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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2824 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 17, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Can someone understand anti-vaxx perspective on this? Why vaccine lobby does not promote vaccines against HIV? Mainstream science position [is that] existing HIV vaccines are experimental and not effective, but if anti-vaxx believe vaccine lobby promotes ineffecient or harmful vaccines, why would it be an obstacle?

The influence of the vaccine lobby and big pharma is massive, but still far from total. With COVID vaccines, the vaccine companies were protected from any legal liabilty, so they didn't have to worry about little things like mrna vaccines leading to the unplanned production of random proteins that create risk of autoimmunity issues, as reported recently in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06800-3). However, pushing other unsafe vaccines without these liability protections is still risky for these companies.

Overall, these data increase our understanding of how modified ribonucleotides affect the fidelity of mRNA translation, and although there are no adverse outcomes reported from mistranslation of mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in humans, these data highlight potential off-target effects for future mRNA-based therapeutics and demonstrate the requirement for sequence optimization.

That risk doesn't seem to have borne out.

No adverse events have been reported from mistranslation because the mistranslation has just now been discovered. But there's plenty to indicate mrna vaccines are not safe.

According to VAERS, the official US vaccine monitoring program, there have been more reported vaccine-related deaths since the introduction of COVID vaccines than from all the other vaccines in the 30 previous years of monitoring, combined. And while VAERS reports are not 100% accurate, they provide a clear picture of relative safety, and VAERS data clearly shows that COVID vaccines have led to more deaths than all other vaccines combined in the last 30 years (check total vaccine-related deaths by year for all vaccines at https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html EDIT: Select "Search CDC Wonder", "VAERS Data Search", under 1., group search results by "Year reported", under 5., select Event category "Death", press "Send" under 5. - the resulting table shows that 70.49% of all reported vaccine-related deaths since 1990 are in the years 2021 and 2021).

Based on clinical trial data, overall mortality in the vaccine group and the unvaccinated control group was statistically equal for mrna vaccines, as opposed to adenovirus vaccines where mortality among the vaccinated was lower, indicating a vaccine risk outweighing the protective effect for mrna vaccines (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37163200/). Put more simply, more people died among the vaccinated than among the unvaccinated in the clinical trials used to approve the mrna vaccines.

Clinical trial data also shows increased risk of serious adverse events for mrna vaccines, outweighing risk of severe COVID in younger population groups: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283.

And that's just a few of the data points we now have that indicate that the mrna vaccines are dangerous, so I'd say the risk has definitely borne out.

Regardless, a medical product that leads to the unplanned production of random proteins within the body would put the company producing it at extreme risk of legal action without the immunities granted to COVID vaccine manufacturers.

VAERS doesn't report vaccine-related deaths. It reports post-vaccine deaths. The easiest way for those to skyrocket is to suddenly administer a lot more vaccines to a much older population.

I understand what you are saying, although I don't think it's completely true: the VAERS form asks you to report a vaccine-related adverse event, not simply that someone died post-vaccination. Also, old people were regularly given at least flu vaccines prior to COVID, so the effect you describe of old people coincidentally dying after vaccine administration was at least partially present before COVID, so I don't think that this is a sufficient explanation for the massive increase.

The current form specifically says "Please report all significant adverse events that occur after vaccination of adults and children, even if you are not sure whether the vaccine caused the adverse event." Healthcare providers are only "required by law to report to VAERS:

  • Any adverse event listed in the VAERS Table of Reportable Events Following Vaccination that occurs within the specified time period after vaccinations
  • An adverse event listed by the vaccine manufacturer as a contraindication to further doses of the vaccine"

(where that Table is basically "things we have a causal mechanism for, if seen within typically one week"), but are still "strongly encouraged to report to VAERS:

  • Any adverse event that occurs after the administration of a vaccine licensed in the United States, whether it is or is not clear that a vaccine caused the adverse event"

Also, old people were regularly given at least flu vaccines prior to COVID, so the effect you describe of old people coincidentally dying after vaccine administration was at least partially present before COVID, so I don't think that this is a sufficient explanation for the massive increase.

That's a very good point ... but the implicit assumption here is that healthcare providers were, for that vaccine, using VAERS that way. That's easy enough to check to back-of-napkin accuracy levels: in the US we administer flu shots to about 50% of the population each year, and we have around 60K deaths per week. Are we seeing the 30K "died within a week after a flu shot" base rate? Not only are we not within napkin-margin of that, we're a couple orders of magnitude too low. We're too low for the discrepancy to even be just "let's not give a flu shot to someone circling the drain" selection bias, which makes me suspect the alternative hypothesis: "nobody even thinks to blame the flu shot". But replace the flu shot with a brand-new politically-charged vaccine and it would be reasonable for the reporting rate to jump from negligible up to 30% - that'd be the responsible thing to do, even if you don't have any real suspicions, just to make it easier for researchers to possibly tease any signal out of the noise later.

the VAERS form asks you to report a vaccine-related adverse event, not simply that someone died post-vaccination.

