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Could someone who is better versed than I in medicine give feedback about the recent claim that Pfizer "observed 1.6 million adverse events covering nearly every organ system" in vaccine-takers?
The original document: https://tkp.at/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/3.PSUR-1.pdf
My instinct is that there is probably some way in which this number is being blown out of proportion by vaccine skeptics. However, I would not be competent to really evaluate this document without doing quite a bit of work. Maybe someone here is better placed to evaluate it?
This looks like it's something from Europe and I don't know much about that. In the U.S. the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System exists and my understanding is that it's basically a log of any clinically significant adverse events that happen to someone in a certain timeframe after vaccination. Doctors and members of the public can report these adverse events, and it's not required that they know the vaccine caused the event. This data is useful if you contrast it with base rates for particular conditions and demographics, e.g. if men 18-24 are showing up with myocarditis in the VAERS system much more often than they are in the general population of hospital admits. Looking at the raw total of VAERS events isn't helpful since the purpose is to do broad data collection about adverse events occuring after vaccination whether or not they can be definitively traced to the vaccine.
My guess is that this is something similar, that there were 1.6 million reported adverse events in some population of European vaccine takers but that doesn't tell you anything unless you contrast it with base rates.
We have a joke in the field that goes something like this: if you get hit by a truck while testing a new drug those Super Bowl advertisements are going to start saying "may cause you to get run over."
This exaggeration but not by a lot.
As you say, OP's data is meaningless without more context.
Wasn't "being struck by lightning" an adverse event included in Pfizer's phase III clinical trial of the BioNTech COVID vaccine?
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