, an inflammation affecting the protective sac encasing the heart.
They looked at more than 39 million Moderna vaccine doses administered.
Like the link between mycarditis and the vaccines, links to pericarditis are still under investigation. It is believed to be caused by the same mechanism, an overactive immune response that attacks the thin sac-like membrane.
There was a greater than 3.7 times risk of a condition called Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM), which causes swelling in the brain and spinal cord that damages the protective covering of nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord, after the first dose of the Moderna vaccine.
Seven instances of ADEM occurred following vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, surpassing the anticipated count of two cases.
There were nearly 190 million shots considered in the study.
The study also found that after getting the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, there were 1.9 and 3.9 times increased risks of transverse myelitis and ADEM, respectively.
Bell’s palsy, which causes temporary weakness or paralysis of the muscles on one side of the face, had an increased odds of 1.05 after a first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
There was also a 1.3 to 1.4 times greater risk of having a seizure following the first and second doses of the Moderna vaccine, as well as the fourth dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
Landmark study finds sudden cardiac deaths in sport fell over time
UK cardiologists say the findings from the 'landmark' Swiss and US study should reassure people about the safety of the mRNA Covid vaccines and the risk of myocarditis.
The researchers added a major caveat to this finding: ‘Chances of having a neurological event following acute SARS-CoV-2 infection were up to 617-fold higher than following COVID vaccination, suggesting that the benefits of vaccination substantially outweigh the risks.’
After a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, there was a 3.2-times-greater than expected risk of Cerebral Venous Sinus Thrombosis (CVST).
The risks after the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine and after the second dose were 1.49 and 1.25 times higher.
CVST is a rare but serious condition characterized by the formation of blood clots in the large channels that drain blood from the brain and deliver it back to the heart after the AstraZeneca vaccine.
In total, 21 events were expected, while 69 events were observed.
Also after the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, there was a 1.07 times higher risk of thrombocytopenia, a condition characterized by a lower-than-normal number of platelets in the blood.
After a third dose of ChAdOx1, the risk notably rose to 1.95.
Their research was published in the journal Vaccine.
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Oh, So Shutting Down Schools And Making Kids Dumber Wasn't Required to Stop COVID
When the COVID pandemic hit, we shut down the schools to protect the kids. Everyone got subjected to remote learning, which didn’t work. When schools tried to re-open, teachers’ unions rioted, claiming selfish parents were trying to kill them. Teachers once again overshot their mark for a profession that doesn’t work year-round and who constantly want raises for mediocre test scores, especially when the damage from remote learning was revealed.
Besides test scores being the lowest in decades, the mental health crisis caused by extended periods of isolation is going to be a generational issue. The number of suicides was one of the most tragic stories coming out of the pandemic. And now, we have this study out of Canada showing that we never needed to shut down schools in the first place (via CP24):
An “extensive,” two-year review of COVID-19 in schools and daycares has revealed that these settings were not a significant source of transmission of the virus when infection prevention and control measures were used, researchers at McMaster University have found.
The review was published Thursday in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health and examined more than 34,000 references, including databases, websites, and studies, related to transmission in child-care settings and schools across the globe.
The results of the review appear to cast doubt on the necessity of the repeated interruptions to in-person learning during the pandemic.
In Ontario schools were closed for a minimum of 135 days to prevent the spread of COVID-19, with disruptions in three successive school years.
“We found that after that initial shutdown where everything was locked down, schools did not appear to have much impact on community level transmission when infection prevention control measures were in place,” Sarah Neil-Sztramko, an assistant professor at the university and the lead author of the review, said in a written statement.
When the masking rules flopped around, followed by the science fiction that followed once the Omicron wave hit that upended the narrative about getting the COVID vaccine, we should have expected this outcome regarding the educational fallout from keeping kids away from each other.
Meanwhile, teachers’ unions have tried to gaslight who was behind and supported the classroom shutdowns. If this pandemic had hit ten years before the Trump presidency—would we have all lost our minds? Even Dr. Anthony Fauci initially took a blasé attitude to the virus until the 2020 election season blossomed. Would we not have reacted with such insanity? Who knows, but what is a fact is that the chasm in American education created by the lockdowns might be one too great to bridge, especially with the burgeoning bureaucracy associated with this sector.
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FDA Official Acknowledges VAERS Faced 'Avalanche' of Reports After COVID Vaccine Rollout
A top FDA official admitted Thursday during a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing that the government's vaccine safety reporting system was not prepared for the “avalanche” of submissions entered after the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.
“As of February 2024, VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] reports for COVID-19 vaccines total significantly higher than all other vaccines combined since 1990 as reported,” said Chairman Brad Wenstrup of Ohio. “This is a surprising figure. Dr. Marks, was the government prepared for an avalanche of reports to VAERS?”
Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA, acknowledged it wasn't.
“We tried to be prepared for that,” he said, "but the avalanche of reports was tremendous. And again, it required re-tasking people on the fly…we had to usually staff up and had many meetings working to increase our ability to go through these reports because as you already mentioned, what the public sees on the public VAERS page is just a small fraction of the information that we ultimately collect and sift through that is very important to determine whether an adverse event is truly related to the vaccine
“One of the things we often receive is that we do not make additional information available,” he added. “I would say to you that it's a challenge. What we have learned is that it is very challenging to make available, essentially, protected health information...”
VAERS is an early-warning system but does not "prove that a vaccine caused a problem," according to the CDC. The information submitted, however, can highlight patterns and important information the agency and FDA can then investigate. Reports can be submitted by anyone
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/02/16/hearing-on-covid-vax-n2635349
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Hearing on the Hill Puts Feds on the Spot--Enormous Mistakes, Overreach & No Readiness for the Masses of Injured
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing titled “Assessing America’s Vaccine Safety Systems, Part 1” examined the effectiveness of vaccine safety reporting and injury compensation systems after the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. Biden Administration officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) all testified that America’s vaccine injury and compensation systems have serious deficiencies related to inadequate staffing, lackluster surveillance, and overlapping programs.
Select Subcommittee Members were adamant of a false narrative: that rather than the safe and effective mantra touted over and over by health agencies, industry and the medical establishment, the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine was in question. They in some cases pressed witnesses aggressively to explain potentially politically motivated decision-making during the pandemic. In other ways, the event seemed like a COVID-19 kabuki.
TrialSite was one of the few media to announce the event in advance, one that Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman, D.P.M., helped to organize.
Importantly, the Republican-led subcommittee sought out representation of patient groups. For example, Brianne Dressen, founder of React19, the largest COVID-19 vaccine injury group in the U.S. was in attendance and allowed to submit questions.
This first hearing was deemed part one of a two-part series of hearings. The second hearing focuses on the importance of the doctor-patient relationship in order to obtain public trust in vaccines during a future public health crisis.
Summary
In a nutshell, the Committee on Oversight and Accountability reports that the Biden Administration made the reckless move of mandating the COVID-19 vaccine less any kind of working system in place to compensate individuals injured by the policy.
Highlighting just how badly inadequate the government was to deal with any sort of vaccine-related injury HRSA Director at the Division of Injury Compensation Programs CDR George Reed Grimes: “At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had not had a direct appropriation with the CICP. We also had only four staff.”
The hearing was also political kabuki for Republicans. They conveniently focus only on the Biden part of the COVID-19 history, excluding the Trump administration’s role in a reckless, relentless race to produce a vaccine first—TrialSite covered how various steps in the standard drug/vaccine development process were bypassed such as IND-enabling preclinical studies and the unreasonably compressed timelines (remember the AstraZeneca study) as examples.
In the hearing, the parties rather started with how the FDA accelerated the COVID-19 vaccine approval process to seemingly meet arbitrary mandate timelines set by the Biden Administration. This precedent was established by the Trump administration.
Executive branch officials from the CDC and FDA did express an accord that the federal government can never guarantee a vaccine is 100% safe. And of course, vaccines are public health tools involving tradeoffs, involving risk-benefit analyses.
Chairman Wenstrup asked: “Is any pharmaceutical 100% safe?”
FDA Director at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Dr. Peter Marks produced the honest answer: “No pharmaceutical is 100% safe.”
CDC Director at the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Dr. Daniel Jernigan: “No medical intervention is risk-free.”
CDR Grimes: “There’s a reason we have a compensation program, and we’re dedicated to diligently carrying that out. I can’t say it any better than my colleagues sitting next to me have.”
Importantly, TrialSite has reported consistently how the U.S. federal government under both the Trump and Biden presidencies completely dropped the ball when it came to planning for the inevitable injuries that would present after the cranking out of a vaccine in such record time.
Is it a surprise to anyone that vaccine injury reporting and compensation systems were not prepared to handle what was described at the hearing as an “avalanche” of injury claims caused by the COVID-19 vaccine?
The FDA’s Dr. Peter Marks:“We tried to be prepared for that, but the avalanche of reports was tremendous. It, again, required re-tasking people on the fly…We had to usually staff up and had many meetings working to increase our ability to go through these reports.”
Not surprisingly, at times the politicians in the room used the forum for grandstanding, not intelligently delving deeper into what kinds of shortcuts the Trump administration allowed or looked the other way during Operation Warp Speed.
The Committee on Oversight and Accountability derived the summary: “Shortcomings in vaccine injury reporting and vaccine compensation systems, as well as ineffective government messaging during the pandemic, deteriorated public trust in vaccine safety.”
Dr. Peter Marks: “We probably have not done a good enough job of communicating sometimes the actual numbers of deaths versus what’s in VAERS.”
Of course, not all reports in VAERS are related to the vaccines. However, the magnitude of problems associated with the system, given the “avalanche” of vaccine injury reports, necessitates its investigation plus call for reform.
Member Highlights
Brad Wenstrup organized this event and during the hearing, argued that advancing an accurate narrative about the COVID-19 vaccine through doctor-patient relationships during the pandemic would have decreased misinformation and disinformation.
Chairman Wenstrup: “I want everyone to understand, especially those serving on the government side that the public perception becomes reality. And because of that, words matter. Words matter that are coming out, you know. For those of us as Members of Congress or as physicians at home, we’re face to face with people. We are sitting face to face with somebody. We’re not just looking at data on a sheet and making decisions. It needs to be done, what you’re doing, but there’s a difference and that’s why I say words matter. Let me give you an example. When you say safe and effective, that’s relative in your mind. It’s relative in your mind, but it’s not to the person at home. They hear 100% safe and 100% effective. That’s what they hear. This is why words matter. Dr. Fauci, in his testimony, even said, you can never say that any treatment is 100% safe. Yet, in essence, that’s what people heard and are still hearing today. We’ve got to change that because the doctor on the ground or the Member of Congress on the ground is one one-on-one with somebody and explains that to them.
…
“Let me tell you, I’m grateful we live in a country that has these systems (vaccine injury reporting and compensation systems) in place because they’re there to protect the American people and to provide for better health in America. But there are ways we can do better.”
Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) pressed FDA Director Dr. Peter Marks to admit he ignored warnings from his colleagues about the dangers of accelerating the COVID-19 vaccine approval process. Chairman Comer further noted that the timing of the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandate and the FDA’s rushed approval of the vaccine appear to correlate. See the link.
Chairman Comer: “Why were you pressuring the doctors and then removing them from the approval process when they disagreed?”
Dr. Marks: “The approval process was one that needed to move as rapidly as possible.”
Chairman Comer: “Do you recall any conversations regarding the need to approve the vaccines in order for it to then be mandated?”
Dr. Marks: “There was an acknowledgment that an approval could allow vaccine mandates to occur.”
Chairman Comer: “So, Dr. Gruber wrote that you and Dr. Woodcock expressed your opinion that absent a license, states cannot require mandatory vaccination. Do you recall this conversation?”
Dr. Marks: “I don’t know what you’re what you’re referring to, but there’s probably, it’s just a statement of fact that once you have a license, vaccine and mandate could be placed.”
…
Chairman Comer: “Do you recall seeing safety signals regarding myocarditis in young men during this time?”
Dr. Marks: “There were yes. There were safety signals known and they were placed on the label.”
A notable admission given Marks was for accelerating the approval by August 20; the eventual approval came three days later on August 23 and coincidentally the Department of Defense’s vaccine mandate occurred according to the exchange on August 20, 2021. On the timing Comer declared, “And that is interesting.”
Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.), M.D., argued that the federal government wrongly inserted itself in the doctor-patient relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic. In actuality the feds extended their reach much more than that, working to censor doctors indirectly via pressure on the National Association of Medical and Pharmacy boards as TrialSite chronicled.
Overall, this “overreach” created a lack of trust between Americans and their public health system.
