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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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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

Following the availability and use of the updated (bivalent) COVID-19 vaccines, CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a near real-time surveillance system, met the statistical criteria to prompt additional investigation into whether there was a safety concern for ischemic stroke in people ages 65 and older who received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent.

Pfizer is associated significantly with strokes - CDC is keeping us in the dark about the exact data.

This preliminary signal has not been identified with the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent. There also may be other confounding factors contributing to the signal identified in the VSD that merit further investigation. Furthermore, it is important to note that, to date, no other safety systems have shown a similar signal and multiple subsequent analyses have not validated this signal:

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.

No change in vaccination practice is recommended.

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.

What we need to compare this to is the pre-existing risk of stroke in people over 65 before getting any vaccines or treatment of any sort for any condition, and that appears to be high already:

About 75 percent of strokes occur in people 65 or older. In other words it is an increasing problem the older we get. It has been estimated that the chance of having a stroke double every decade after 55.

Stroke afflicts about 800,000 people a year and is estimated to occur at the rate of one American every 40 seconds. About three-fourths of the annual strokes are first-time strokes and the other quarter are recurrent. In other words most strokes are first-time episodes.

Stroke is the third leading cause of death among Americans. It kills about 140,000 people a year.

So this is the same question as the one about miscarriages etc. - are they directly attributable to the vaccine, or are they being noted and recorded as vaccine-related/Covid-related, just because a lot of people are being vaccinated/contracting Covid? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Now, if you pull up a link about 30 year olds getting strokes at the higher than normal rate, great, that's something to be addressed. But "population already at high risk of having strokes are getting strokes" is not, not unless "the rate is usually 75% but now has increased to 90%".

CDC has released a report today finding preliminary association between the Pfizer vaccine and stroke for those over 65 years of age.

That is not what it says, upon reading. It says that there was a signal which "met the statistical criteria to prompt additional investigation into whether there was a safety concern for ischemic stroke in people ages 65 and older who received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent".

They investigated, and found nothing of concern. This is because:

Often these safety systems detect signals that could be due to factors other than the vaccine itself. Although the totality of the data currently suggests that it is very unlikely that the signal in VSD represents a true clinical risk, we believe it is important to share this information with the public, as we have in the past, when one of our safety monitoring systems detects a signal. CDC and FDA will continue to evaluate additional data from these and other vaccine safety systems. These data and additional analyses will be discussed at the upcoming January 26 meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

So you leading off with "Guys, guys, CDC found the vaccine booster causes strokes!" is incorrect.

Now, if you pull up a link about 30 year olds getting strokes at the higher than normal rate, great, that's something to be addressed. But "population already at high risk of having strokes are getting strokes" is not

I think this is totally wrong. If two people get strokes instead of one, that's not a worry. If two thousand people get strokes instead of a thousand, that is way more of a worry, the absolute amount of people being affected is much higher. I get the logic. Strokes happening to old people is Normal and to young people is Scary. But often Scary problems are Scary precisely because they're uncommon, while we shut our eyes to bigger problems precisely because we decide they're Normal.

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