How safe are COVID-19 vaccines?
Some key evidence, in one place
Numerous studies have come out with concerning data about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. However, much of that data, even when it’s published in the most prestigious science journals, gets ignored by traditional mainstream media.
For this reason, the public remains largely uninformed on this topic.
This article is for people who have gotten their news primarily from traditional media sources over the last three and a half years.
It compiles much of the information on COVID-19 vaccine safety into one place. It includes many peer-reviewed studies, and statements from scientists and doctors.
The article will be divided into the following sections:
Hearing from scientists, doctors, and nurses
Hearing from the vaccine injured
How common are harms from COVID-19 vaccines?
Studies showing harms from COVID-19 vaccines
How are so many harms possible?
mRNA vaccine technology is not mature
Can the pharmaceutical industry and their regulators be trusted?
The reality of science and “consensus”
Why don’t we hear about this in the media?
Where to get better information
Hearing from scientists, doctors, and nurses
Dr. Aseem Malhotra, MD, cardiologist
Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a well known cardiologist in Britain, initially encouraged people to get the COVID-19 vaccines on national television. He has since changed his mind:
In this clip, he details why he thinks an mRNA vaccine played a role in his father’s sudden cardiac death in late 2021. He also mentions data showing that the mRNA vaccines were causing huge levels of coronary inflammation, as measured by inflammatory markers.
At the same time, he found out that a colleague of his from a prestigious British institution, had corroborated this data; this colleague had “accidentally found, by use of coronary imaging,” that the vaccine was causing huge increases in coronary inflammation.
But:
They were not going to publish these findings because they were worried about the fact that they may lose funding from the pharmaceutical industry.
He has since gone on BBC, calling for a pause on mRNA vaccines until more research can be done.
Note: he was called on BBC to talk about statins and heart disease, but he used the opportunity to also discuss mRNA vaccines.
Dr. Christine Stabell Benn, PhD, Professor in Global Health
Dr. Christine Stabell Benn is a world-renowned researcher with over 300 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. She studies the non-specific effects of vaccines, aka the “off-target” effects of vaccines:
Excerpt:
This may come as a surprise, but normally vaccines are not assessed for their effects on overall health. They’re only assessed for their protective effects against the vaccine disease… But when we started looking at the effect of vaccines on overall health, it quickly became clear to us that there was something wrong…
…We realized that vaccines also affect the risk of other diseases.
Her research group consistently found that traditional live attenuated vaccines, which contain a bit of weakened pathogen to create a mild infection of the body, are associated with beneficial non-specific effects.
But non-live vaccines, which contain pathogen that has already been killed,1 had negative non-specific effects. For example, children who received the non-live DTP vaccine were at five times higher risk of dying than those who didn’t. In fact, the DTP vaccine may kill more children than it saves.2
What’s worse is that globally, there has been a push to switch from using live vaccines to non-live vaccines:
Things are moving in the wrong direction. Live vaccines are being stopped; more non-live vaccines are being developed.
In this podcast, at around 21:00, Dr. Benn discusses the COVID-19 vaccines. Here are some takeaways:
Dr. Benn reported that adenovirus-vector vaccines3 were associated with a reduction in overall mortality, but when it came to the mRNA vaccines, though there was a slight reduction in risk of dying from COVID-19—though this was not statistically significant—this was outweighed by a slightly increased risk of dying from cardiovascular diseases.
This was all based on an analysis of the original vaccine trial data. This was limited, because the trials were stopped so quickly when they decided to vaccinate the control group as soon as the vaccines received emergency approval.
At around 25:20 Dr. Benn and the podcast host, physician and medical researcher Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, talked about why the vaccine trials were “a big failure,” how it was a failure that we didn’t have randomized trials to test whether it was beneficial or harmful to recommend “booster after booster,” or vaccinate children, or people who had already had COVID-19.
The focus of the vaccine trials was on efficacy, not safety; in fact many of the numbers on the safety data had discrepancies.