Rep. McCormick: “When you insert yourself between a doctor and a patient, and some doctors contradict you and you censor them, even when you’re not a doctor treating patients, people are going to say, why does the government have authority to do that, to censor my doctor? And then secondly, when you start requiring people to do something instead of encouraging the natural resistance of a freedom-loving people that were founded on those principles, will be to resist what you’re requiring. So, it shouldn’t be any surprise to us when the people say, I’m not going to do what you’re telling me I have to do when my doctor may agree with me and not you. You’re the government. Why do they insert themselves in inappropriate ways?
“And really, when we talk about the evolution of science, when you have immunity and you’re still requiring a vaccination that can cause a hyper-immune response, which we’re all scientists, we can admit to, there’s risk versus benefit on every decision. When the government says we’re going to make a carte blanche requirement without taking science into account, it’s no wonder people are mistrustful of our recommendations.”
Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) demanded FDA Director Dr. Peter Marks explain why the publicly reported data on vaccine injuries differs significantly from the confirmed death and injury count available to FDA officials. See the link.
Rep. Lesko: “We spoke over the phone back on August 10th of 2021, and I was asking about VAERS because I had lots of constituents reaching out to me saying there were tons of adverse effects, there were thousands of deaths, etc., and they were very concerned. And I asked how many were confirmed. And at that time, you said four. There were four cases that you confirmed deaths that were caused by the vaccine. I suggested, at that time, that the CDC and FDA do a better job of telling the public not just how many cases were reported, but how many were actually confirmed. And just if I heard you right, just recently, you said, well, we don’t want to give out too much information because of privacy rights. But certainly, we could put out how many were confirmed deaths, couldn’t we?”
Dr. Marks: “I fully agree with you that we probably have not done a good enough job of communicating sometimes the actual numbers of deaths versus what’s in VAERS. In fact, we just nearly fell prey to it here at this hearing.”
Rep. Lesko: “It seems very logical to me that if you’re saying the public shouldn’t count on VAERS because anybody can report to that, which they can, why wouldn’t you as actively report to the public — well, we confirmed this really low number of cases that actually were caused by vaccines. I mean, it’s been years now. Why? Why haven’t you done it?”
Dr. Marks: “We did present that in various settings, including at, I believe, at the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. It was mentioned at our vaccine advisory committee. It perhaps did not go as broadly.”
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), M.D., uncovered evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine was mandated for healthy Americans and U.S. service members without a sufficient system in place to compensate those harmed by the coercive policy.
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks: “I understand that there’s a current backlog of claims in CICP, by about more than 10,000. Why is there a backlog of claims for the COVID-19 vaccines?”
CDR Grimes: “At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had not had a direct appropriation with the CICP. We also had only four staff. When we received our first direct appropriation in fiscal year 2022, we were able to ramp up quickly and now we have over 35 staff who are assisting to adjudicate claims.”
What have we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic? As healthcare itself became politicized and used by warring factions over access to power and money, the people generally suffer as a result. In a democratic society usurped by pecuniary interests, one normalizing the power of money over all else, little will likely change.
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18 February, 2024
Dispute over COVID-19 Vaccination & Children
A prominent British Immunologist and Professor in Biomedical Sciences and Public Engagement at the University of Manchester recently declared in an Op-Ed piece in The Guardian that British health authorities are deviating from the rest of the wealthy developed nations by not placing more emphasis on universal COVID-19 vaccination for children and young adults. Sheena Cruickshank argues that the risk-based approach to COVID-19 vaccination recommended by the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI)---that the vaccines are generally only available for high-risk groups deviates from the norm of wealthy peer nations.
But is Cruickshank correct? Not really. The JCVI’s recommendations reflect more the norm among most developed nations. Even the New York Times would concur. Just read the recent “Covid Shots for Children.” David Leonhardt reports, “Much of the world has decided that most young children don’t need to receive Covid booster shots. The U.S. is an outlier.” Why is this the case? While the COVID jabs helped mitigate risk during the pandemic, now experts align for the most part that the benefits of these jabs for children in most cases “fail to outweigh the costs.”
Contrary to Professor Cruickshank’s stance, the U.S. is an outlier in this regard. And Britain’s JCVI actually follows most of the peer national COVID-19 vaccine policy, where healthy children are not included in the seasonal vaccination campaign.
Either Professor Cruickshank doesn’t understand very well COVID-19 vaccination policy among the rich nations, which we find hard to believe, or she is using her position and the media platform to promote a particularly biased agenda.
What prompts the British immunologists’ call for a new vaccine strategy? She is trying to force an argument, a case, to spark a movement to pressure the government to open up its “limited” vaccination recommendation by attempting to connect it to problems like long COVID. Allow children to get the vaccines, and first, parents will line up to volunteer their children to get the jab. And this will lower long COVID rates, although there is limited evidence that in the age of Omicron long COVID is materially reduced by vaccination.
“We know vaccination helps protect against long COVID, but we are still seeing new cases, so it’s uncertain how long protection persists from previous vaccinations.”
She cites no studies. And that’s likely because there are no studies anywhere that conclusively prove causation linking COVID-19 vaccination conclusively to reductions in long COVID.
Some observational studies suggest an association, but such investigations must be interpreted cautiously given their limitations. In one prominent recent population-based cohort study in Sweden published in The BMJ, Maria Bygdel and colleagues point out what they found to be “a strong association between COVID-19 vaccination before infection and reduced risk of receiving a diagnosis of PCC (Post-COVID condition).
But all sorts of limitations in this Swedish study means such examples should not be used by experts to prove conclusively that the vaccine reduces long COVID.
Bygdel and colleagues point to studies looking into the impact of vaccination on existing PCC, “showing both no effect as well as alleviation and aggravation of PCC symptoms.” This means the science remains uncertain, the situation unfolding and therefore the responsible position of any scientist or doctor should be to acknowledge that reality.
Another reason Cruickshank gives for the UK to open up its COVID-19 vaccination recommendations to more groups such as healthy children and young adults: the “government already negotiated the purchase of millions of doses of COVID vaccines, to be delivered in stages between 2021 and 2024.”
Meaning that under the pretext of emergency the government made prior bulk procurement decisions and now such product would just go to waste because a large segment of the population is excluded from the vaccine category group established by JCVI.
What the University of Manchester professor doesn’t touch on however, are the data involving cost-benefit analysis.
Rather she implies that the JCVI could have some agenda. After all they are using a ‘bespoke, non-standard method of cost-effectiveness assessment” guiding priorities less any details.
Professor Cruickshank fails to make the case for opening up the COVID-19 vaccine category to include healthy children and young people.
She doesn’t’ produce any conclusive evidence of any kind, nor does she point to any morbidity or mortality numbers pressing the current JCVI position on the matter. In fact, she acknowledges the data involving COVID morbidity and mortality is better this year than last. Of course, this is the case, we are out of the pandemic, the emergency has been called off, and the Omicron variant is substantially milder in effect for the substantial majority of the population.
The professor ignores any safety issues, a considerable factor in the young healthy population given the higher incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis. While she points to the U.S. as an example the JCVI should consider, she considers what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) package insert states about children and the Pfizer Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine for example.
Under Section 8.4 of this formal regulatory artifact:
“The safety and effectiveness of COMIRNATY in individuals younger than 12 years of age have not been established. Evidence from clinical studies in individuals 6 months through 4 years of age strongly suggests that a single dose of COMIRNATY would be ineffective in individuals younger than 6 months of age.”
She also ignores whether someone has been infected or not. Natural immunity also can wear off given the mutating pathogen, but it’s a major contributing factor undoubtedly the JCVI and most other developed countries have factored into their analysis.
Professor Cruickshank cites a couple examples of developed nations making the vaccine universally available for healthy children and young adults--the U.S. and France. But as the New York Times now acknowledges, it’s the U.S that is an outlier, not the other way around, as Professor Cruickshank opines.
Finally, Cruickshank evades the topic of the market’s general rejection of the COVID-19 vaccines in the USA, despite continuous promotional energies across both public health authorities and industry. Less than one fifth of the eligible population stepped forward to get the latest monovalent booster (BA.4/BA.5), and the percentage of children that ultimately received a booster jab targeting Omicron BA.4/BA.5 was far less.
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Long COVID can destroy your ability to exercise or do simple tasks — now we may know why
Extreme fatigue and difficulty exercising are common symptoms of long COVID — now scientists may finally have discovered why.
While most people who test positive for the coronavirus are over their symptoms within a week or two, more research is showing that some people continue to report symptoms — and even develop new ones — three months after their initial positive test, lasting for months or even years.
A new study, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that some of these symptoms may persist or worsen as those with long COVID-19 experience biological changes in their bodies after working out — most notably involving their muscles.
“We’re seeing clear changes in the muscles in these patients,” Michèle van Vugt, professor of internal medicine at Amsterdam UMC, said in a statement.
The study found that long COVID patients had extreme fatigue, changes in muscle composition and widespread muscle damage.
Researchers from Amsterdam UMC and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) analyzed data from 25 long-COVID patients with post-exertional malaise (PEM) — meaning their symptoms worsened after the minor physical exertion, causing them to crash from extreme fatigue — and 21 healthy control participants after cycling for 15 minutes.
As patients experience PEM, even daily tasks like carrying groceries and brushing their teeth can be exhausting.
After analyzing blood and muscle tissue samples, the researchers discovered that those with long COVID had various abnormalities in their muscle tissue.
“At the cellular level, we saw that the mitochondria of the muscle, also known as the energy factories of the cell, function less well and that they produce less energy,” Rob Wüst, assistant professor at the Department of Human Movement Sciences at VU University, explained in a statement.
“So, the cause of the fatigue is really biological. The brain needs energy to think. Muscles need energy to move.”
This biological decrease in energy is specific to those with PEM and not seen in other chronic illnesses.
“Normally we know from all the other chronic diseases that exercise is good for you, that exercise is medicine,” Wüst told National Geographic. “However, these patients do get worse.”
Long COVID patients were also found to have a higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, which may also explain some of the fatigue.
These muscle fibers deplete energy faster, meaning they exhaust quicker.
“We know that it is difficult to change fiber types in people and that it doesn’t happen with inactivity,” Wüst told National Geographic. “Something else is changing the fiber types.”
The cause of this change is still unclear.
Along with changes to energy production and muscle composition, the research team also found those with long COVID had muscle damage — muscle scarring, inflammation and blood clots before and after working out.
Studies have shown that those with PEM struggle to recover from exercise, but this latest research showed that this may be caused by repeated overexertion — even from daily tasks — that prohibit the body from fully recovering.
The experts noted that this breakthrough will help guide more appropriate treatments for those with long-term COVID, though not everyone would necessarily benefit in the same ways.
“Keep in mind that every patient has a different limit,” Brent Appelman, a researcher at Amsterdam UMC, said in a statement.
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15 February, 2024
Censored again
My post of 12th relating Covid to drug side-effects has been deleted by Google, who own Blogspot. The original story that I reproduced is here:
It is very iconoclastic
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Forced Vaccination In Australia Should Be A Crime
Fact 1 – Vaccines did not control the risk from infectious diseases. This is an historical fact that is being erased by big pharma funding.
Fact 2 – Childhood chronic illnesses and deaths have increased significantly in a direct dose-response relationship with the increased use of childhood vaccines for 30 years.
This correlation is being ignored yet is the strongest sign of a causal link when governments do not use scientific methodology to prove the vaccines are harmless before they market them to the public.
Conclusion: There is no empirical evidence that any vaccine is safe or necessary for controlling infectious diseases. Hence, the use of mandatory policies with coercive strategies is a crime against the population.
Individuals have the right to choose which ones they use and this does not make them an ‘antivaxxer’ or a ‘conspiracy theorist’. It makes them a critical thinker who is doing a proper risk analysis of the use of each vaccine (aka drug) in yourself or your child, according to your genetic make-up. (A summary pamphlet of the main arguments de-bunking mandatory vaccination in my PhD)
When government policies are built on fraud society begins to crumble and this is what we are seeing in Australia today. Most people can sense that lies are being told by the government and our institutions but so many people are paid to tell these lies, particularly our politicians and medical profession, that the Australian population is confused, anxious, depressed – and more and more divided. Our young people are struggling.
Australia is turning into a totalitarian state. Mental health and suicides are skyrocketing yet television portrays this country as a ‘paradise on earth’. The inversion of reality.
Does this remind you of 2020 when the television told you we were in a ‘pandemic’ but when you looked out your window nothing had changed – the sun was shining and no one was dropping dead or getting ill around you?
But then you watched the TV and saw those distressing pictures of hospitals and heavily gowned up staff.
Reality can be inverted by a biased media:
‘The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.’ (George Orwell).
Suffice to say you are being told what to think by a corporate-funded media and the lies become truths when history is erased and our government officials receive the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for telling these lies.
