June 24, 2021 at 2:28 p.m.
Happy Juneteenth! Let's just call the whole emergency off
Happy Juneteenth! Let's just call the whole emergency off
That's right, they canceled what they themselves called an emergency meeting, which is usually held when, you know, there is an emergency.
That committee had been scheduled to address the rapid rise in reported cases of heart inflammation in young people following Covid-19 vaccinations. It's comforting to know that these critical agencies won't let any old public health emergency stand in the way of a day off. Union thinking is alive and well.
OK, we're kidding. A big reason the agencies cancelled the meeting for the holiday was that they don't believe there's an emergency, a point explicitly made by CDC director Rochelle Walensky in announcing the meeting's cancellation, an announcement she actually coupled with a call for everyone to get their kids vaccinated.
That kind of obviates the need for an emergency meeting, doesn't it? So there you go - we knew already what any "emergency" discussion would conclude: Everybody shut up and take the children out for a jab or two.
Imagine that, a foregone conclusion that the vaccine is safe for everybody, never mind that the Israeli Health Ministry has concluded that there is a probable link between the vaccine and the heart conditions and that standard clinical trials are ongoing, meaning the vaccine is authorized for emergency - there's that word again - use only.
None of this should be surprising. The CDC itself is a vaccine juggernaut, holding some 56 vaccine patents, and in the early 2000s actually played a key role in U.S. efforts to corral the patents for all coronaviruses on earth, not to mention any vaccines developed for and from them.
The FDA is no better. As Drs. Leslie E. Sekerka of Menlo College and Lauren Benishek of Johns Hopkins University wrote in 2018 in "Thick as Thieves: Big Pharma Wields its Power with the Help of Government Regulation," even though the FDA is responsible for approving pharmaceutical products for marketing in the U.S., as well as having the statutory authority to regulate prescription drug labeling and advertising, the pharmaceutical industry contributes heavily to its annual budget.
Since 1992, the authors reported, pharmaceutical companies contributed $7.67 billion to the federal agency's coffers. Ya think they are going to say anything bad about any vaccine unless they absolutely have to?
Meanwhile, as we report, the number of reported cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, especially in young people age 30 and under, continue to pile up in the nation's Vaccine Adverse Reporting System (VAERS). As of June 11, VAERS data showed 1,117 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis. Of those, 695 cases, or 62 percent, were for people aged 17-44, while 109, or about 10 percent, were from people aged 12-17.
But wait a minute! the critics shout. That whole VAERS system is a load of crap. Anyone can submit reports - the anti-vaxxers are manipulating the system by flooding it with false reports - and, in any event, even a legitimate report doesn't mean there is a causal connection between an adverse event and the vaccine.
In other words, in this view, it's a system designed to mean nothing and that, given all the unreliable reports, now means even less than nothing.
Excuse us if we laugh. These accusations against the system are what we like to call political forensic countermeasures, acts of distortion, redefinition, and falsity that intend to destroy the system's integrity, much like bad actors trampling a crime scene with many footsteps to conceal and destroy the footsteps of a perpetrator.
In this case the perpetrators have brought in elephants to stomp on and smear the evidence and VAERS. Let us straighten things out.
First, while it is true that VAERS reports cannot be taken as proof of causality - many, many reports turn out not to be related to vaccines - that's not the system's purpose or its value. Its purpose is to act as an early warning system in which red flags alert investigators early on to take a look to see if there is a serious problem.
The primary red flag is the number of case reports, especially as compared to reports received for other vaccines. Any vaccine that generates a lot of adverse event reports from the get-go, or that shows unusual or unexpected patterns, warrants a real close look, and VAERS gives us that early warning siren.
In one of the classic examples of this, upon its release in 1998, a rotavirus vaccine, RotaShield, produced a higher-then-expected incidence of intussusception after vaccination, as reported to VAERS. Investigators verified the legitimacy of the concern, and the vaccine was withdrawn from the market.
Here's how the CDC put it: "The suspected association between (RotaShield) and intussusception based on a review of VAERS data led CDC, in conjunction with state and local health departments, to implement a case-control study and case-series analysis and a retrospective cohort study."
VAERS worked as it was supposed to. The CDC became alarmed because, over a period of about seven months, 10 cases of intussusception were reported to VAERS, whereas only four cases of intussusception involving other vaccines had been reported to VAERS during the preceding eight years. The cases appeared to be nonrandom in distribution and there was temporal clustering after receipt of the vaccine, which the CDC said "suggested a causal relationship."
After further investigation, the association was established, and vaccine distribution was halted.
If all this sounds familiar, it should. It's exactly what we have here - an explosion of case reports of adverse events with the Covid vaccines, both serious and minor, compared to the history of other vaccines. That's fact, both in general and more specifically with myocarditis and pericarditis. We'd be fools not to investigate, and fools we may be.
For example, in general, how many adverse events are reported following Covid-19 shots versus, say, the flu shot? Look at the numbers and, well, red flags are flying, particularly for younger people.
In the 2019-20 flu season, VAERS reported just 49 deaths following the flu vaccine, 18 of those over the age of 75. During that flu season, too, there were just 410 hospitalizations reported overall following flu vaccination. For adults between ages 17 and 64, there were 137 hospitalizations.
For Covid vaccinations? For adults between ages 17 and 64, there were 2,488 in that age group following vaccination. The difference is stark when it comes to deaths, too. There were 534 deaths reported in that age group following Covid vaccinations (as of mid Mid-April, more since then) but during the 2019-20 flu season there were only only six flu deaths in that population group following vaccination.