There is no plausible way for an individual to distinguish between these two.

The VAERS UI and UX designers deserve to be shot.

I note a massive spike from 2021, which I don't particularly consider noteworthy since the total deaths from that period onwards sums up to about 15k. And:

VAERS accepts reports of adverse events and reactions that occur following vaccination. Healthcare providers, vaccine manufacturers, and the public can submit reports to VAERS. While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. Most reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases. This creates specific limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind.

And the CDC makes no effort to verify every individual claim, let alone actually enforce the nominal legal penalty for false ones.

I expect that given the enormous increase in public awareness about VAERS, that this isn't particularly significant.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37163200/

The RR for overall mortality of mRNA vaccines vs. placebo was 1.03 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.63-1.71). In the adenovirus-vector vaccine RCTs, the RR for overall mortality was 0.37 (0.19-0.70).

Those are some pretty wide 95% CIs to me, but I'm no statistician. All I can conclude from it is that mRNA vaccines do worse than adenoviral ones. Which is fine, a suboptimal choice of vaccine is bad enough by itself.

Clinical trial data also shows increased risk of serious adverse events for mrna vaccines, outweighing risk of severe COVID in younger population groups: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283.

I don't disagree that it's not worth vaccinating paediatric age groups.

I looked around for takes from those better equipped to evaluate such claims than I am:

https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/covid19-mrna-vaccines-saved-lives-reducing-risks-infection-severe-covid-19/

First, Benn et al. used RCTs with a small number of deaths, whether from COVID-19 or other causes. Together, the mRNA vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) RCTs reported 61 deaths out of 74,193 participants (0.0008%), while the AV vaccine (AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson) trials reported 46 deaths out of 122,164 participants (0.0003%). When assessing the risk of death, a small number of events is problematic because it leaves the results highly vulnerable to statistical flukes.

Karina Top, a professor in the division of infectious diseases of Dalhousie University, explained that these small numbers of deaths “translated into wide confidence intervals around the point estimates indicating lack of precision in the results”.

Abram Wagner, a professor of epidemiology and global public health at Michigan University, reached the same conclusion. “Together, these studies included 74,193 participants in mRNA vaccine trials, and there were only 61 deaths across vaccinated and placebo groups. Essentially there is not enough statistical power to make any conclusions from these data”, he said.

Statistical power is the ability of an analysis to adequately detect an effect where there is indeed one. In this case, a lack of statistical power due to a small number of deaths means that there’s a high risk of failing to detect mRNA vaccines’ effect on overall mortality when such an effect actually exists. In other words, data on mortality in the mRNA clinical trials reported in Benn et al. are actually inconclusive.

Hmm, I guess my nose is worth something after all, I did consider those CIs sus before I read this.

And:

The fact that there aren’t enough deaths to properly assess the effect of vaccination on all-cause mortality isn’t surprising. As Benn et al. acknowledged, the initial clinical trials that led to vaccines’ authorizations primarily focused on preventing symptomatic COVID-19. For example, death from COVID-19 isn’t among the original primary outcomes monitored during the Pfizer, Moderna, or AstraZeneca clinical trials.

If you have better sources or can point out a reason my reasoning is incorrect, I'd be happy to hear it. My general enthusiasm for technological advances is, at least I'd hope, less overwhelming than my desire to get to the bottom of things.

Thank you for the thoughtful response! When we get to this level of analysis, I am of course willing to admit that there are many unknowns, and that the data is not sufficient for strong and clear conclusions on mRNA vaccine safety, although I would argue that there are clear indications that serious concerns exist. But it is the lack of willingness to investigate these worrying signals from the data and the blind repetition of the "safe and effective" mantra that is my main cause for concern. If you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any, right?

VAERS, the main monitoring system for vaccine safety, indicates a massive, and I mean MASSIVE, concern regarding the relative safety of COVID vaccines. I phrased my comment on VAERS carefully - it's definitely not 100% reliable, but it shows a massive relative difference in reported vaccine-related deaths since the introduction of COVID vaccines. Is this not cause for concern? Even if only 3% of the post-COVID VAERS reports are real and 97% are bogus, COVID vaccines still cause as much death as all other vaccines put together (per year instead of in 30 years combined). So even if 97% of post-COVID VAERS reports are trash (and the "increased awareness" argument is a huge stretch to support such a strong claim), the COVID vaccines are still more dangerous than all other vaccines put together, "just" causing more deaths that all other vaccines put together per year instead of more deaths than all other vaccines in 30 years. And if VAERS is complete and utter trash, as you say, isn't that even MORE cause for concern? In that case, we have NO population-level vaccine safety monitoring system of note at all. If you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any, right?