Meanwhile, your academics and health professionals get their reputations destroyed by the media for providing evidence of the truth. Speaking truth to power when money is power.
Totalitarianism is building globally as freedom of speech is curtailed by new laws to protect government lies. These laws are already being discussed in the Australian parliament and freedom is being lost by the increase in CCTV cameras and Centrally Managed Smart (CMS) Lights with 5g, in previously peaceful and natural spaces.
This infrastructure is being put up by our councils that are now called ‘The City of …..’ to fit in with the WEF’s Smart City agenda. Look up the UN Agenda 21 and 30.
The Medical Fraud in Government Vaccination Policies
Vaccination policies are promoted to the public as ‘health’ policies but like mainstream media, reality can be inverted when they are not based on empirical (observed) scientific evidence.
That is, when policies are based on claims of safety and efficacy without evidence, they result in the opposite outcomes in the population – sickness not health.
This is happening because of the influence of the medical-industry complex through funding, in every area of scientific methodology – scientific journals, research institutions, education, media and of course Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administrator (TGA) that is 96 percent funded by the industry whose drugs it approves AND monitors for safety.
Who’s interests do you think the TGA is protecting?
This huge conflict of interest in all our institutions results in a biasing of information on drug safety and efficacy, that is presented to the public in government policies. A situation that results in life or death consequences, as well as a decline in quality of life for many who develop chronic illnesses.
The published data clearly shows a significant increase in chronic illness in children that has occurred over the last 30 years in all developed countries, as the vaccination schedule expanded to multiple vaccines.
Young people are also unaware that most people over 30 years old, have NEVER had these vaccines. Why ? Because vaccines did not control the risk from infectious diseases. This is an historical fact that is being erased by big pharma funding and young people are being deceived.
This historical fact makes coercive and mandatory vaccination a crime against the population.
So when did the inversion of these facts start to occur in society? In 1986 the US Congress, under Ronald Reagan, removed all liability from pharmaceutical companies for any drug that they called a ‘vaccine’.
Why would you need to indemnify drug companies if their drug only had ‘rare’ adverse health outcomes?
When governments claim that adverse events (AEs) after vaccines are ‘rare’, an illusion can be created by the corporate-funded mainstream media by rarely reporting adverse events, and those that get compensated, are gagged by their legal contracts from speaking about their injury.
This has gradually been happening over the last three decades.
These public-private partnerships are creating the illusion that childhood vaccines are safe and necessary, through bias and framing of the facts. In a similar way that the illusion of a pandemic was created in 2020 in the media.
When government’s and media moguls work together in public-private partnerships you have fascism under Mussolini’s definition.
The definition of fascism by the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th Ed):
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
This centralised government is well advanced in Australia, and Australians have felt the violent suppression of the totalitarian Liberal and Labor governments over the last decade as we challenged the implementation of coercive and mandatory vaccination policies in Federal policies.
If a parent, researcher, doctor or politician speaks against the use of mandatory vaccination policies, then they are gas lighted and their reputations smeared. This is another strategy that is used to tell you what to think not how to think.
See my website Vaccination Decisions for the reality and why as a parent I put my reputation on the line.
In 2016 the promotion of the childhood vaccination program of 16+ vaccines with multiple doses of each, was reduced to the jingle No Jab No Pay/Play in the media. Anyone who challenged these policies was ridiculed and dismissed as an ‘antivaxxer’ or a ‘conspiracy theorist’.
Even academics and health professionals who were providing the evidence for the right to choose this medical intervention.
Choice is NOT antivaccination.
These are strategies used to tell you what to think about vaccines not how to think. The pro-vaxxers could not rely on evidence because there is NO evidence to support mandatory vaccination with any vaccine.
It is blind faith controlled by money.
This means the coercive vaccination policies in Australia are harming and dividing the population because they have not been supported by empirical (observed) scientific evidence. They are baseless claims.
This government policy is causing death and illness (democide) because the government is ignoring the overwhelming evidence of the destruction of health in the population – and it has ignored this evidence for 30 years.
My book Vaccination: Australian’s Loss of Health Freedom reveals many more of the political strategies used to invert reality for vested interests in government policy, big pharma’s influence and the control of populations.
“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force” (George Orwell)
Here is Elizabeth Hart’s latest substack revealing the time-line of how the Australian government destroyed voluntary informed consent that is a requirement under all doctors and health practitioners ethical guidelines – The Destruction of Voluntary Informed Consent via Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccination.
Here is a moving song and video of the Forest of the Fallen showing the thousands of people that died prematurely or lost their quality of life after taking the COVID19 “vaccines” from 2021-2024 (genetically engineered products that were not tested to see if they prevent COVID-19 disease) – Forest of the Fallen by Kelly Newton-Wordsworth
Forest of the Fallen is being set up all over Australia and people are suffering mental health issues from being gas lighted and not acknowledged as as having a vaccine-injury.
https://principia-scientific.com/forced-vaccination-in-australia-should-be-a-crime/
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Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients at Higher Odds for Long COVID—Large 3+ Million Patient CDC-Backed Study
This is not exactly surprising. If they were hospitalized,they were sicker to start with
A group of medical researchers targeting real-world data via electronic health records (EHR) known as PCORnet Network Partners sought to better understand post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC), another term for long COVID by comparing the occurrence of specific COVID-associated symptoms against conditions as potential PASC 31-to 150-day following a SARS-CoV-2 test among both adults and children with positive and negative test results. The group conducted this retrospective cohort study by tapping into the EHR data from 43 PCORnet sites participating in a national COVID-19 surveillance program.
This study included 3,091,580 adults (316,249 SARS-CoV-2 positive; 2,775,331 negative) and 675,643 children (62,131 positive; 613,512 negative) who had a SARS-CoV-2 laboratory test during March 1, 2020–May 31, 2021, documented in their EHR. The investigators employed use of logistic regression to calculate the odds of having a symptom and Cox models to calculate the risk of having a newly diagnosed condition associated with a SARS-CoV-2 positive test. Represented by Harvard Medical School physician-epidemiologist Jason Block, MD, MPH, the authors report, “Patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection, especially those who were hospitalized, were at higher risk of being diagnosed with certain symptoms and conditions after acute infection.”
With the outcomes published in BMC Infectious Diseases, the entire study was part of PCORnet, the national research network of health systems set up to facilitate multi-site research using EHR data via a standardized common data model across all sites. The 43 PCORnet sites participating in the national COVID-19 surveillance program were funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Findings
Once adjusting baseline covariates, Dr. Block and colleagues report, “Hospitalized adults and children with a positive test had increased odds of being diagnosed with ≥ 1 symptom (adults: adjusted odds ratio[aOR], 1.17[95% CI, 1.11–1.23]; children: aOR, 1.18[95% CI, 1.08–1.28]) or shortness of breath (adults: aOR, 1.50[95% CI, 1.38–1.63]; children: aOR, 1.40[95% CI, 1.15–1.70]) 31–150 days following a SARS-CoV-2 test compared with hospitalized individuals with a negative test.”
Those patients who were both hospitalized and tested positive for COVID-19 faced greater odds of diagnoses with ≥ 3 symptoms or fatigue compared with those patients testing negative.
“The risks of being newly diagnosed with type 1 or type 2 diabetes (adjusted hazard ratio[aHR], 1.25[95% CI, 1.17–1.33]), hematologic disorders (aHR, 1.19[95% CI, 1.11–1.28]), or respiratory disease (aHR, 1.44[95% CI, 1.30–1.60]) were higher among hospitalized adults with a positive test compared with those with a negative test.”
According to the PCORnet Network Partners analyses, adult patients non-hospitalized but with a positive COVID-19 test face higher odds, or increased risk, of being diagnosed with certain symptoms or conditions.
Limitations
An observational study this study isn’t designed to conclusively prove causation. The authors identify several limitations included in the published output. For example, there are inherent limitations based on the specific set of medical records used for this study. All sorts of complex assumptions must be made to overcome various biases and the like. The findings must be interpreted cautiously.
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Ventricular Tachycardia Cardiac Arrest after mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination
Researchers Fail to Assess Myocardial mRNA/Spike Protein and Loading Death Reports with Incongruous "Mild" and "Benefits Outweigh Risk" Statements
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH
As the modern world is recognizing record numbers of unexpected deaths with no antecedent disease as a result of cardiac arrest, the medical literature is begrudgingly allowing sporadic case reports to be published. It is reasonable to conclude there must be tremendous resistance against publishing large series of cardiac arrests. The bias probably starts with the doctors who are receiving these cases in the emergency room with CPR in progress.
Minato et al, reported a fatal vaccine-induced ventricular tachycardia arrest in a man around age 40 years the day after Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccination. As a cardiologist, I see this case as a straightforward myocarditis cardiac arrest. However the manuscript is laced with statements that seem to placate fellow authors, reviewers and editors on continued mass vaccination. For example, without presenting any data, the authors state “in most cases the symptoms are mild and tend to resolve on their own.” Later in the abstract “the benefits of vaccination appear to outweigh the benefits.”
These statements are juxtaposed to their description of a completely unnecessary death of a Japanese man in his forties. The authors fail to stain for mRNA or Spike protein or in heart tissue. When evaluated, both have been found in fatal cases such as this making it abundantly clear it was a vaccine death (Krauson et al, Baumeier et al).
This paper serves the purpose of 1) reporting a exemplary case of fatal COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis, 2) to show the biased psychology of researchers, reviewers, and editors who are still in mass formation and pursuing continued vaccination no matter how many more cardiac arrests occur among the vaccinated.
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13 February, 2024
Was the Covid cure worse than the disease?
A lot of Australians are dying. Many politely say: We need to know why. …but really now, how long must polite company continue this faux naivety?
The Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS), is the only body in Australia that undertook the task to investigate why Australian Excess Deaths continue to equate to about two jumbo jet crashes each week, and every week, since early 2021. That is two jumbo jets of dead Australians a week.
Why did AMPS step up thus?
Because the Australian Senate voted down a motion last year to hold hearings into why Australia has been experiencing this surge in Excess Deaths. Again this week, Labor and the Greens voted against investigating why Australia is experiencing continued excess mortality that began early 2021. Our elected officials turned their backs on us.
You see, the two major federal political parties were instrumental in motivating state governments to lock down Australians, confining essentially millions of people to their homes, with the only hope of release back into the general community being dependent on receiving a Covid vaccine, all to be recorded, of course, on vaccine passports. Millions of others had no choice – no jab meant no job. With bills to pay, mortgages to service, and kids to feed, many surrendered to this State-sponsored coercion.
With no equivalent Bill of Rights to protect the Australian people, and the almost complete abolition of human rights, many among the millions desperate to regain their fundamental freedoms succumbed to this disgusting and brutal authoritarianism. Australia’s political overlords had successfully revived our early penal colony history, where throughout 2020, 2021, and 2022, we became ruled by physical force and rubber bullets.
And it worked – by the end of 2021, somewhere between 85-95 per cent of Australians had fallen victim to the many tactics employed by our federal and state governments, to receive the ‘safe and effective’ gene-based injections.
Now, a lot of Australians are dying. People are asking, why?
To be clear, in 2020 Australia experienced below average All-Cause Mortality, despite apparently the presence of a highly infectious and deadly virus said to be circulating amongst us. In fact, deaths due to respiratory disease were 16.2 per cent lower, while influenza and pneumonia deaths were 36 per cent lower. Does that read like a pandemic to you? Covid deaths didn’t even break into our top 10 leading causes of death, and were at 832, far below the more than 3,000 suicides. So low were Covid deaths that Australia did not appear to have data to support the urgent cries from politicians, here and globally, to the effect that we all were facing imminent death from SARS-CoV-2. In truth, we faced and experienced a political theatre.
It is our opinion that this is why the Australian Senate continues to look the other way, now that it finds itself confronted by the fallout from a theatre of the absurd, the violent, and the dishonest.
In October 2023, AMPS released the investigative findings of over 30 science and medical authors into Australia’s Excess Deaths. In brief, we suspect that Australia may be suffering from an iatrogenic disaster potentially caused by the uptake of Covid vaccines.
The book is simply titled out of respect for the dead – Too Many Dead: An Inquiry into Australia’s Excess Mortality.
Some of the generous co-authors include Associate Professor Peter Doshi, Edward Dowd, Phillip Altman PhD, Andrew Madry PhD, Geoff Pain PhD, Wilson Sy PhD, Dr Monique O’Connor, Conni Turni PhD and Astrid Lefringhausen PhD, Jessica Rose PhD, Dr Tess Lawrie, Professor Norman Fenton, Dr Clare Pain, and Dr Aseem Malhotra, together with another 21 science and medical doctors of great distinction.
