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CDC has released a report today finding preliminary association between the Pfizer vaccine and stroke for those over 65 years of age.
Another drop in the bucket - or is the bucket spilling out the top now?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/bivalent-boosters.html
Pfizer is associated significantly with strokes - CDC is keeping us in the dark about the exact data.
They then list multiple studies that did not replicate this finding for the BIVALENT vaccine - well of course, this vaccine was testing on mice, and then deployed without long term testing. Do they have monovalent data they are not mentioning?
EDIT: Is it possible monovalent risk benefit analysis is simply using a different pathogen, and now with the advent of Omicron, this is a medical update saying this level of strokes is no longer worth the benefit vs the current pathogen? Food for thought.
This contradicts what Paul Offit's opinion is, which was posted in the NEJM. Paul Offit believes we should not give bivalent boosters to young healthy patients.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2215780
It would be much more shocking to announce a chance to the vaccine campaign, than to keep the current inertia the same. I think we are seeing a communication strategy developing to deliver the population into accepting yearly mRNA vaccines - instead, they will be directed to other worthwhile candidates for vaccination - IF pharma companies can even deliver those.
In my eyes: mRNA vaccines are dangerous, so you need to determine how dangerous the pathogen presenting is. I see a great use case for mRNA developing for Airborne Ebola Zaire strains (90% mortality) or other disease of similar magnitude. Simply put: your vaccine should not significantly increase cardiovascular risk. It should be absolutely negligible. 1 in a million, whereas these vaccines might be 1 in 100,000.
Why? This seems to me like you picked "an order of magnitude safer than what it allegedly is" and if the alleged rate of danger were different, you would have picked a different goal. Unfortunately I can't easily find the serious side effect rate for various common medicines, but https://www.medsafe.govt.nz/consumers/Safety-of-Medicines/Medicine-safety.asp says that a "very rare" side effect means one that happens to 1/10,000 people or less.
I find these numbers to be particularly confusing in light of how dangerous COVID itself is. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02867-1/fulltext#seccestitle140 says that at age 65, the IFR for COVID is about 1.7%, 1,700 times higher than your alleged risk of the vaccine and 17,000 times higher than what you claim the risk should be.
And according to https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/facts.htm, the baseline rate of ischemic stroke in the US is slightly over 2 per 1,000 people, again much higher than the alleged risk of the vaccine. For those of age 65, it seems to be slightly higher, increasing quickly with age: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/STROKEAHA.120.031659
For additional context, to have a 1 in 1 million risk of dying while driving, you would have to drive less than 100 miles (overall rate is about 1.5 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in the US, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States, although I think that number is outdated and is even higher now).
No medicine is completely safe, but this seems like a real no-brainer to me.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35653-z
Here's one estimate. I would never base policy on one study, usually that's something the CDC would do.
This is data from a year ago. We are talking about how the bivalent booster is associated with ischemic strokes, especially held against the risk of omicron.
Let's stick to relative risk? This is not useful.
Agreed. But we have to go places, like schools, small business, and our places of worship. So no one proposes stopping driving. I'm proposing stopping the EUA novel biotechnology vaccination campaign.
Which it is not by the very report you are using. You've jumped from "The CDC reported a signal which they investigated and found nothing" to "The vaccine is associated with strokes" as though that were proven and established.
Why not go the whole hog and say the vaccine causes women to ride broomsticks to the meeting with the Devil? You are determined the vaccine is bad and then go looking for straws to build your house with, instead of looking at established risks and then forming an opinion.
Definite side-effects of getting the vaccine that have been established: muscle pains, fever, diarrhoea, mild allergic reaction.
Possibility of more serious side-effects: anaphylactic reaction
If you want to argue that the risk for young men is too high as compared to the risk of contracting Covid and the effects of that illness, you have a valid case there. You do not have one for general scare-mongering.
Fair, I'm not going to rip off my wallpaper over elderly and at risk people receiving bivalent vaccines - precisely because I have a calculation of their quality life years remaining, that is very different from younger healthy people.
The exact people who benefit from a covid vaccine have less quality life years to live than those who do not.
The vaccine has a novel, not totally understood method of mRNA translation, and then goes through another not completely understood process of protein folding, and then enters the immune system (not completely understood). The pharmacokinetics of the nano lipid particle are not characterized or understood. And there is a concerning signal of a blood clot appearing in patient's brains.
I am not scare mongering, I am being highly critical, since I'm not the one defending the novel RNA transfection vaccines.
When they run trials for new vaccines, they will compare them to the harms that the RNA transfection vaccines caused, and the new vaccines are going to look amazing. My guess is they will use protein-adjuvanted methods.
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