When there were safety issues, the trials almost always concluded that these were unrelated to the vaccine.
This might have been because the trials were funded by the drug companies themselves; obviously they had conflicts of interest (more on this later).
Gøtzsche mentioned that the editor of JAMA, a prestigious medical journal, has said in an interview, “Don’t believe a word of what drug companies tell you.” And yet, this is what we do when drug companies do clinical trials and publish results in journals.
There is supplementary material on the trials that few people ever find; this shows that 1 in 200 who gets the vaccine will be “severely harmed,” meaning they cannot perform their usual activities and need sick leave.
At 30:37, Gøtzsche mentioned that one of the participants in Pfizer’s trial became severely incapacitated and dropped out of the trial and disappeared. There was no account of her in the publication of the trials.
At 41:43, regarding the non-specific effects of the mRNA vaccines, Dr. Benn says that mRNA vaccines seem to do what non-live vaccines do to the trained (innate) immune system4; they seem to increase tolerance5, so “I’m concerned that we cannot exclude at this time that the surges in other infectious diseases we have seen post-pandemic—with RSV, with rhinoviruses, with staphylococci—that that could not be associated with the mRNA vaccines.”
They mention that this video will not go on YouTube, because YouTube censors this kind of content. “This censorship has worsened tremendously during COVID-19.”
At 50:14: “People had tried to develop vaccines against coronaviruses earlier and had not been very successful… respiratory viruses mutate a lot; for example that’s one of the reasons the influenza vaccines are pretty ineffective… Canadian researchers have shown that if you get vaccinated you run a higher risk of getting next year’s influenza, but with other strains.”
Dr. Peter Doshi, PhD, associate professor, senior editor at The British Medical Journal
Dr. Peter Doshi, a senior editor at the prestigious British Medical Journal, has received wide recognition for his work on greater transparency of clinical trial data.
In this interview, he talks about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. Some key takeaways:
Health officials projected certainty about these vaccines when in reality there were a great deal of unknowns.
The authorization of the Omicron booster was based on data on mice.6
He and a group of researchers and doctors did a re-analysis of the original Pfizer and Moderna trials. This study was published in the journal Vaccine.
Their analysis found that the risk of serious adverse events7 was ~1 in 800 vaccinated. This is much higher than what was conveyed by health agencies, and much more common than for other vaccines, where rates are ~1 or 2 per million vaccinated.
In past years, 1 in 800 would have been more than enough to take a vaccine off the market. Example: in 1976 an influenza vaccine was pulled from the market because of a 1 in 100,000 rate of Guillain-Barré syndrome.8
The number of COVID hospitalizations reduced was about 6 per 10,000 for Moderna and 2 per 10,000 for Pfizer. But this was outweighed by that fact that the serious adverse events were around 15 per 10,000 for Moderna, and 10 per 10,000 for Pfizer.
The trials were never designed to study infection. But that got completely ignored by governments pursuing a “herd immunity” strategy, which had made the assumption that the vaccines stopped infection or transmission.
There were reasons from the beginning to think that these vaccines wouldn’t stop transmission, since they were intramuscularly injected, as opposed to something that targeted the mucosa.9
The raw patient level data from the vaccine trials is not publicly available, which prevents independent researchers from analyzing the data further.
Dr. Patricia Lee, MD, ICU physician and surgeon
Dr. Patricia Lee, an ICU physician and surgeon based in California, reached out to the FDA and CDC after she witnessed a litany of serious harms from the COVID vaccines. In her letter she wrote:
It appears statistically improbable that any one physician should witness this many COVID-19 vaccine injuries if the federal health authority claims regarding Covid-19 vaccine safety were accurate.
At first she received no response, but then she reached out to the law firm Siri & Glimstad, which eventually sent a legal letter on her behalf. Within hours, the FDA responded, but sadly their response was about public relations.