To say no stone was left unturned by such an esteemed ensemble of scientific and medical expertise would be an understatement. As the book notes:
This book has been assembled by an aggregation of highly-qualified and experienced doctors and researchers who take their ethics seriously. Here, information has not been withheld, or, worse, blocked.
AMPS did also fairly invite Australian medical regulators to contribute their analysis and synthesis of the Australian data, where it was hoped they would call upon the over 3,500 international case studies casting extreme doubt over the integrity of the Covid vaccines. Instead of a comprehensive contribution, there was silence; no response was provided. In correspondence to a previous letter, former head of the Department of Health, Mr Brendan Murphy, sent a rather brief letter, which read in part:
Regarding excess mortality statistics, there is no credible evidence to suggest that excess mortality is related to Covid vaccination either in Australia or internationally.
‘No credible evidence’?
In pondering these words from Australia’s (former) chief health bureaucrat, Too Many Dead observes:
For three years Australia succumbed to the will of corporate ideologues in big pharma, big media, big finance, and big government who seem to prioritise profit over people. This enslavement, and it is nothing less, may help to explain these high excess death rates being witnessed now at more than 15 per cent above baseline mortality. Put another way, AMPS and all ethical and informed doctors are horrified at the ten or twenty or thirty thousand excess deaths in this country in the time since March, 2021. Australian and other Western data show a mass casualty event; peculiarly, the higher figures are occurring in the countries that are highly injected, but our political and medical authorities seem to think there is nothing worth scrutiny. Now, with this book, it has been probed. This investigation has had to cut straight across the lockstep media messaging, the medical misinformation and the censorship.
Too Many Dead shall be seen through the years as a book of the age of Covid, a historic document gathering together meticulous facts that cause governments everywhere fear for what they have wrought and brought upon their people, death, and the pestilence of a thousand forms of injury brought and wrought by their ‘safe and effective’ solution to a non-pandemic.
I commend the authors of Too Many Dead for bravely stepping into the pages of history bearing the torch of Truth.
And to you good readers on far away shores I commend Too Many Dead as a systematic and disciplined account, and blueprint, for beginning the same journey into your Truth, for what has befallen every nation that opted to secure benefits for big pharma first, before the peace and health of their people … their mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, and our innocent infants.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-dying-of-down-under/
************************************************COVID-19 Likely Linked to Higher Risk of Dementia
Researchers from Columbia University, University of Oxford and Lancaster University conducted a thorough search across several prominent medical databases (MEDLINE/PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus, medRxiv, and PQDT Global) for studies published in English from January 2020 to December 2023. The medical researchers sought to understand the risk of developing new-onset dementia (NOD) using the Risk Ratio (RR) for measurement.
Established control groups were segmented as (i) a non-COVID cohort with other respiratory infections [control group (C1)]; and (ii) a non-COVID cohort with otherwise unspecified health statuses [control group (C2)]. Ensuing follow-up periods were divided into intervals of 3, 6, 12, and 24 months post-COVID. The study protocol was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42023491714).
What was the study authors’ aim? The relationship between COVID-19 infection and the increased likelihood of older adults developing NOD, given this connection, remains elusive. Hence the study mostly sought to investigate the potential role of COVID-19 in leading to NOD among older adults aged 60 years and older over various time intervals.
While the study did not generate conclusive evidence, the study team does conclude that “COVID-19 infection may be linked to a higher risk of NOD in recovered old adults at the subacute and chronic stages following COVID-19 diagnosis. This risk appears to be on par with that associated with other respiratory infections.”
Recently accepted to Preprints with The Lancet, the study was represented by Dan Shan, Columbia University.
The Findings
The study team’s investigation included 11 studies, consisting of 939,824 post-COVID-19 cases and 6,765,117 controls.
Applying the pooled analysis pointed to “a significant link between COVID-19 infection and an increased risk of NOD (RR = 1.58, 95% CI 1.21–2.08). In subgroup analyses, NOD risk was significantly higher in the COVID-19 group compared to C2 at 12 months post-COVID (RR = 1.84, 95% CI 1.41–2.38), but not at 3 (RR = 0.87, 95% CI 0.46–1.65) or 6 months (RR = 1.73, 95% CI 0.72–4.14).”
When comparing to C1, “the risk increase was not significantly remarkable at 3 (RR = 0.94, 95% CI 0.35–2.57), 6 (RR = 1.13, 95% CI 1.07–1.20), and 12 months (RR = 1.12, 95% CI 0.91–1.38), and overall (RR = 1.13, 95% CI 0.92–1.38).”
The authors disclose that females are associated with a higher risk of developing NOD in the COVID-positive group (RR = 1.65, 95% CI 1.53–1.78) and C2 group (RR = 1.33, 95% CI 1.22–1.44).
Using definitions from the American Thoracic Society guidelines, patients with severe COVID-19 “were significantly much more prone to developing NOD than those with non-severe infections (RR = 17.58, 95% CI 10.48–29.49).” A striking finding was that “cognitive impairment was nearly twice as likely in COVID-19 survivors compared to those uninfected (RR = 1.93, 95% CI 1.52–2.43).”
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12 February, 2024
Was COVID-19 actually a drug side-effect? Expert statistician says so
Correlation is not causation but the correlation is so high that one has to assume causation pending further analysis
The Australian quant challenging the official Australian COVID-19 pandemic narrative is at it again. This time, Wilson Sy targeted the United Kingdom (UK). Does macro-level data analyzed in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic reveal marked data anomalies and inconsistencies with existing explanations for excess deaths?
According to Sy, a financial analyst who spent over a decade working in investment banking, funds management and asset consulting, then spending several more years in the public sector involved with a range of analytical topics involving finance and insurance, yes.
Sy, a principal of Investment Analytics Research undertaking industry consulting and research in investment and superannuation, argues in a recent preprint that according to the application of his substantial quantitative skills that the deaths “wrongfully attributed to COVID-19 in April 2020, were not due to SARS-CoV-2 virus,” but rather the “Widespread use of Midazolam injections which were statistically very highly correlated (coefficient over 90%) with excess deaths in all regions of England during 2020.”
Sy raises a different hypothesis than many in England today. For example, many critics suggest the excess death rates in the UK today are the result of the COVID-19 vaccines.
Yes, Sy goes on the record in his preprint that these current excess deaths in the UK are “statistically uncorrelated to COVID injections.” Rather, the quant declares that in fact, the ongoing surge in mortality remains statistically correlated to Midazolam.
What is Midazolam?
A medication primarily used for its sedative, anxiolytic (anti-anxiety), and hypnotic properties, Midazolam belongs to the benzodiazepine class of drugs, which act on the central nervous system to produce calming effects. Midazolam is commonly used in medical settings for procedures requiring sedation, such as surgeries, endoscopies, and dental procedures. It is also used in the management of seizures and as a pre-anesthetic medication to induce anesthesia.
In addition to its medical uses, midazolam has garnered attention in recent years due to its use in capital punishment by lethal injection in some jurisdictions in the United States. It is used as part of a cocktail of drugs to induce anesthesia and then subsequently stop breathing and heart function, leading to the person's death.
It's important to note that the use of midazolam, like any medication, should be under the guidance of a qualified healthcare professional due to its potential for side effects and risks, including respiratory depression and dependence if used improperly.
The British government responded to a Freedom of Information Act request, and then released data involving Midazolam and COVID-19 deaths.
Importantly, in his paper, Sy suggests that the use of the drug Midazolam could possibly suggest a euthanasia policy. Fact-checkers from groups such as Full Fact responded to such allegations with the summary response bullocks!
Earlier in the pandemic conspiracy theorist David Icke released a long video circulated on social media, alleging the use of midazolam during the pandemic was used to facilitate the “culling of old people,” and that Covid-19 is a faked pandemic used as a scheme to allow this. Of course, SARS-CoV-2 is very real.
What about those who believe the majority of deaths were the result of how medicine was practiced?
That’s the camp Sy falls under. A band of doctors and scientists in the struggling medical freedom concur with the general theme Sy identifies—that at least in the UK, COVID-19 was an iatrogenic pandemic triggered by Midazolam and likely the vaccines, yet Sy acknowledges that he cannot verify the involvement of the COVID-19 vaccines with the current data.
The analyst concludes that “Global investigations of COVID-19 epidemiology, based only on the relative impacts of COVID disease and vaccination, may be inaccurate, due to the neglect of significant confounding factors in some countries .”
But Sy’s paper is based on a hypothesis. Presently, no one can be certain what’s behind the excess deaths in places like the UK and America.
But the quant is confident that the data points in a direction at least in the UK, that the use of Midazolam statistically correlates to excess deaths. Again, due to his math, Sy cannot make the same presumption about the vaccines, although he suspects them.
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Has British Medical regulator been corrupted?
Something is rotten in the United Kingdom—could it be captured by regulatory agencies? The regulatory body responsible for ensuring that medicines, medical devices, and blood components for transfusion are safe for patients in the UK, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is the equivalent of the Food and Drug administration in America—truly one of the most important, if not the most important of regulatory agencies.
But what happens when the agency that is charged with assessing the safety, quality, and efficacy of mission-critical medicinal products becomes compromised by politics, financial interests or ideology in such a way as compromising the agency mission of patient safety?
Such a concern has been raised during the COVID-19 pandemic applied to the MHRA, FDA and other national regulatory bodies. In the UK now a prominent group of elected officials as well as representation from academic medicine have come forth with troubling concerns, co-authoring and co-signing a letter expressing somber concern about how the MRHA conducts its regulatory business in Britain.
A bombshell allegation, that the MHRA rather than ensuring patient safety are instead, putting the public at risk via two fundamental problem areas: the Yellow Card Scheme (safety database) and conflict of interest and transparency entanglements.
While the letter was October 24, 2023, the group sponsoring the letter, All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) Pandemic Response and Recovery made the artifact public yesterday, Feb. 9, 2024.
While the primary issue involves what emerged as a dangerous hormone-based pregnancy test, the APPG shares evidence from scientists, health professionals as well as members from the public suggesting the practices and problems endangering the British public is merely the tip of the iceberg of a far bigger failure.
The most urgent of matters---patient safety, represents a fundamental mandate of the MHRA, yet that vital regulatory body seems to stay ever farther from its mandate of protecting patients, thus placing the public in imminent danger.
The letter was penned by Rt Hon Esther McVey MP and Graham Stringer MP with the APPG on Pandemic Response and Recovery Co-Chairs along with 23 MPs as well as Marie Lyon, Chair of ACDHPT and Secretariat for the APPG on Hormone Pregnancy Tests, Kath Sannsom, Founder of Sling the Mesh for Secretariat for the APPG on Surgical Mesh; and Professor Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, Director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine and an NHS General Practitioner working in urgent care.
What’s the details?
The Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review (IMMDS) finds endemic and systematic safety failings as part of the ongoing investigation into Primodos, the hormone pregnancy test.
The group finds a UK healthcare and regulatory system compromised, raising issues of patient safety stemming from both the safety database (Yellow Card) along with conflict of interest and transparency dynamics that have literally led to the loss of life!
Some Background—the Medical Product
It is a hormone-based pregnancy test produced by what was at the time Schering AG (take over by Bayer AG in 2006) and used in the 1960s and 1970s. The regimen consisted of two pills which could detect pregnancy by inducing menstruation in women who were not pregnant.
The presence or absence of menstrual bleeding was then used to determine whether the user was pregnant. In some places such as Germany the product was used “perhaps as a double dose to induce abortions.”
The product was first available for sale in 1959, then withdrawn from the UK in 1978.
Dr. Isabel Gal Isabel a clinical investigator, led a study at Queen Mary’s Hospital for Children in the 1960s evidencing a link between use of the medicinal product and birth defects.
An ensuing investigation in the 1970s by the Committee on Safety of Medicines determined that the product should not be used by pregnant women. Then by the 1980s, ensuing litigation led to inconclusive results, with proceedings discontinued.
By 2014, the MHRA reviewed the matter, eventually finding the evidence for adverse events inconclusive. See the link.
Then output of an expert working group within the UK Commission on Human Medicines published their findings November 2017, finding no “causal relationship” between Primodos and severe disabilities in newborns.
Importantly, skipping over any and all evidence of product culpability, the expert group rather recommended that the injured and their families exposed to the hormone pregnancy assay rather should be offered a genetic test to help them assess if there was a different root cause. See their report.
This should sound similar to COVID-19 vaccine injuries, where despite tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of cases, these patients are typically met with various gaslighting tactics.
An Ensuing Review
Yet another review commenced in 2020, sponsored by the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review (IMMDS) led by Baroness Cumberlege finding that “avoidable harm” resulted from the use of Primodos.
This body recommended that “the Government should immediately issue a fulsome apology on behalf of the healthcare system to the families affected by Promidos.”