The figure is even more telling when one compares the number of doses. Considering all population groups, there were only 49 deaths reported following flu vaccines in the 2019-20 year out of some 174 million doses of flu vaccine delivered. Compare that to the 3,186 deaths reported following Covid vaccinations (again, as of mid April) - out of about 202.3 million doses delivered at the time. In other words, a person was about 59 times more likely to die following the Covid vaccine than following the flu vaccine, and it's only grown worse since.
Or to compare myocarditis/pericarditis reports with those from other vaccines, just as the CDC did for intussusception reports for other vaccines, we find the same higher numbers, the same temporal clustering.
Using VAERs, there are 947 reports of myocarditis/pericarditis reports for ages 6-29 following vaccination for all vaccines since the VAERS system began in 1990. Of those, 589, or 62 percent, followed Covid vaccinations while only 38 percent followed non-Covid vaccinations, though Covid shots have only been given since last December.
What's more, as reported, journalist Alex Berenson found that VAERS had only 42 life-threatening myocarditis/pericarditis case reports for non-Covid shots, or 1.4 a year, while there have been 98 life-threatening reports in six months for the Covid shots.
All of this put another way, for RotaShield there were 10 cases of intussusception in seven months compared to four for all other vaccines in the preceding eight years. For the Covid vaccines, there have been 589 cases of myocarditis/pericarditis reported in about seven months compared to 358 such cases reported in the preceding 31 years from all other vaccines.
Clearly something is amiss, as there was with RotaShield. Back then, independent scientists conducted an investigation. These days the modern scientists of the Democratic Party are in control. They know the truth, they have the oracle, spelled F-A-U-C-I, so why investigate. It's just a bunch of anti-vaxxers hoaxing the system.
About that ability to hoax the system. The truth is, while anyone can submit a report, most reports come from health care professionals, and federal law requires health care providers to report serious adverse events to VAERS.
What's more, both the CDC and the FDA review data reported to VAERS to root out the non-serious, fraudulent, or otherwise flawed reports. None are taken at face value. Many of the reports, probably a little more than half, turn out not to be vaccine-related, but the follow up is what is invaluable about the integrity of the system.
In a 2012 causality assessment of adverse events reported to VAERS, 23 percent of reports were found to be definite or probable, 20 percent were possible, and 53 percent were classified as either unlikely or unrelated to a vaccine received, with the rest unidentified.
But think about that for a second. As of June 11, there were 5,993 reported deaths to VAERS following a Covid vaccination. If only 23 percent of them are definitely or probably linked to the vaccine, that's still 1,379 deaths for a vaccine the government declares to be perfectly safe.
Maybe in the end, after thorough vetting, the reality is less stark. But, right now, is that really something to take a vacation day over?
It gets worse. In its June 10 presentation, the CDC looked at 475 cases of reported myocarditis and/or pericarditis in those age 30 and under, and, guess what, it found that 226 met its working definition. In other words, these were real reports and real conditions.
Now that's doesn't mean the vaccine definitely caused the conditions, but that's 47 percent that were possible - just about where the 2012 assessment pegged it. Consider, too, that the CDC acknowledged that those conditions followed in the weeks after vaccination and that they were substantially higher than what would be expected in background, further raising red flags about the vaccines' potential causation.
If we used the the old CDC comparison standard that was used for RotaShield, the numbers, to use the CDC language from then, "suggested a causal relationship." But now CDC and the FDA take the day off.
It's not just myocarditis, either, but blood clots, shingles, and more, many occurring in clusters and right after vaccination. Given that these are emergency authorizations, and vaccine clinical trials won't even end until 2022 at the earliest, scrutiny should be an even higher priority, not a lower one.
There's a reason vaccines are tested for so long before receiving full approval, and there's a reason this is emergency use approval only - because there's just a ton of questions we don't have the answers to and a bunch of warning signs that scream out for caution.
But, hey, let's just call the whole emergency off.
In its rush to vaccinate, the nation is making the same mistake as it did with the pandemic last year - it's all or nothing. Last year everybody had to be locked down, had to wear masks, the schools and churches had to be closed, society had to shut down. We now know the more reasonable public policy approach was to focus on the elderly and other high-risk populations.
But we're making the same mistake with the vaccines - everybody has to be vaccinated, women, men, elderly, young, Spot, and Rover. This is not good public policy.
The vaccine makes sense as a personal choice for the elderly, where the death toll from Covid-19 is high, but it makes no sense for younger people, who have virtually zero risk of death from the virus but who face real and mounting risks with the vaccine. As questions mount, this is an especially urgent question.
As for altruism, as we reported, this week a 13-year-old seemingly healthy Michigan boy died three days after his second Covid vaccination. The autopsy showed an enlarged heart with fluid surrounding it, according to relatives.
The boy's aunt, a pro-vaccine advocate named Tami Burages, tweeted out the situation and then deleted it because she claimed disinformation outlets were politicizing a family tragedy. But Ms. Burages did not retract the content of those tweets, which were captured in internet eternity, and she put it far better than we ever could about exposing young people to these risks.
"The CDC needs to investigate this," Burages tweeted. "There have been other cases of myocarditis in young men receiving their 2nd Pfizer shot. Have others died from it in the United States or is my nephew the first? I think parents should be warned of the risk. I do believe that the vaccine is saving millions of lives. But should any innocent child be a sacrificial lamb in this endeavor? There are moral, ethical and health questions that need to be answered. If Jacob had not received the 2nd shot, we believe he would be alive today."
Moral, ethical, and health questions, yes. The CDC needs to investigate this, yes.
But instead the government took the day off. What will be the consequences?
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