Are the Covid mRNA Vaccines Demonstrably Safe? The Jury is Still Out, According to this Harvard Epidemiologist
Harvard epidemiologist and biostatistician Dr Martin Kulldorff, also co-signer of the Great Barrington Declaration, has offered an accessible analysis of a recent study of the mRNA Covid vaccines (the full text can be found on the Brownstone Institute’s website), in which he concludes that “It is the responsibility of the manufacturers and FDA to ensure that benefits (of the mRNA vaccines) outweigh harms. They have failed to do so.”
Dr Kulldorff’s research focuses on infectious disease outbreaks and the monitoring of vaccine and drug safety, for which he has developed the free SaTScan, TreeScan, and RSequential software. He has consistently advocated the voluntary use of Covid vaccines for high risk groups but firmly opposed the violation of informed consent and repeatedly urged that vaccine choice depends on a risk-benefit assessment that may vary from person to person.
Given the impressive credentials of this doctor and his significant experience monitoring vaccine safety, combined with his respect for informed consent and brave opposition to lockdowns that have proved catastrophic for so many people across the world, when he offered a point-by-point analysis of the most recent evidence on vaccine safety, I had to sit up and listen. I encourage you to read his piece for yourself. But in the interests of efficiency, I’d like to share with you some of his leading take-home points on the safety of mRNA vaccines:
“When regulators approved the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines for emergency use in December 2020, two randomized trials showed that the vaccines reduced symptomatic covid infection by over 90% during the first few months after the second dose…(But) Pfizer and Moderna did not design the trials to evaluate long-term efficacy or the more important outcomes of preventing hospitalization, death, or transmission.”
There were more adverse events detected, proportionately, in the vaccine arm of the trial than the placebo arm, in the initial trials that were used to validate the Emergency Use Authorisation of the mRNA vaccines.
“A new scientific study by Joseph Fraiman et al entitled “Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA vaccination in randomized trials” provides the best evidence yet concerning the safety of the mRNA Covid vaccines.” This study “pools data from both mRNA vaccines to increase the sample size, which decreases the confidence intervals’ size and the uncertainty about the estimated harms.”
The result of pooling data from both Pfizer and Modern mRNA vaccine trials is that “there is one additional AESI (Adverse Event of Special Interest) for every 800 people vaccinated (95% CI: 437-4762). According to Dr Kulldorff, “That is very high for a vaccine. No other vaccine on the market comes close.” “Most excess AESIs were coagulation disorders. For the Pfizer vaccine, there was also an excess of cardiovascular AESIs.”
These adverse events might be justified if there was a substantial reduction in severe Covid disease or death. But the original Pfizer and Moderna trials were not designed to demonstrate such a reduction, so this remains unclear. Nonetheless, “Dr. Christine Benn and her colleagues calculated a combined estimate of the effect of vaccination on all-cause mortality using the same randomized trial data as Fraiman et al. They did not find a mortality reduction for the mRNA vaccines (relative risk 1.03, 95% CI: 0.63-1.71).”
“These results concern only the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines. Fraiman et al. did not analyze data on the adenovirus-vector vaccines marketed by Johnson & Johnson and Astra-Zeneca. Benn et al. found that they reduced all-cause mortality (RR=0.37, 95% CI:0.19-0.70), but nobody has used trial data to analyze AESIs for these vaccines.”
Dr Kulldorff concludes that “Fraiman and colleagues have produced the best evidence yet regarding the overall safety of the mRNA vaccines. The results are concerning. It is the responsibility of the manufacturers and FDA to ensure that benefits outweigh harms. They have failed to do so.”
I am not a vaccine specialist. But I have heard numerous well respected analysts explain that the original mRNA vaccine trials were deeply flawed, both in failing to test for reduction in severe disease or death, and in being effectively aborted after a few months, leaving us no good long-term data on the efficacy of the Covid vaccines.
The evidence discussed above by Dr Martin Kulldorff only raises further question marks over the safety of the mRNA vaccines. It is extraordinary that with such weak evidence for their safety, they were approved at all, and even more extraordinary that they were thrust upon so many of us against our will.
We have lived through an ugly episode of medical tyranny. It would be ugly even if the vaccines in question were demonstrably safe. But once you remove informed consent from the picture, vaccine manufactureres and governments no longer have a strong incentive to demonstrate that their vaccines are actually safe. They know they can fill in the gaps in their weak trials with coercion and threats.
Where tyranny and despotism come into play, science becomes the handmaid of the powers that be, and we are thrust back into a dark age in which safety becomes whatever the heck Tony Fauci, or the head of FDA, or the US President’s office, decide it is, or based on a behind-closed-doors assessment of trial data that public health authorities would prefer to keep concealed from us for 75 years.
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Thank you!
Thanks David for drawing our attention to this article. Today I found this interview with Dr Harvey Risch which explains the problems in a way that should be understandable for people who are not scientists. https://www.theepochtimes.com/dr-harvey-risch-why-are-vaccinated-people-getting-covid-at-higher-rates-than-the-unvaccinated_4602409.html