Pointing to German pharma company Bayer Baroness Cumberlege stated “I think they should not only apologize they should recognize what has happened to give e-gratia payments to these people who have suffered.”
Bigger Concerns
While the concerns associated with the hormone-based pregnancy test goes back over decades, the dynamics driving patient safety endangerment persist according to the members of APPG, MPs and supportive experts.
Based on the ongoing investigations including IMMD review, the letter’s authors representing the people of the UK express grave concern that “serious patient safety concerns persist beyond even the findings of the IMMDS review.”
Turning to the MHRA the group declares:
“We also believe that the MHRA is at the heart of these far wider endemic failings, and that those cited in this letter merely represent the tip of a sizeable iceberg of failure.”
The author of the letter offers two primary points of concern—
the Yellow Card Scheme
Conflict of Interest and Transparency issues
This should sound disturbingly similar to the many issues chronicled by TrialSite during the pandemic, impacting regulatory bodies including the MHRA, FDA as well as the European Medicines Agency and others.
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11 February, 2024
House Oversight Panel to Assess Efficacy of Vaccine Injury Reporting, Compensation Systems
The continued fallout from the COVID-19 vaccines’ introduction has raised questions about the effectiveness of the United States’ existing vaccine injury reporting and compensation systems.
On Feb. 15, a panel of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee will hold a hearing to examine those systems and how they might be improved for future victims. Witnesses will include officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).
“Vaccine safety systems were designed to protect public health. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic—and resulting vaccine mandates—appear to have exceeded the capabilities of these systems,” Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in announcing the hearing on Feb. 9.
“All the while, the Biden administration coerced healthy Americans into compliance with unscientific vaccine mandates, seemingly without having a sufficient system in place to protect and compensate individuals who were potentially harmed. This hearing is an important step to increase vaccine transparency and to ensure that victims of future vaccine injuries are properly compensated,” he said.
Caught Unawares
Since 1990, the nation’s early warning system for reporting vaccine injuries has been the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The system is co-managed by the FDA and CDC, but anyone can submit a report, regardless of medical expertise.
And report they have. As of Jan. 26, more than 1.6 million adverse event reports have been submitted to VAERS in connection with the COVID-19 vaccines, according to OpenVAERS, a private organization that compiles and publishes VAERS data online.
Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request also show that the sheer volume of those reports—though downplayed by health agencies—surprised officials in the months following the first vaccines’ rollout in December 2020.
More COVID-19 Vaccinations Linked to Higher Infection Risk: Study
“Two vaccines have been released since the last report. Since release the number of incoming COVID-19 reports has significantly exceeded the estimated maximum of 1,000 reports per day,” General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), a contractor hired to process VAERS reports, notified the CDC in a status report on Jan. 15, 2021. “As a result, GDIT is unable to meet processing and other timeframes (data processing, telephone inquiries, clinical [inquiries], etc.).”
A chart included in the report shows that the number of daily reports was substantially higher than predicted, even topping 4,500 on Jan. 10, 2021. The trend also continued for several months, resulting in a backlog of nearly 94,000 reports that took until the end of May to clear.
‘Don’t Want to Appear Alarmist’
At around the same time those reports began rolling in, the CDC was warned of a potential link between the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines and a “large number” of cases of myocarditis, a type of heart inflammation among healthy, young Israelis.
While the CDC initially planned to notify doctors and public health officials of that emerging link through its Health Alert Network (HAN), the alert was never sent.
The reason for the delay, according to an email recently obtained by The Epoch Times, was that officials did not want to incite a panic.
“The pros and cons of an official HAN are what the main discussion are right now,” wrote Dr. Sara Oliver in the May 25, 2021, missive. “I think it’s likely to be a HAN since that is CDC’s primary method of communications to clinicians and public health departments, but people don’t want to appear alarmist either.”
Other emails from that same week show that the FDA also played a role in canceling the alert in favor of issuing clinical considerations, which were published on the CDC website on May 28, 2021.
The considerations advised that “increased cases of myocarditis and pericarditis have been reported in the United States after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna),” but still recommended COVID-19 vaccination for everyone aged 12 and older.
Compensation Complications
Cody Flint, an agricultural pilot in his 30s, was young and healthy when he received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
That changed within an hour of getting the shot.
Mr. Flint soon began to experience intense head pressure—pressure that only worsened when he boarded a flight two days later.
“One second, I went from having burning in the back of my neck and tunnel vision to the very next second, I was slumped over in my airplane. The best way I know to describe it—it was like a bomb went off inside my head,” he said.
Four doctors diagnosed Mr. Flint as having a severe adverse reaction to the Pfizer vaccine. But for the U.S. Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), which compensates those who can prove they have a COVID-19 vaccine injury, those diagnoses were not enough.
CICP administrators told Mr. Flint that “compelling, reliable and valid medical and scientific evidence does not support a causal association” between the Pfizer vaccine and the condition doctors diagnosed him with, perilymphatic fistula, which is a defect in the membranes separating the middle and inner ear.
They also wrote off his claim of having been injured by the vaccine as implausible “given the timeline of symptoms.”
“It’s just all comical to me,” Mr. Flint told The Epoch Times last April. “I get the shot, I’m injured within 48 hours, and they say that that makes it implausible.”
And Mr. Flint is not alone in his experience. Of the 2,214 COVID-19 vaccine injury claims the CICP had reviewed as of Jan. 1, only 40 were deemed eligible for compensation—just 11 of which have been compensated.
Decisions on CICP claims are made by the HRSA, which is housed under the Department of Health and Human Services—a fact some researchers have pointed to as a potential conflict of interest.
At its hearing next week, the House Oversight Committee will likely seek input from Dr. George Reed Grimes, director of the HRSA Division of Injury Compensation Programs, on whether that’s the case.
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Adverse effects following COVID-19 vaccinations as reported in the Pubmed/Medline literature: Update and Expansion
Dr. Ronald N. Kostoff
On 24 December 2023, I published an Op-ed in Trial Site News titled “Adverse effects following COVID-19 vaccinations as reported in the Pubmed/Medline literature”. Its purpose was to demonstrate that, even with the extreme censorship of the biomedical literature (especially concerning papers that counter the official government narratives on Covid-19 issues), there exist sufficient papers in the premier biomedical literature that show the extent of myriad adverse effects following Covid-19 vaccinations. The query developed for this Op-ed retrieved ~6,200 Pubmed records.
The Gold Standard for biomedical publications focused on adverse effects following Covid-19 vaccinations is the REACT19 database. Currently, this database contains 3,580 records. My previous Op-ed (referenced above) analyzed the ~6,200 records that were retrieved from Pubmed/Medline as part of the study, and were focused on adverse effects from Covid-19 vaccinations. In the present Op-ed, I developed an expanded query to retrieve the relevant articles from Pubmed (based on lessons learned from the previous Op-ed). Use of the expanded query retrieved over 13,000 articles, of which over 90% were deemed relevant (by sampling) to adverse effects following the Covid-19 vaccinations.
The 12,000+ relevant articles retrieved for the present Op-ed and focused on adverse events following the Covid-19 vaccinations should be viewed as a very low “floor” of what exists in Pubmed. More articles could have been retrieved from a well-resourced study. Additionally, because of Pubmed proximity search limitations, the Abstracts were not searched to the full extent possible.
Because of the aforementioned censorship of the biomedical literature, credible papers on Covid-19 vaccination side-effects were retracted or rejected by the journal Editors. The number of Editorial rejections is unknown, since the public does not have access to what is submitted to the journals, and what fraction is accepted. Thus, the Pubmed published literature represents a fraction of the post-Covid-19 vaccination adverse events research has identified.
For additional background on this issue of Pubmed/Medline articles on Covid-19 vaccination after-effects, especially the limitations of the Pubmed/Medline database, see the previous Op-ed on this topic. The present Op-ed will focus on the structure of the expanded query that was developed to retrieve additional relevant articles, and will provide 1) estimates of numbers of Pubmed/Medline papers in different post-Covid-19 vaccination symptom/disease categories and 2) incidence frequencies of specific symptoms/disease terms that occurred following Covid-19 vaccinations. These results should complement the results from the text clustering categories that were generated in the previous Op-ed on this topic.
METHODOLOGY
Development of the query used to retrieve Pubmed/Medline biomedical articles on post-Covid-19 vaccination adverse effects is described in detail in Appendix 1. The 13,000+ articles that were retrieved from Pubmed were imported into Excel. Approximately 25 umbrella categories were identified by a combination of visual inspection and the text clustering categories from the previous Op-ed on this topic. A query was developed consisting of mainly root terms characteristic of each of the 25 umbrella categories, and applied to each category to extract the records from the total download that could be credibly assigned to that category. For example, if one of the 25 categories is Blood Clotting, then two of the query terms used to identify records related to blood clotting would be Thromb and Embol. If these terms are entered into the Excel filter “Contains” option, then all the records in the total download containing phrases that had a root of Thromb or Embol would be identified and selected for the Blood Clotting category. Assignment of records to multiple categories was allowed, if the records had multiple themes.
Using an excellent online N-Gram generator, Unigrams, Bigrams, 3-Grams, and 4-Grams of the Titles and Abstracts of the 13,000+ records were generated. Using visual inspection of these N-Grams, thousands of symptoms/diseases phrases in the downloaded records were identified.
The 25 categories are shown in the results, along with the titles of records in each category, the phrases used to generate these records for each category, and the main specific symptoms/diseases associated with each category (see Appendix 2, Tables 2A-1 to 2A-25, for each category). For the reader who wants to search the 13,000+ downloaded Pubmed/Medline articles for information not presented in this Op-ed, the Titles and Abstracts of the full download are contained in Table 3A-1 of Appendix 3)
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Table 1 summarizes the 25 umbrella categories, and the number of Pubmed records in each category. The number of records in each category should be viewed as a “floor”. The queries were developed, and the records retrieved, before the N-Grams were generated (because of the timing of major upgrades to the N-Gram generator). Some additional terms from the N-Gram results could have been added to the queries for retrieving records, resulting in greater numbers of records in each category. However, the hundreds or thousands of records that were identified for each of the 25 categories are more than enough to demonstrate the breadth of adverse events in each category that occurred post-Covid-19 vaccination.
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8 February, 2024
Real Driving Forces Behind the COVID Waves
“Stay 6 feet apart.” This unforgettable slogan was one of the first recommendations implemented when the world announced the first COVID-19 wave.
As the mysterious virus appeared and quickly spread throughout the world, countries sealed their borders, schools closed, travel was restricted, and people started working remotely. We were told to wear masks, social distance to “flatten the curve,” and get vaccines promoted as being “safe and effective.”
The COVID-19 waves have come and gone approximately seven to eight times during the last three years until May 2023, when the public health emergency and the national state of emergency for COVID-19 were officially declared over. What we experienced during that time will be etched in our minds forever.
Among a number of public health measurements taken during the COVID-19 pandemic, which factors affected the COVID waves? Social distancing? Masks? Vaccines? Or something else?
Researchers have analyzed these factors to determine their effectiveness.
Impact of Nonpharmaceutical Interventions
Many people attributed a reduction in COVID-19 cases to nonpharmaceutical health policies.
These included travel restrictions, stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, school closures, and social distancing measures. Since they have nothing to do with pharmaceuticals, they are classified as nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs).
More Than 400 Studies on the Failure of Compulsory Covid Interventions
However, a number of studies disagree and couldn’t find clear evidence that these interventions contributed to the decline in each COVID-19 wave.
For example, in terms of mortality, fatal cases were declining before the full United Kingdom lockdown on March 24, 2020.
A systematic review of 32 studies conducted in Europe and the United States concluded that lockdowns during the spring of 2020 had no substantial effect on reducing COVID-19 mortality.
A study that analyzed data across 169 countries covering 98 percent of the world population from Our World in Data between July 1, 2020, and Sept. 1, 2021, also did “not find substantial COVID-19-related fatality-reducing effects of the ten NPIs under investigation.”
A Nature study found no evidence that Japanese school closures significantly reduced the number of COVID-19 cases in the spring of 2020.
A randomized controlled study in Denmark indicated that mask use did not significantly reduce the infection rate compared to the control.
A newly published 2024 study analyzing COVID-19 data in six European countries (Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland) found no clear evidence indicating that NPIs effectively altered the course of the pandemic in these countries, despite common misconceptions about them.
Impact of COVID-19 Vaccine
Many have been forced to comply with overwhelming vaccine mandates, and the impact of vaccination on the pandemic has been extensively researched.
Vaccination recommendations started for people at high risk and now include everyone, even children. Initially, the expectation was to stop the virus from spreading. Later, the authorities admitted to the public that it was still possible to get COVID-19 after vaccination. We were later told it was important for reducing hospitalization rates.
