Free Daily Headlines :

  • COVID-19
  • Vaccine Info
  • Money
  • Politics
  • Education
  • Health
  • Justice
  • More
    • Environment
    • Economic Development
    • Gaming
    • Investigations
    • Social Services
    • TRANSPORTATION
  • Opinion
    • CT Viewpoints
    • CT Artpoints
DONATE
Reflecting Connecticut’s Reality.
    COVID-19
    Vaccine Info
    Money
    Politics
    Education
    Health
    Justice
    More
    Environment
    Economic Development
    Gaming
    Investigations
    Social Services
    TRANSPORTATION
    Opinion
    CT Viewpoints
    CT Artpoints

LET�S GET SOCIAL

Show your love for great stories and out standing journalism
CT VIEWPOINTS -- opinions from around Connecticut

A call to save arms: is vaccination really the solution?

  • CT Viewpoints
  • by Genevieve Diamant
  • January 25, 2021
  • View as "Clean Read" "Exit Clean Read"

Excerpt from page 48 of FDA briefing document on the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine

According to the World Health Organization, global all-cause mortality from illness is highest for heart disease (9 million) and stroke (over 6 million in 2019). The fourth leading cause of death — lower respiratory illnesses like pneumonia, flu, and tuberculosis — has claimed approximately 2.6 million lives for the past 20 years, consistently.

Even before COVID-19 arrived on the scene, highly infectious respiratory disease was one of the primary public health threats legislators faced. For approximately 10 -15 years, research has been focused on preventive vaccination, rather than on treatment and improvement in public health infrastructure at the point of care.

There is, frankly, not a lot of evidence that this strategy has been successful.

The mortality and infection rates for seasonal influenza, for example, have remained more or less the same for two decades. The influenza vaccination industry has grown significantly, however. The WHO has become a pivotal institution involved in global surveillance and classification of influenza virus mutations each year. From the WHO’s determination of the three most prevalent strains, pharmaceutical companies produce a product tailored (theoretically) to each flu season and roll it out to government agencies.

The steps of government marketing approval, sales to health care providers and citizens, and stockpiling happen largely without incident. If new types of influenza-like illness emerge and begin to infect humans, such as H1N1 or swine flu, existing production structures are easily adapted for manufacture of vaccines against the newly emerging threats. This is one of the main arguments for maintaining the influenza vaccine production infrastructure, even in years where there might be low demand for, or even low efficacy of, a given product.

What gets lost in the shuffle is any hint that local structures delivering medical care to the substantial numbers of people affected (3-5 million severe cases globally, causing up to 650,000 deaths annually, with seasonal influenza) are impacted in any positive and meaningful way — for example, by helping doctors improve treatment outcomes for patients.

Although the burden of efficacy proof for preventive vaccination should lie with producers, it does not. Corporations essentially police themselves, delivering carefully culled datasets and documentation to agencies for approval shortly before the next influenza season looms. This poses a dilemma for elected officials in charge of public health: to take the time to look into the data more thoroughly, or to question its validity, is to risk being caught unprepared with that potentially preventive vaccination (and blamed!) when the next respiratory illness invades the airspace of a given territory.

The problem of infectious viruses too small to be seen without a microscope using computer-aided electron wave technology to magnify them several thousand times is highly technical, to put it mildly. Once a vaccine has been developed and approved, there is little incentive to keep monitoring efficacy or impact on disease prevention. With diseases like influenza, comparison of each season’s vaccine formulation against circulating strains is practically impossible and of little value for the following year.

Legislators and leaders are threatened with damage to entire economies and the tax bases needed to maintain government services for citizens — if, for example, enough of their constituents become too ill to work, or hospitals become overburdened and fail.

At the same time, there is incentive for government regulators and manufacturers alike to downplay or fail to follow-up on safety concerns. Headlines like: “NIH ‘Very Concerned’ about Serious Side Effect in Coronavirus Vaccine Trial” hint at danger. Serious damage to formerly healthy individuals like the post-vaccination transverse myelitis documented here often gets lost or ignored by a 24-hour news cycle, which is not designed to take up the slack where government regulators fail to adequately hold corporations responsible for the safety of study subjects.

Pharmaceutical companies, by releasing preliminary data about “interim analyses” before regulatory agencies release reports on the final data like these Moderna or Pfizer FDA dossiers, are essentially governing by press-release. They have leveraged the media apparatus to trumpet claims about an “efficacy rate of 95%” that go entirely unchallenged.

