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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2839 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 17, 2023

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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.

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.

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

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