Despite early promising results from clinical trials indicating significant effectiveness, it’s essential to consider that these findings were based on a relatively small number of COVID-19 cases in the vaccine trials.
For instance, the Pfizer/BioNTech trial had 43,548 participants, but only 170 confirmed symptomatic COVID-19 cases were identified across both the vaccinated and placebo groups. Although the relative risk reduction was reported as 95 percent, this was calculated from a modest sample size exerting little impact on the whole patient population, raising major questions about the reliability of the conclusions.
Countries such as Israel and the UK were leaders in rolling out vaccine campaigns during the pandemic. Yet the same nations have frequently faced new waves of the virus, often driven by emerging variants.
The previously mentioned study on six European countries concluded that despite initial high hopes, there was no clear evidence that the vaccine altered the course of the pandemic.
Impact of Seasonality
A 2021 Nature study shows that higher temperatures and higher relative humidity have consistently adversely impacted COVID-19 transmission across large geographic areas.
The European six-country study, while dismissing the role of NPIs and the vaccine in the COVID waves, concluded that the patterns of COVID-19 cases, hospital admissions, and the number of people in intensive care units were surprisingly consistent, forming a visible seasonal pattern.
SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to behave like other respiratory viruses—peaking in mid-winter and having a very low incidence during the summer.
A study on the survival of SARS-CoV-2 on surfaces found that the virus survives better in colder and drier environments.
Airborne transmission plays a significant role in spreading SARS-CoV-2. In winter, when the air is usually drier and colder, the virus is more likely to survive and spread easier.
The survival of other coronaviruses also depends on temperature and humidity, showing a clear seasonal pattern.
While seasonal patterns are a driving force behind the COVID waves, they are just one piece of the puzzle and not the entire picture.
Another Surprising Factor
There have been many unknowns with this microscopic virus that remain a mystery.
A breakthrough study in Japan published in Nature revealed an unexpected finding about the COVID-19 pandemic: how people’s changing behaviors, like isolation, might have influenced the virus’s evolution.
The researchers used detailed clinical data and complex mathematical models to understand the viral behavior during the past four years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It was found that as the virus mutated into the Delta variant, the newer strains displayed higher and earlier peaks in the viral load within the body. However, the infection duration was relatively shorter.
This suggests that the virus mutates to become more transmissible, which counteracts the measures people take, such as self-isolation.
Researchers discovered that the virus transitioned from having a shorter incubation period to being more infectious without showing symptoms. A typical example of this is the Omicron variant.
This is the virus’s way of adapting to human behavior; it is intelligent and appears to know how to outsmart human intervention.
It’s not surprising that even the most intelligent scientists and virologists cannot predict mutations, as we have seen with recent strains like HV.1 and JN.1.
Unfortunately, this has resulted in a challenging battle between viruses and human intervention, and the variants’ microscopic tricks appear to be far superior.
Human Behavior Matters
There are other factors related to human behavior that are often ignored yet may be fundamental to driving COVID-19 waves.
In modern health care, Western medicine often fails to address the human soul, including a decline in moral values and behavior, which is linked to the root causes of disease.
Intriguingly, not everyone succumbs to viruses, even during a pandemic. This fact has been evident since the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak and has been further supported by recent COVID-19 human challenge studies. Many participants who were exposed to the virus remained infection-free.
This phenomenon points to the extraordinary capabilities of our God-given natural immunity. The real frontline where the battles between viruses and humans take place is at a microscopic level—our natural defense system, including mucosal epithelial cells on the surface of our nose, lungs, and gut.
A remarkable link exists between our thoughts, moral values and behaviors, and our body’s ability to fight viruses on this battlefield.
It’s not only about nutrition and exercise; our mental state also plays a crucial role. Science has shown that emotions such as stress, anxiety, and fear can impact our biochemistry.
Furthermore, our body, mind, and spirit interplay with each other. Positivity and purposeful living can actually boost our immune response.
A study reveals that striving for compassionate, noble goals can supercharge our body’s virus-fighting abilities. Honesty isn’t just a virtue, it strengthens our immunity by lowering stress hormones.
Embracing a positive, purpose-driven life can not only fill us with joy but can also arm us against illness. Traditional wisdom meets modern science—kindness, altruism, and calmness aren’t just good for the soul; they’re secret weapons for staying healthy.
A pivotal driving force for the virus waves may not be external but something within ourselves. In other words, our behaviors and values may have contributed to the spread of the virus.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/real-driving-forces-behind-the-covid-waves-5573822
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VAERS Data Reveals 223-Fold Increase in Myocarditis Reports Post-COVID-19 Vaccination
In the wake of the widespread distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, including Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Janssen across the United States, a surge in adverse event reports was documented through the Vaccine Adverse Events Reports System (VAERS).
VAERS tracks vaccine side effects by allowing patients and healthcare professionals to report any unexpected reactions, helping authorities at the CDC and FDA to scrutinize and monitor vaccine safety. Concerns over safety issues with COVID-19 vaccination came as early as the beginning of 2021. Loss of medical licensure threatened doctors from voicing dissenting opinions. Medical professionals or news media who questioned short-term, or long-term safety with the novel vaccines, and strayed from the official public health messaging, were often censored—including this news media.
An analysis was recently published in Sage Journals, titled “Determinants of COVID-19 Vaccine-induced Myocarditis”. Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle, often caused by viral infections or other immune-related conditions, and it can affect the heart's ability to pump blood effectively.
The creators of the investigation aimed to delve into VAERS data, specifically focusing on myocarditis cases, and explore the potential correlation between COVID-19 vaccines and the occurrence of myocarditis.
Utilizing statistical methods, the study assessed the frequency of myocarditis reports with respect to sex, age, and dose number, comparing them with historical values and vaccine administration data from the Our World in Data database.
The researchers uncovered troubling indications in the data. According to their analysis, myocarditis reports in VAERS following COVID-19 injection in 2021 were 223 times higher than the average of all vaccines in the past 30 years. This marked a 2500% increase in reports, with youths and males being most affected. Emergency care and hospitalization were required in 76% of cases, and 3% resulted in death. Myocarditis was more likely after the second dose, and individuals under 30 were at a higher risk.
They concluded that “COVID-19 vaccination is strongly associated with a serious adverse safety signal of myocarditis, particularly in children and young adults resulting in hospitalization and death. Further investigation into the underlying mechanisms of COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis is imperative to create effective mitigation strategies and ensure the safety of COVID-19 vaccination programs across populations.”
Myocarditis and Vaccine-induced Myocarditis
Prior to the pandemic, four per million children were affected annually in the U.S., and it has been reported that 0.05% of all pediatric hospitalizations are attributed to myocarditis. This condition, more frequently identified in young males, has historical associations with various vaccines, including influenza and smallpox.
Myocarditis can present with symptoms such as chest pain, heart failure, or sudden death, posing a significant risk - especially among the young - making it the third leading cause of sudden cardiac death in children and young adults. In VAERS, myocarditis qualifies as a Serious Adverse Event (SAE).
The authors acknowledged that there were cases of myocarditis from SARS-CoV-2 infection before the rollout of vaccines. During severe COVID-19 illness, studies noted heart issues using certain codes. However, many reports didn't thoroughly check symptoms or use detailed diagnostic procedures like ECG or MRI: meaning that important diagnostic details associated with heart problems in COVID-19 might be missed in these studies.
Regarding COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis, the authors wrote: “The prevalence of myocarditis reports in the VAERS system was significantly higher in the context of dose 2, males, and individuals under 30 years of age…Dose 2 was generally administered 3 weeks following the first dose – assuming the individual survives dose 1 without any major complications, including death. Figure 4 reveals five times more reports of myocarditis for dose 2 in 15-year-old males and regardless of age, myocarditis cases were more frequent following dose 2.”
The observation suggests a dose-response relationship, indicating potential cumulative and more damaging effects with each additional dose. “In such cases, it is possible that myocarditis was subclinical after dose 1 and became symptomatic after dose 2. We found 70% of all reports of myocarditis were filed within 7 days and 43% were made within 48 hours. Following dose 2, 77% of reports were filed within 7 days and 48% within 48 hours, thus providing more evidence of clinical concern and a temporal relationship with the injections.”
If signs of myocarditis are present after the first dose, the vaccinations should end there, and clinical monitoring should begin. “Because the duration of action of genetic material coding for spike protein is unknown, long-term follow-up with cardiology consultation may be advised in cases with possible repeat imaging and biomarkers.”
Why the Young and Athletic Might Be at Risk
Based on numerous autopsy studies involving suspected vaccine-induced myocarditis deaths, a theory has been formed that may explain why young males and athletes are particularly vulnerable.
Worldwide expert in both Endocrinology and Sports Medicine fields, Dr. Flavio A. Cadegiani, holds a unique endocrinological perspective to Physical Activity. In his Op-ed published by TrialSite News, Cadegiani examined multiple studies that provided evidence for a converging cause: that catecholamines, mostly represented by noradrenaline and adrenaline, are the “key triggers” of myocarditis and sudden deaths caused by COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
This is more simply explained as an adrenaline surge feedback loop. With young males and athletes having the highest amount of catecholamines in their system, it’s likely the reason why this group experiences an overload after vaccination. This theory corroborates with the determination of Connecticut’s Medical Examiner who published a case-study on his autopsies of two teen boys who died in their sleep within days of COVID-19 vaccination.
Estimating the Bigger Picture
The article shared some disheartening information regarding “the spontaneous reporting nature of VAERS,” implying that the reported cases are likely not rare, but rather represent a fraction of the total occurrences. Acknowledging the significant under-reporting issue with VAERS, the study cautions against using it alone to estimate population incidence. With 3,078 reported myocarditis cases by August 11, 2023, and considering an under-reporting factor of 31, the study estimates the actual number of myocarditis cases in the United States to be around 95,418. If considering the under-reporting factor for the Foreign VAERS data-inclusive, this estimate becomes 564,696 since 83% of myocarditis reports are found in the Foreign VAERS data set.
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AstraZeneca is facing tens of millions of pounds in compensation claims from 35 alleged victims of the Covid jab in High Court legal battle
The pharmaceutical giant, which developed its jab in partnership with the University of Oxford, is set to face a High Court battle over claims the vaccine is 'defective'.
It has been linked to a newly identified condition called Vaccine-Induced Immune Thrombocytopenia and Thrombosis (VITT) which causes blood clots.
At least 81 people have died due to complications linked to the very rare side effect while hundreds of others have also suffered illness as a result.
In what may be one of the biggest cases of its kind, more cases are expected to be lodged, meaning the vaccine manufacturer could face up to £80million in compensation payouts if it loses, according to The Telegraph.
The government indemnified AstraZeneca and other vaccine manufacturers as it sought to roll out vaccines during the pandemic.
Under Vaccine Damage Payment scheme, victims of certain vaccines, including ones used to beat Covid, are entitled to a one-off 'all-or-nothing' sum of £120,000 from the Government.
Tory MP Sir Jeremy Wright, whose constituent Jamie Scott suffered a 'significant permanent brain injury' from a blood clot after getting the job in 2021, has urged the government to take action.
The former Attorney General said: 'The public need the confidence to know they will be looked after if in the tiny, tiny minority of cases where the vaccine has gone wrong.
'And that confidence is damaged if the Government does not step in and settle these cases.'
The claimants are suing under the Consumer Protection Act, suggesting that the vaccine was not as safe as those who received it were led to believe.
AstraZeneca is fighting the claims, calling them 'confused' and 'wrong in law'.
The company has also pointed to the millions of lives the vaccine is believed to have saved in its first year of rollout.
The AstraZeneca vaccine is not being used as part of the UK's booster programme after experts recommended mRNA vaccines – such as the Pfizer or Moderna jabs – should be used instead.
Vaccine complications have been listed on the death certificates of a number of people who were administered the AstraZeneca jab.
Dr Stephen Wright, 32, died from a blood clot to the brain ten days after having his first dose of the AstraZeneca jab in January 2021.
In April last year, a coroner ruled the vaccine should be added to Dr Wright's death certificate.
In another case, a rock musician known as Lord Zion suffered a severe headache and was admitted to hospital eight days after receiving the jab.
His condition worsened and he passed away in hospital on May 19, with the preliminary death certificate listing a brain bleed caused by vaccine complications as the cause.
His partner Vikki said she is still 'pro-vaccine' following his death, but called on the Government to better educate medical staff on the side effects and rework the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme.
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6 February, 2024
COVID-19 Vaccination Rates Near Collapse in Europe--Market for mRNA Vaccines in Danger
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) releases the COVID-19 vaccination coverage data for the 2023-24 season vaccination campaigns. The ECDC by September 2023, updated its COVID-19 vaccination coverage data analysis process. The latest data report is an interim description of COVID-19 vaccination in the European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) between September 2023 and January 2024.