Using the Pfizer document, I finally resorted to testing my memory of cross-multiplication to determine percentages. On p.17, the ‘final efficacy analysis” was apparently conducted whenever 170 people in the study had caught COVID. However, on p.32, there is mention of a “primary efficacy endpoint” which muddies the water a bit. Of the 21,669 people who were vaccinated, 50 got COVID after Dose1: with 39 of them infected sometime between Dose1 and Dose2; 2 infected a few days after Dose2; and nine who were infected seven or more days after Dose2. The analysis presented to the public seems to be based on those nine that both doses of vaccine failed to protect.

The 50 vaccinated people who got COVID comprised .23% or about a quarter of a percent of the total vaccinated group of 21,669. If you choose to count only the nine, that’s only .04%.  But in the placebo group 275 (1.27%) of 21,686 people got the disease. It therefore appears that the vaccine was about 1% more effective than the placebo, or 1.23% if you only count the nine who were vaccinated with both doses before getting COVID.

Medical studies are designed to look at both efficacy and safety. Yet only 2,238 of the study subjects were included in something called the “reactogenicity subset of the safety population aged 18 to 55 years.” (P.35, Table 17). There are several pages of further “subset” analyses, using various age groups, etc. I searched the entire report but could not find a comprehensive listing of safety data for all participants.
Without complete data on how many of the more than 40,000 people serving as vaccinated and placebo subjects had fatigue, headache, chills, nausea, vomiting, etc., all we have are relatively meaningless numbers…

…Unless we use the same tactics pharmaceutical companies are using, and extrapolate. This “reactogenicity subset” of 2,238 people is approximately 1/10th the size of the full data-set of 21,669 vaccinated subjects. After vaccination, 1,085, or almost half, were fatigued. This would be over 150 million people if everyone in the U.S. were vaccinated.

One could argue that needing a nap is not a good reason to decline vaccination against severe disease. But what about the 959 (42%, 9,100 of full data-set, 134 million if all Americans were vaccinated) who had headache, 14% of whom had a bad headache? What about the apparently tiny 1.2% of the subset who vomited?

Extrapolated to the full U.S. population, must we expect that 3,840,000 people may vomit if the entire country is vaccinated? Serious systemic side effects such as muscle pain (reported by 21%) and new or worsened joint pain (11%) may also be harbingers of autoimmune disease and other lasting systemic damage, that could emerge long after vaccination.

Vaccines have been shown to worsen some cases of subsequent infection, a phenomenon called antibody-dependent enhancement. And the best part? There’s no proof that vaccination protects against death from COVID. According to the Pfizer/FDA report (p.48) “A larger number of individuals at high risk of COVID-19 and higher attack rates would be needed to confirm efficacy of the vaccine against mortality.”

Economic modelling done by professional statisticians is often used to claim that the ounce of prevention provided by a vaccine is much better than the pound of cure that well-funded hospitals, fully staffed with professional nurses and doctors, using effective pharmaceutical remedies, can provide. But is this actually true?

Genevieve Diamant PhD of Hampton is a former medical writer for an international pharmaceutical company that specializes in vaccines.

There is a rebuttal related to this article.

CTViewpoints welcomes rebuttal or opposing views to this and all its commentaries. Read our guidelines and submit your commentary here.

Sign up for CT Mirror's free daily news summary.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SEE WHAT READERS SAID

RELATED STORIES
Connecticut should work to reduce rates of inmate calling services 
by David Lamendola

Many telecommunications issues are really complicated and only interesting to a handful of policy-oriented folks. But once in a while an issue arises that has easily understandable implications for all of society. High rates for inmate calling services (ICS) is one of these issues. The way it usually works is that an incarcerated person make collect calls from detention facilities, and their family pays the bill. Unfortunately, some providers charge extremely high rates for these calls – a 15 minute phone call to a loved one costs an incarcerated person $5 in Connecticut.

The public health bill no one is talking about, but should be
by Brian Festa

On February 16,  the legislature's Public Health Committee conducted a public hearing on two bills, S.B. 568 and H.B. 6423, both of which would eliminate the religious exemption to mandatory vaccinations for Connecticut schoolchildren.  The hearing was capped at 24 hours, depriving nearly 1,500 members of the public who had registered for the hearing their opportunity to be heard.  The vast majority of those who did testify, and who submitted written testimony, opposed the bill.  The committee is expected to vote on the bill as early as  today. 

Students need more resources, fewer officers
by Tenille Bonilla

"School resource officer" is just a nice way to say cop. But what students really need is more resource and less officer.

