Don't let legacy Media Fool You
Safety of mRNA vaccines administered during the initial 6 months of the US COVID-19 vaccination programme: an observational study of reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and v-safe The Lancet, March 7, 2022.
The CDC published the above paper in The Lancet on March 7, 2022. The legacy media immediately promoted the study as documenting that the vaccines are safe and effective. With severe side effects being of short duration and rare.
I began reading this paper with my usual wary eye, and what jumped out at me was that the conclusions reached by the legacy media did not match what I, as a trained physician and scientist, found important. As is often the case. Because they are journalists, not scientists. Please remind me, why are we relying on/allowing them to interpret science when they are not trained for this?. In any case, here are some of the headlines from the main stream media:
Huge study finds most COVID-19 vaccine side effects were mild for Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna (USA Today)
Side Effects of COVID mRNA Vaccines Are Mild and Short, Large Study Confirms (Medscape)
No link between Covid vaccine and deaths, says major US study Just 4,500 people died out of the 298 million vaccines considered in the study (Evening Standard)
Wait, let’s back up a bit here and do our own due diligence and thinking! The Lancet paper documents the percent of severe adverse events (6.6%), compared to non-severe adverse events (92.1%). BTW - death was a separate category determined to be around 1.3% of all adverse events. So, what does this mean? A severe event ratio (including death) of 7.9% of all reported adverse events is high - very high! That means that about 1 in 13 people has a severe adverse event out of all adverse events reported, as defined by the VAERS system (quote from the Lancet paper below):
“VAERS reports were classified as serious if any of the following outcomes were documented: inpatient hospitalisation, prolongation of hospitalisation, permanent disability, life-threatening illness, congenital anomaly or birth defect, or death.”
One out of every eight reported adverse events were classified as serious! But “somehow” what the Medscape Headline concludes is that the side effects are “mild and short.” This is just not accurate.
But let’s dig deeper. One has to look at the actual numbers of people affected by adverse events. Not just at the percentage points of the various adverse events. So, let’s take a look under the hood and figure out what this all means.
First there are many caveats to this paper. This data is only for the first six months after the vaccine roll out, so no children and almost no teens were vaccinated during this period (the 15-18 year old age range began to get vaccinated around May, 2021, but the data analysis started January and ends June 2021). Why the cut-off at six months? There are now data that extend for 14 months, and those data include children.
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https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/the-lancet-paper-adverse-events-are