What becomes clear is much like in America, a precipitous drop in COVID-19 vaccination rates. In fact, TrialSite suggests a collapse in market demand, such a collapse that the vaccine makers will consider their options as time progresses to the next vaccination season.
A handful of countries on the continent report high rates (Denmark for example) but the overall rates have plummeted. A pattern emerges in that eastern nations in Europe have all but dropped the mRNA vaccine product. Moderna is locked out of the lucrative European market, and while Pfizer’s partnership with Germany’s BioNTech ensured it the overwhelming lead position, its COVID-19 vaccine and antiviral sales all but collapsed.
During the reporting period, 24/30 EU/EEA countries reported data on COVID-19 vaccination coverage for at least one target group (people aged 60 years and above, people aged 80 years and above, healthcare workers, individuals with chronic conditions, pregnant women). Approximately 19.4 million people during this period, aged 60 years and up received one COVID-19 vaccine dose.
At least 5.5 million people aged 80 years and above opted to receive the jab. The median COVID-19 vaccination coverage among the most high-risk cohorts in Europe—persons aged 60 years and above equaled 11.1% (range 0.01-65.8%). This specific median indicates the rates skewed to the lower end. The even more high-risk cohort of 80 years of age and up were vaccinated at 16.3% (0.01-88.2%) with high variation among countries, but clearly among the whole content much like in America the demand for COVID-19 vaccination all but collapsed.
Only a handful of nations’ populations went out in force to get the COVID-19 jab during the 2023-2024 season. Of the 24 European countries reporting, three countries reported a vaccination coverage of ?50% for the age group 60 years and above, while eight countries reported a vaccination coverage of ?50% for the age group 80 years and above.
What was the most used vaccine brand? The Pfizer-BioNTech product was originally developed by Germany’s BioNTech. A majority of the 22.7 million COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in the EU/EEA during this period in the overall population were the Comirnaty Omicron XBB.1.5 (Pfizer BioNTech) vaccine (around 22 million doses; 97% of the total doses administered). Moderna’s all but cut out of the European market which should have a profound impact on its vaccine sales forecasts.
The ECDC reminds all analysts that the preliminary results herein must be interpreted with caution. A higher degree of data consolidation and data completeness is expected in the coming weeks and months.
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Australian Employer Ordered to Pay Compensation for Vaccine Injured in ‘Significant Precedent’
An Australian court has ordered an employer to pay weekly compensation and medical expenses to an employee after ruling that a vaccine injury that occurred from a workplace directive is compensable under the law.
Daniel Shepherd, 44, worked as a child and youth support worker with South Australia’s Department of Child Protection when he developed pericarditis after receiving his third Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in February 2022.
Pericarditis is inflammation of the pericardium, a thin sac that surrounds the heart. The condition is reported to be more common in males aged 18 to 49, with an estimated 27 cases per 100,000 doses.
Mr. Shepherd was told by his employer that his employment would be terminated if he did not receive the third dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. The directions for the mandate were made under Section 25 of South Australia’s Emergency Management Act in January 2022, which required support and healthcare workers to receive a third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to continue working.
Mr. Shepherd received two COVID-19 vaccinations on Aug. 19, 2021, and Sept. 9, 2021, respectively, according to documents submitted to the South Australian Employment Tribunal.
On the first dose, Mr. Shepherd experienced aching joints, cold, and flu symptoms, and minor chest pain for one to two weeks. He experienced similar symptoms on his second dose.
Mr. Shepherd then received his third booster dose on Feb. 24, 2022, after receiving a message from his employer saying that employees needed to have a third dose of vaccine within four months of having a second vaccine.
The following day, Mr. Shepherd experienced severe chest pain, which worsened over the next two weeks.
On March 11, 2022, the chest pain was so unbearable that he felt “like someone was kneeling on his chest.” Having thought he was experiencing a heart attack, Mr. Shepherd was taken by ambulance to the Ashford Hospital, where cardiologists diagnosed him with pericarditis.
The 44-year-old husband and father of a 5-year-old boy noted some improvement four to five months after the chest pain; however, further episodes of severe chest pain followed and symptoms returned.
Mr. Shepherd has not worked since March 2022, except for two months when he worked part-time in an administrative role.
Vaccine-Injured Files Claim Against the State
Mr. Shepherd filed a claim for compensation against his employer, the State of South Australia, which was initially rejected.
The state had initially contested the connection between the vaccine and the injury but later acknowledged that the third dose caused Mr. Shepherd’s pericarditis and subsequent incapacity to work.
Despite that, the state argued that the injury didn’t arise from his employment under the Return to Work Act, and that the injury was linked to the Emergency Management Act.
The state argued that if criteria under the Return to Work Act are met, they are exempt from liability in relation to the broader management of the pandemic under the Emergency Management Act.
But Tribunal deputy president Judge Mark Calligeros rejected those arguments.
“The injury was a direct consequence of an Emergency Management Act vaccination direction and of Mr. Shepherd’s employment,” Judge Calligeros said.
“The connection between employment and the injury is a strong one, given I have found that Mr. Shepherd would not have had a third dose of the vaccine if he had not been required to in order to continue working.
“The state required Mr. Shepherd to be vaccinated to continue working in a healthcare setting because it sought to protect and reduce the risk of infection to the public and general and those members of the public receiving healthcare services in particular.
“It would be ironic and unjust if Mr. Shepherd was denied financial and medical support by complying with the state’s desire to preserve public health.
“The rejection of Mr. Shepherd’s claim should be set aside, and it should be ordered instead that he receive weekly payments of income support and payment of medical expenses.”
Ongoing Pain
Currently, Mr. Shepherd tires easily, and becomes tired after walking his son to school, some 400 metres (437 yards) from his home. Prior to the injury, he was able to hike up and down Mount Lofty, walk, and do Chinese boxing, which he is now unable to do.
In an interview with 9News, Mr. Shepherd said he now has the heart of a 90-year-old. “Even today with just mild exertion [I get] chest pains and then it’s followed by fatigue, like severe fatigue,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to have to say, ‘Sorry buddy, daddy’s tired’.”
In a social media post, Senator Gerard Rennick said the ruling is a “significant precedent.”
“[E]mployers are now going to think twice about forcing people to get a vaccine if they have to fork out for potentially significant medical costs if the employee then incurs a vaccine injury,” Mr. Rennick said.
“This is only one case, and I suspect it will be appealed.
“I hope the decision is upheld because it will then open up the option of employers suing governments who mandate vaccines or pharmaceutical companies for unsafe or ineffective vaccines.”
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5 February, 2024
mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines Caused More Deaths Than Saved: Study
With considerably lower efficacy rates, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines cause more deaths than save lives, according to a new study whose researchers called for a “global moratorium” on the shots and “immediate removal” from childhood immunization schedule.
The peer-reviewed study, published in the Cureus journal on Jan. 24, analyzed reports from the initial phase 3 trials of Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. These trials led to the shots being approved under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in the United States. The study also looked into several other research and reviews of the trials. It found that the vaccines had “dramatically lower” efficacy rates than the vaccine companies claimed.
Moreover, based on “conservative assumptions, the estimated harms of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines greatly outweigh the rewards: for every life saved, there were nearly 14 times more deaths caused by the modified mRNA injections.”
“Given the well-documented SAEs (serious adverse events) and unacceptable harm-to-reward ratio, we urge governments to endorse and enforce a global moratorium on these modified mRNA products until all relevant questions pertaining to causality, residual DNA, and aberrant protein production are answered.”
The authors also recommended an “immediate removal” of the COVID-19 vaccines from the childhood immunization schedule. They pointed out that children were at very low risk from the infection.
“It is unethical and unconscionable to administer an experimental vaccine to a child who has a near-zero risk of dying from COVID-19 but a well-established 2.2 percent risk of permanent heart damage based on the best prospective data available.”
Very Low Efficacy Rate
Following the first trials of Pfizer and Moderna, it was claimed that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines had a 95 percent reduction of symptomatic COVID-19. The study pointed out that this efficacy assumption was false
Pfizer’s claim was based on the fact that only eight out of 22,000 vaccine recipients contracted COVID-19 during the trial compared to 162 out of 22,000 people in the placebo group. In total, 170 confirmed COVID-19 cases were reported in both groups.
However, the researchers pointed out that a large number of infections fell under the “suspected” COVID-19 category, which was ignored. A total of 3,410 such suspected cases were identified in the trial, which is 20 times the 170 confirmed cases.
“There were 1,594 such cases in the vaccinated group and 1,816 in the placebo. When factoring in both confirmed and suspected cases, vaccine efficacy against developing symptoms drops to only 19 percent, far below the 50 percent RR (relative risk) reduction threshold required for regulatory authorization,” the study said.
“Thus, when considering both confirmed and suspected cases, vaccine efficacy appears to have been dramatically lower than the official 95 percent claim.”
The study’s authors declared no financial support from any organization for their work. A few conflict of interest disclosures were made.
One author received a grant from Quanta Computer Inc. Another author, cardiologist Peter A. McCullough, declared employment and owning stock/stock options in The Wellness Company. A third author is the founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation (VSRF).
Lives Saved Versus Deaths
Researchers criticized the Pfizer and Moderna trial reports for “exclusive focus” on relative risk or RR measure while omitting absolute risk reduction. They argued that absolute risk reduction “gives a better indication of a drug’s clinical utility.”
“Both types of risk estimation are required to avoid reporting bias and to provide a more comprehensive perspective on vaccine efficacy. Omitting the absolute risk statistics leads to overestimation of the clinical benefits of the vaccines.”
In contrast with the 95 percent efficacy rate using the RR measure, absolute risk reduction for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were 0.7 percent and 1.1 percent, respectively, the study stated.
“An absolute risk reduction of approximately 1 percent for the COVID-19 mRNA vaccinations meant that a substantial number of individuals would need to be injected in order to prevent a single mild-to-moderate case of COVID-19.”
To prevent one case of COVID-19 infection, 142 individuals would need to be vaccinated with Pfizer’s shot, the study said. When it came to Moderna, 88 people had to be injected.
Taking into account these numbers as well as the infection fatality rates of COVID-19, the researchers concluded that roughly 52,000 people would need to be vaccinated to prevent one COVID-19-related death.
This would mean two lives saved for roughly 100,000 injections of the Pfizer vaccine. However, there is a risk of 27 deaths per 100,000 doses of Pfizer shot, the researchers calculated. As such, for every life saved by the jab, almost 14 lives would be lost due to the mRNA vaccine, the study stated.
Authors noted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) “did not include absolute risk reduction measures” when reviewing vaccine data.
This action deviated from FDA guidelines “which state that both approaches are crucial in order to avoid the misguided use of pharmaceuticals.”
Serious Adverse Events
Researchers cited a September 2022 analysis to detail the pervasiveness of serious adverse effects (SAE) among the vaccinated group in the trials. The analysis looked at both Pfizer and Moderna trial data, discovering roughly 125 SAEs per 100,000 vaccine recipients. This indicated one SAE per 800 vaccines.
“The Pfizer trial exhibited a 36 percent higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group (compared to placebo) … The Moderna trial exhibited a 6 percent higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group,” the analysis stated.
“These findings stand in sharp contrast with the FDA’s initial claim that SAEs reported by the two pivotal trials were ‘balanced between treatment groups,’” researchers from the Jan. 24 study noted.
This discrepancy could be because the FDA only counted the number of individuals with serious adverse events rather than the total SAEs experienced by the trial subjects, they said.
Since a single person can have multiple SAEs, counting only individuals would produce a lower number than the total number of such adverse events.
“When the SAEs were viewed collectively, the risks in the vaccine group were substantially elevated beyond those previously determined by the FDA,” the researchers wrote.
The analysis found that the excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest (AESI) among the placebo group was 10.1 per 10,000 individuals. However, the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization in this group was only 2.3 per 10,000 people.
This meant that the subjects were at over four times the risk of suffering AESIs after getting vaccinated than they were of getting hospitalized from the infection. In the Moderna trial, subjects were more than two times at risk of experiencing AESI than being hospitalized.
“To put these findings in perspective, the official SAE rate for other vaccines is only 1-2 per million,” the Jan. 24 study said. The 2020 analysis’ “estimate based on the Pfizer trial data (1,250 SAEs per million) exceeds this benchmark by at least 600-fold.”
Rushed Vaccines
In the Jan. 24 study, researchers noted that the safety of mRNA products was “never assessed” in a manner consistent with scientific standards for vaccines or for gene therapy products (GPT), which they claim is “the more accurate classification” for these jabs. “Many key trial findings were either misreported or omitted entirely from published reports.”