She had also “spoken with colleagues who had similar experiences in treating patients” but none would publicly acknowledge these injuries because they thought doing so would “fuel vaccine hesitancy” or result in “backlash.”
Since then however, Siri’s firm was contacted by other physicians.
Dr. Kerryn Phelps, MD, former Australian Medical Association (AMA) president
Dr. Kerryn Phelps is one of Australia’s best-known doctors. She has revealed that both she and her wife had serious injures from the COVID vaccines.
Regarding her symptoms:
I continue to observe the devastating effects a year-and-a-half later with the addition of fatigue and additional neurological symptoms including nerve pains, altered sense of smell, visual disturbance and musculoskeletal inflammation. The diagnosis and causation has been confirmed by several specialists who have told me that they have seen ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation.
And:
Within this group of vaccine injured individuals, there is a diminishing cohort of people who have symptoms following immunisation, many of which are similar to Long Covid (such as fatigue and brain fog), but who have not had a Covid infection.
She has said that the true rate of adverse events is far higher than acknowledged due to underreporting and “threats” from medical regulators:
Regulators of the medical profession have censored public discussion about adverse events following immunisation, with threats to doctors not to make any public statements about anything that ‘might undermine the government’s vaccine rollout’ or risk suspension or loss of their registration.
Dr. Gregory A. Poland, MD, Director of Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group
Dr. Gregory Poland, a well known vaccinologist, reported that he developed “life-altering” tinnitus about “an hour and a half after my second dose” (more here). Still, he was so pro-vaccine that he later got a booster dose. The booster made his symptoms worse: “it got significantly louder and higher pitched,” like "loud humming from a fluorescent light." He has not taken another booster since then.
Poland is still very pro-vaccine and has made it clear that he does not want his experience to spread unnecessary fear, but he’s disapproved of how little interest there has been in this; "we have not been able to get [the CDC] interested" in tinnitus.
He added: "There's almost no research because it's not something you can measure, it's not something you can image. There are no biomarkers and no evidence-based treatment for it."
He recently wrote an excellent paper about this very problem: Cryptic vaccine-associated adverse events: The critical need for a new vaccine safety surveillance paradigm to improve public trust in vaccines
He wrote that some vaccine adverse events are “immediate and easily observable or measurable,” but others are “not immediately obvious, or are even clinically ‘silent’ or cryptic, making them challenging to identify and link directly to a vaccine.”
As a result, such cryptic adverse events are easily missed or dismissed by clinicians and vaccine safety systems.
Vaccine-associated tinnitus is one such adverse event, and patients are “unlikely to recognize such an association—and neither are physicians.”
Dr. Nikolai Petrovsky, PhD, immunologist and vaccinologist
Lastly, here’s a short clip of Dr. Nikolai Petrovsky, immunologist and vaccine developer, expressing his concerns about these vaccines:
Declarations from scientists and doctors
Many other scientists and doctors have disagreed with the “official narrative” on the COVID-19 vaccines. Some have even signed declarations or petitions to publicly voice their opinions, but sadly they did not get much media attention:
Why we petitioned the FDA to refrain from fully approving any covid-19 vaccine this year
A scathing letter from Professor Edu Qimron, one of Israel’s leading immunologists, to the Israeli Ministry of Health.
Hearing from front line nurses
In this video, healthcare workers testify before their representatives about their concerns over COVID-19 vaccine injuries. Start about 1 hour in:
At about 1:01:00, an ICU nurse reported:
I am here to discuss how vaccine reporting has gone on in our hospital. We have gotten very little direction on how to report… I had a coworker… A young healthy man got the first dose of the vaccine and had a severe reaction in which his lung partially collapsed…
He was told by the physician in the ER that it was an expected response to the vaccine. So I said Ok well maybe you should try to report that… Is this being reported? We know that he had this event within 24 hours of being vaccinated and I was told by my director that ER should be handling it… I wasn’t given any instruction on how to pursue reporting that.