The Board of Regents’ changes must not shortchange its students or faculty
by Carrie Andreoletti, PhD

As a university professor and a lifespan developmental psychologist, I tend to approach my work from a developmental perspective. This means I aim to foster a lifelong love of learning and to help others find a sense of meaning and purpose, as well as confidence in their ability to reach their goals. My approach to higher education is shaped by my desire to provide the best possible education for my students. This is why the recent Board of Regents’ proposed changes at the four state universities have me worried.

How to close schooling opportunity gaps created by the pandemic
by Carol Gale

We ask school district leaders to trust your public servants whose daily work life involves assessing student needs and planning or modifying instruction to meet those needs. Listen to their voices, as we have, and allocate precious resources on interventions that will offer increased opportunities for Hartford students to succeed.

Support Our Work

Show your love for great stories and outstanding journalism.

$
Select One
  • Monthly
  • Yearly
  • Once
Artpoint painter
CT ViewpointsCT Artpoints
Opinion The public health bill no one is talking about, but should be
by Brian Festa

On February 16,  the legislature's Public Health Committee conducted a public hearing on two bills, S.B. 568 and H.B. 6423, both of which would eliminate the religious exemption to mandatory vaccinations for Connecticut schoolchildren.  The hearing was capped at 24 hours, depriving nearly 1,500 members of the public who had registered for the hearing their opportunity to be heard.  The vast majority of those who did testify, and who submitted written testimony, opposed the bill.  The committee is expected to vote on the bill as early as  today. 

Opinion Students need more resources, fewer officers
by Tenille Bonilla

"School resource officer" is just a nice way to say cop. But what students really need is more resource and less officer.

Opinion The Board of Regents’ changes must not shortchange its students or faculty
by Carrie Andreoletti, PhD

As a university professor and a lifespan developmental psychologist, I tend to approach my work from a developmental perspective. This means I aim to foster a lifelong love of learning and to help others find a sense of meaning and purpose, as well as confidence in their ability to reach their goals. My approach to higher education is shaped by my desire to provide the best possible education for my students. This is why the recent Board of Regents’ proposed changes at the four state universities have me worried.

Opinion How to close schooling opportunity gaps created by the pandemic
by Carol Gale

We ask school district leaders to trust your public servants whose daily work life involves assessing student needs and planning or modifying instruction to meet those needs. Listen to their voices, as we have, and allocate precious resources on interventions that will offer increased opportunities for Hartford students to succeed.

Artwork Grand guidance
by Anne:Gogh

In a world of systemic oppression aimed towards those of darker skintones – representation matters. We are more than our equity elusive environments, more than numbers in a prison and much more than victims of societal dispositions. This piece depicts a melanated young man draped in a cape ascending high above multiple forms of oppression. […]

Artwork Shea
by Anthony Valentine

Shea is a story about race and social inequalities that plague America. It is a narrative that prompts the question, “Do you know what it’s like to wake up in new skin?”

Artwork The Declaration of Human Rights
by Andres Chaparro

Through my artwork I strive to create an example of ideas that reflect my desire to raise social consciousness, and cultural awareness. Jazz music is the catalyst to all my work, and plays a major influence in each piece of work.”

Artwork ‘A thing of beauty. Destroy it forever’
by Richard DiCarlo | Derby

During times like these it’s often fun to revisit something familiar and approach things with a different slant. I have been taking some Pop culture and Art masterpieces and applying the vintage 1960’s and 70’s classic figures (Fisher Price, little people) to the make an amusing pieces. Here is my homage to Fisher -Price, Yellow […]

Twitter Feed
A Twitter List by CTMirror

Engage

  • Reflections Tickets & Sponsorships
  • Events
  • Donate
  • Newsletter Sign-Up
  • Submit to Viewpoints
  • Submit to ArtPoints
  • Economic Indicator Dashboard
  • Speaking Engagements
  • Commenting Guidelines
  • Legal Notices
  • Contact Us

About

  • About CT Mirror
  • Announcements
  • Board
  • Staff
  • Sponsors and Funders
  • Donors
  • Friends of CT Mirror
  • History
  • Financial
  • Policies
  • Strategic Plan

Opportunity

  • Advertising and Sponsorship
  • Speaking Engagements
  • Use of Photography
  • Work for Us

Go Deeper

  • Steady Habits Podcast
  • Economic Indicator Dashboard
  • Five Things

The Connecticut News Project, Inc. 1049 Asylum Avenue, Hartford, CT 06105. Phone: 860-218-6380

© Copyright 2021, The Connecticut News Project. All Rights Reserved. Website by Web Publisher PRO