The usual safety testing protocols and toxicology requirements were bypassed by the FDA and vaccine manufacturers. As the two trials were terminated prematurely, there was never an “unbiased assessment” of potential serious adverse events.
“It was only after the EUA that the serious biological consequences of rushing the trials became evident, with numerous cardiovascular, neurological, reproductive, hematological, malignant, and autoimmune SAEs identified and published in the peer-reviewed medical literature.”
In addition, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines produced and evaluated in the trials were not the same ones that were manufactured and administered to people around the world. The global vaccination campaign used a vaccine produced by a different process, which has been shown to have “varying degrees of DNA contamination.”
The researchers pointed out that several excess deaths, cardiac events, strokes, and other serious adverse events have wrongly been ascribed to COVID-19 rather than the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines since early 2021.
Injuries from these vaccines overlap with both post-acute COVID-19 syndrome (PACS) and severe acute COVID-19 illness, which end up often obscuring the vaccine’s contribution to such conditions. “Multiple booster injections appear to cause immune dysfunction, thereby paradoxically contributing to heightened susceptibility to COVID-19 infections with successive doses.”
For the “vast majority” of adults below 50 years of age, the perceived benefits of the mRNA vaccines were dwarfed by their “potential disabling and life-threatening harm.” The study said older adults may be at higher risk of such harm.
CDC and FDA Criticized
Commenting on the study, Mat Staver, the founder and chairman of nonprofit Liberty Counsel, said that in the paper, scientists “confirm what sound scientific research has been showing for years, that these shots have never been safe nor effective.”
“The FDA and the CDC are supposed to protect the people, but they have become the lapdog of the pharmaceutical industry. This must change.”
The CDC is currently under scrutiny for suppressing an alert for myocarditis from COVID-19 vaccination. Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle called the myocardium.
A document recently obtained by The Epoch Times shows that in May 2021, the CDC had prepared a draft alert for myocarditis related to the jabs.
The agency was supposed to send the alert to federal, state, and local public health officials and doctors nationwide through its Health Alert Network (HAN). However, the alert was never sent as some officials were worried about appearing “alarmist.”
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4 February, 2024
New documents strengthen—perhaps conclusively—the lab-leak hypothesis of Covid-19’s origins
The day is growing ever closer when Washington may have to add to its agenda with Beijing a nettlesome item it has long sought to avoid: the increasingly likely fact that China let the SARS2 virus escape from the Wuhan lab where it was concocted, setting off the Covid-19 pandemic that killed some 7 million people globally and wrought untold economic havoc.
New documents may explain why no one has been able to find the SARS2 virus (aka SARS-CoV-2) infesting a colony of bats, from which it might have jumped to people. The reason would be that the virus has never existed in the natural world. Documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know, a health advocacy group, provide a recipe for assembling SARS-type viruses from six synthetic pieces of DNA designed to be a consensus sequence—the genetically most infectious form—of viruses related to SARS1, the bat virus that caused the minor epidemic of 2002. The probative weight of the recipe is that prior independent evidence already pointed to SARS2 having just such a six-section structure.
The documents unearthed by U.S. Right to Know, and analyzed by its reporter Emily Kopp, include drafts and planning materials for the already-known DEFUSE proposal, an application to DARPA, a Pentagon research agency, for a $14 million grant to enhance SARS-like bat viruses.
The new recipe is in striking accord with a theoretical paper published in 2022 that predicted the SARS2 virus had been generated in exactly this way. Three researchers—Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, and Antonius VanDongen—noted that the virus could be cut into six sections if treated with a pair of agents known as restriction enzymes and so had probably been synthesized and assembled in this way.
Restriction enzymes, made naturally by bacteria as a defense against viruses, are an invaluable tool for biologists because they cut DNA at specific points known as recognition sites. These sites occur randomly across the genome, so a natural virus treated with a restriction enzyme will be cut into pieces of different sizes. However, researchers who want to synthesize a virus from scratch in order to manipulate its parts more effectively will often rearrange the recognition sites so that they are evenly spaced. This allows short chunks of DNA, all of roughly equal length, to be synthesized chemically and then strung together in a complete viral genome. Bottom line: if your virus has evenly spaced recognition sites, it’s a pretty good bet that it was made in a laboratory.
Bruttel and his colleagues guessed that a commonly used pair of restriction enzymes, known as BsaI and BsmBI, might have been used to assemble the SARS2 virus’s genome. When they examined the structure of SARS2, they found that the recognition sites used by these enzymes were indeed evenly spaced across the genome, marking it into six sections. “Our findings strongly suggest a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2,” they wrote.
Their paper did not receive the attention it deserved, in part because of the difficulty of ruling out a natural explanation for the even spacing. The small group of virologists who adamantly oppose the lab-leak hypothesis attacked the paper as “confected nonsense” (Edward Holmes) and “kindergarten molecular biology” (Kristian Andersen).
The recipe in the new DEFUSE drafts, however, closely resembles the one posited in the Bruttel article in saying that new viruses would be constructed from six sections of DNA synthesized in a lab. The documents even include a form for ordering the BsmBI restriction enzyme.
“The DEFUSE draft documents show that, exactly as we had postulated, they planned to use 6 segments to assemble synthetic viruses, to use unique endonuclease sites that do not disturb the coding sequence, and TO BUY BsmBI !!!” Bruttel wrote in a post on X.
The fact that the rearranged recognition sites change the virus’s nucleic-acid sequence but not the proteins it specifies is unusual and would occur by chance less than one in a million times, Bruttel said in a lecture.
His coauthor Washburne said in an email, “For us, it’s not a surprise to find DEFUSE collaborators using these enzymes & discussing a 6-segment assembly because the odds of this pattern occurring in nature have been very low this whole time.”
Discovery of the new recipe certainly strengthens the possibility that the regular spacing of BsaI and BsmBI recognition sites in SARS2 is the signature of synthetic origin. Indeed, Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who had called the 2022 paper “noteworthy . . . but not decisive,” now says that the evidence in the new documents “elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence from the level of noteworthy to the level of a smoking gun.”
Some experts say that the sequence issues highlighted in the 2022 paper and the new DEFUSE documents need further study before they can be claimed as definitive. Others think that the claim can be made already.
“Game over,” wrote Matt Ridley, co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, noting that every suspicious feature of SARS2 is explained by the methods called for in the DEFUSE proposal documents. But his coauthor, Alina Chan, argues that more needs to be understood about what happened after 2018.
The DEFUSE project, first leaked in 2021, was submitted in 2018 but turned down by DARPA. That doesn’t mean that the experiments it describes were not performed. It’s common practice to strengthen a grant application by doing much of the proposed work beforehand. Or the researchers may have found funds elsewhere.
The DEFUSE proposal was authored by Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance in New York, with partners including Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina. The grant proposed to “introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites” into SARS-related viruses, a procedure that could have led to the creation of SARS2, with its distinctive furin cleavage site, depending on the starting virus used for the manipulation.
The new drafts show the authors planned to synthesize eight to 16 strains of SARS-type bat viruses, selected for their likely ability to infect human cells. The goal was to use them to make a vaccine to immunize bats in regions that military troops might have to enter. The researchers were well aware of the risk that their work would set off a pandemic. “Also, we MUST make it clear in proposal that our approach won’t drive evolution the wrong way (e.g. drive evolution of more virulent strain that then becomes pandemic,” says a planning memo.
Some observers believe that when DARPA declined to fund the project, the Chinese members of the group may have decided to find their own financing and go ahead unilaterally. This is plausible, as Baric and Shi were collaborators but also rivals. With Baric blocked for lack of DARPA funds, Shi may have seen the chance to race ahead if she could acquire funds from Chinese sources.
Daszak, the project leader, had planned in any case to have much of the work undertaken by Shi’s team in Wuhan, even though it meant deceiving the Defense Department into thinking the bulk of the research would be done by Baric in the United States. In a note found in the new documents, Daszak wrote, “If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team. Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan.”
Daszak is a research manager, not a virologist, and perhaps did not fully understand the consequences of this decision. The DEFUSE project, if undertaken by Baric, would have gone forward in the second-highest level of safety conditions, known as BSL3, because Baric believed that the manipulation of SARS-related viruses was dangerous work and did his research in a BSL3 lab.
The Chinese were less impressed with the dangers. Shi worked on SARS-related viruses mostly in BSL2 labs, which have minimal safety requirements, though she did test the viruses on humanized mice under BSL3 conditions.
When SARS2 first appeared in the world, it had all the unique properties that would be expected of a virus made according to the DEFUSE recipe. Instead of slowly evolving the ability to attack human cells, as natural viruses must do when they jump from animals to humans, SARS2 was immediately infectious to people, possibly because it had already been adapted in humanized laboratory mice to the human cell receptor.
SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site, found in none of the other 871 known members of its viral family, so it cannot have gained such a site through the ordinary evolutionary swaps of genetic material within a family. The DEFUSE proposal called for inserting one. As is now known, the DEFUSE procedure was to assemble the viral genome from six DNA sections, which would account for the even spacing of the restriction enzyme recognition sites in SARS2. Despite intensive search, no precursors for SARS2 have been found in the natural world. Given the 2018 date of the DEFUSE proposal, the researchers in Wuhan could have synthesized the virus by 2019, accounting perfectly for the otherwise unexplained timing of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as its place of origin. It all fits.
Both Beijing and Washington have covered up information about the origin of SARS2. Washington’s obfuscation has been aided by the puzzling inability of its 17 intelligence agencies to discover documents in the U.S. government’s own possession, and by a mainstream press too opinionated and ignorant of science to understand the story of the decade. U.S. responsibility lies in having allowed two senior health-research officials, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, to promote gain-of-function research (enhancing natural viruses) for years without adequate safety oversight or scientific consensus.
Though Washington may be complicit, the bulk of the blame for the pandemic surely rests with Beijing. No one but China is responsible for regulating the safety of virology research at Wuhan. Chinese researchers apparently chose to race ahead with a project that DARPA, perhaps because of the manifest risks, had refused to fund. When the virus escaped its lax containment, if that is indeed what happened, the Chinese government did everything possible to bury the truth.
But that truth is enciphered in a place where, once decoded, no one can hide it: the genetic structure of the SARS2 virus itself.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-documents-bolster-lab-leak-hypothesis
**************************************************Federal agencies refuse to cooperate with Florida grand jury investigating COVID-19 vaccines
Federal agencies have declined to help a Florida grand jury convened by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis investigate the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, the panel said Friday.
In their refusal to participate, some witnesses have told the grand jury that “professional or personal consequences” may arise from their cooperation with the probe, while others have been critical of the “fairness” of the investigation, the panel noted in a 33-page interim report on the inquiry.
“Unfortunately, not all our investigative efforts have been met with fulsome cooperation,” the grand jury report states. “Some prospective witnesses have elected not to testify, often citing potential professional or personal consequences arising from their involvement with the Statewide Grand Jury process.”
“Occasionally, prospective witnesses have raised concerns about the underlying fairness of this Body,” it adds.
None of the federal agencies involved in the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines have been forthcoming with information, the grand jury has discovered, and the panel said it has no legal power to force the agencies to furnish information.
“The Center for Disease Control (CDC), the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Army, among others, all had a substantial hand in the contracting, approval and distribution process for the COVID-19 vaccines at the center of our inquiry,” the report states. “These agencies have elected not to provide representatives to testify before this body, and federal law prohibits us from compelling their cooperation.”
In December 2022, DeSantis, 45, requested that the statewide grand jury be impaneled to investigate COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers for potential wrongdoing and violations of state law related to vaccine rollout.
In the governor’s petition to ?establish? the grand jury, he argued that a Florida Department of Health analysis “found an increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related deaths among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination.”?
The grand jury was sworn in on June 26, 2023, and did not draw a conclusion on vaccine efficacy in its interim report.
“As of today, our investigation is nowhere near complete,” the report notes. “We remain in regular session and our Legal Advisor is actively scheduling future witness appearances.”
“There are still many months and much more testimony and evidence to come before our work will be finished.”
The report, however, blasts health agencies and the federal government over pandemic-era face masking recommendations, arguing that “with respect to masks, we have never had sound evidence of their effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 transmission” and that “public health agencies failed to adequately explain” the ineffectiveness of masks to Americans.
The grand jury also found that lockdowns “traded the immediate welfare of a smaller, affluent, well-represented group of older Americans who could afford to stay home for the longer-term welfare of a larger, less-affluent, poorly-represented group of children, teens, twenty-, thirty- and forty-somethings who could not.”
“If anything, the result of this was a modest benefit to the former group at the expense of the latter.”
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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