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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?
That PDF is 400 pages long and not text-searchable, but it's obvious from the order of magnitude that this must be something like "every recorded medical event in tens/hundreds of millions of people" and completely meaningless without comparison to base rates.
That would be my guess as well. In addition, these likely reflect reports rather than any sort of confirmed illness (edit: I would guess coming from https://vaers.hhs.gov/). In attempting to make its point seem stronger, in my opinion, it actually makes it weaker: how could a single vaccine (not even a new idea, just a different way of making them) causes eye injuries (something the article itself admits is unusual for a vaccine), vascular disorders, skin and tissue, ears, respiratory, breast or reproductive... the list goes on. It also is clearly doing the thing of "Big! Numbers!" by pointing to the number of different categories, even though looking at the list a "category" may be extremely specific, such as differentiating "vaccination site pain" "...swelling" "...discomfort" and then repeating them all for "vaccination site joint X".
Oh yeah, and the author is also advertising their book, which looks like a very reasonable and dispassionate review of scientific evidence.
That part isn't really surprising at all. The theory is that the spike protein itself is what's extremely toxic in covid, and it's going to cause a variety of illnesses once you inject people with MRNA to generate massive amounts of spike protein.
I'm no doctor, but this claim doesn't explain anything to me. The spike protein is in COVID, that's the whole point. AFAIK COVID doesn't cause anywhere near this range of symptoms, and if it did, it would be vastly more dangerous than most vaccine skeptics seem to think. Just because something is "toxic" doesn't mean it causes literally every symptom imaginable.
As is usual I disagree with all the major factions involved. The most likely place to find any risks associated with COVID vaccines is in the delivery mechanism and how this necessarily functions differently from the virus, not in the spike protein.
For Pfizer that delivery mechanism is a payload that codes for the spike protein encased in a lipid nanoparticle. This causes two differences from how getting covid works. The first and most obvious is the lipid nanoparticle itself. The second, much less frequently noted but probably more important, is that the lipid nanoparticle can deliver the payload to a different distribution of cells than OG covid. This is enough to put forward a plausible hypothesis for a very wide range of side effects, though the key word here is hypothesis.
To make a comparison to something that's probably more clear-cut, the AstraZeneca heart issue risks (which US anti-vaccine commentary missed because that vaccine was never deployed in significant numbers in the US) are likely caused by how it's delivery mechanism, an adenovirus viral vector, interacts with the Coxsackievirus and adenovirus receptor, which is expressed in cardiac muscle and involved in all sorts of heart problems including myocarditis.
It makes sense to me that the vaccine could cause very different symptoms than COVID itself. It's not the most intuitive, but it wouldn't be the weirdest fact about biology by far. However, I'm still very skeptical that the vaccine could cause hundreds of different syndromes covering every single system in the human body. Is there any single cause that causes such a wide variety of medical symptoms?
Inflammation from widely distributed nanoparticles. Look up inflammation, its complicated.
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