As for the second study I broguht up (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37163200/), I agree that the clinical trials used to approve the COVID vaccines, which are the only large clinical trials that have been run on them, were not designed to assess all-cause mortality risk from the vaccines, and the sample showing no effect on overall mortality is very small, yes. So where's the follow-up? VAERS is trash, and the trials were not designed to assess overall mortality risk. If you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any, right?

Your position on the severe adverse events risk study is not entirely clear to me based on your response. It's not about pediatric populations, it's that they found a greater increase in severe vaccine-related side-effects (that land you in the hospital) than the reduction in severe COVID events compared with the control group. The COVID vaccines cause more hospitalization-level adverse events than the hospitalizations they prevent from COVID, according to that study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283). The authors call for a harm-benefit analysis for mRNA COVID vaccines, which has never been done. But if you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any, right?

Finally, we have the Nature article finding that the mRNA vaccines produce random proteins. Which ones? What are their effects? Surely Pfizer and Moderna tested whether their vaccines were actually producing what they were supposed to, at some point? Or was this a total surprise, and we "could not have known at the time"? Of course, if you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any.

You requested other sources, so here's the BMJ (top medical journal) desperately calling for follow-up studies on COVID vaccine safety: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2527?fbclid=IwAR3e8Rv7UdOUjx60Vf7CnrtZAcM7rCVxl5IRpT76ngyTokkALHVCbiO3Naw

And I wonder how long the spike protein produced by COVID vaccines keeps being produced? Here's a study finding that it's still being produced 60 days after vaccination: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8786601/ I thought the vaccine cleared out in a week or two, as I was told? Does it keep producing (these random) proteins longer than 60 days? How long are these vaccines active in the body? Who knows! If you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any.

Here's COVID vaccines causing myocarditis (perhaps because production of random proteins by the vax causes an autoimmune response in the heart in those unlucky to have the wrong random proteins produced by the vax?): https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/44/24/2234/7188747?login=false

Here's COVID vaccines causing vaginal bleeding: https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj-2023-074778 How? Why? Who knows! There's plenty more studies like this showing worrying signals. Modifying immune response in unknown ways for unclear reasons? Sure: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.29.23296354v1.full.pdf Causing seizures in children? Yup: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.13.23296903v1.full.pdf

Yes, you can pick apart any of these studies. They are all limited at least by being fairly small given the relative rarity of these events. None of them are proper clinical trials. But that's because these studies are the only ones that have been done. If you also dismiss population-level monitoring systems like VAERS, you can claim that there is no clear evidence, sure. If you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any. But we do now know that vaccines remain active for 60+ days and that they produce random proteins they are not supposed to (these are lab studies on how the vax works). And various data sources, flawed as they are, indicate strong safety concerns. Nevermind that this should have been investigated before giving these vaccines to billions (or coercing people into taking them). The companies are shielded from liability, and politicians will point to the medical community missing or ignoring these issues and say "we could not have known" (although scientists previously considered credible tried to raise concerns, but were sidelined or ostracized). But could we not at least look carefully at the potential issues NOW, before continuing to use this technology that was never deployed in humans before?

Anyway, I hope I've offered some insight on the anti-COVID vax position here. I'll shut up now unless there's something I really need to respond to, since this is the small-scale questions thread :)

The issue with VAERS is both that it doesn't vet data, had massive signal boosting, and more importantly, was signal boosted heavily in the vaccine-skeptical crowd. I expect a great deal more spurious claims, both because of intentional and disingenuous reporting, as well as people being on edge and willing to attribute a natural death or one from COVID itself to the vaccine that preceded it.

I mean, it's both possible for people to be irrationally averse to vaccination in general or the COVID one in particular and the vaccine to be dangerous (or at least worse than the disease), it's just unlikely.

Yes, you can pick apart any of these studies. They are all limited at least by being fairly small given the relative rarity of these events. None of them are proper clinical trials. But that's because these studies are the only ones that have been done.

I'm not against better studies, but until they happen, I reserve judgement, or at least hold the null hypothesis. There's publication bias both from the vaccine manufacturers and their pharma affiliates who would prefer not to demonstrate harm and hundreds or thousands of small-time researchers who would love to make a name by demonstrating clear and obvious harm. The latter aren't deplatformed, you did link to multiple weak/inconclusive studies after all.

But we do now know that vaccines remain active for 60+ days and that they produce random proteins they are not supposed to (these are lab studies on how the vax works)

"Random proteins" aren't really that big a deal. The human body handles probably quadrillions of misfolded proteins or even those produced by point/frameshift mutations every day. When the original study you cited makes no claim that it causes harm, I expect more evidence to back up that claim, including obvious increases in all cause mortality that can be retroactively attributed to mRNA vaccines.

In the specific case of children, my point is that the CFR for them is so minuscule that it wouldn't be worth vaccinating them even if the vaccine was perfectly safe. Certainly not when vaccine stocks were short of requirements in the early/middle pandemic.

Here's my attempt to parse VAERS data, so the next poor soul doesn't have to.

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