I’ve definitely noticed over the past several months a sharp uptick in blood clotting disorders in our patients… and any time that is brought up… It’s always brushed aside, it’s not reported or mentioned in patient notes as a possible cause of their admission or their diagnosis.
It’s something that is occasionally passed on from nurse to nurse: Hey, they did get this dose within the past couple weeks. But there is no link being made at this time.
At about 1:04:13, an ICU nurse from a different facility reported that what she was seeing in the cardiovascular ICU was “terrifying.”
She then described how she had been ignorant of the fact that they had a state reporting system until recently; she had known about the national reporting system, but no one knew who was responsible for reporting to it:
I believe that I represent the majority of nurses and doctors in this state that are unaware of the reporting system and I am concerned that is the reason there is mass underreporting.
At about 1:10:24 a third nurse recounted how her husband went to the ER shortly after his first shot because they thought he was having a stroke. When she asked the nurses there—her coworkers—if they planned to report the incident, they said something confusing along the lines of “You can do what you want but we’re not really trying to tell you what to do. We don’t think you should be reporting.”
She went on to describe how she has noticed “multiple people from the booster shots come in three days later- massive heart attacks… When I ask my physicians in the unit, is this related to the vaccine, three days post vaccination, they say no, it’s not related.”
Hearing from the vaccine injured
Kyle Warner was a well known professional mountain bike racer. In June 2021, he took the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Shortly afterwards, he experienced life-altering complications to his heart from the vaccine:
At around 5:25, Kyle says:
I went to the hospital. I said, “Hey, I know this is weird. I just read about myocarditis, pericarditis with the mRNA vaccine. I think I might be having this reaction.”
And they basically just said, “No you’re not… that’s very rare. You’re having an anxiety attack.”
The doctor at the ER didn’t believe him.
Kyle did eventually find a better doctor, but he will probably never ride professionally again.
Because his case became very public, thousands of other vaccine injured people have reached out to him, and he’s spoken at press conferences. I highly recommend you listen to what he said at a press conference in D.C.:
They invited Anthony Fauci, the directors of the CDC, NIH, and FDA, the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna, and various state representatives to the press conference. None showed up.
As of January 2024, Kyle has still not fully recovered; he still has “a hard time riding bikes consistently without constant chest pain and tightness,” according to his latest Instagram post. And he can’t sue the vaccine manufacturer; they have total immunity from liability.
Here are more people who have been vocal about injuries after vaccination:
Musician Eric Clapton, said that his previously diagnosed peripheral neuropathy got significantly worse after taking the vaccine. He worried that speaking out would mean losing friends and family, and believes fear of reprisal has prevented more from speaking out.10
Brandon Goodwin, former Atlanta Hawks point guard, suffered from blood clots shortly after getting vaccinated.
Dr. Joel Wallskog, an orthopedic surgeon, developed transverse myelitis after receiving his first Moderna dose. His symptoms, which include numbness and electrical sensations, mean that his career as a surgeon was over. The CDC has categorized his injury as “not serious.” Listen to his story here.11
Megyn Kelly said that both she and her rheumatologist think that she got an autoimmune issue because of her booster shot. More here and here.
Greg Pearson, a pilot who developed atrial fibrillation after the vaccine, says there were other pilots who were injured but were afraid to come forward.
Maddie de Garay, part of a Pfizer clinical trial, received her second dose on January 20, 2021. Shortly afterwards she developed life-altering adverse reactions. She is now permanently wheelchair bound and needs to get her nutrition through a feeding tube (more here and here). Here is her mother’s testimonial:
A common theme among the victims is that they were afraid to speak out for fear of reprisal. In such an environment, it is easy to imagine that adverse events are underreported (more on that next).
How common are harms from the COVID-19 vaccines?
Studies show that our system underreports vaccine injuries
The British Medical Journal recently reported on how the system used to report vaccine injuries, VAERS, is broken: Is the US’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System broken?
It highlights how the process to submit vaccine injuries is glitchy and cumbersome.
Staffing levels have failed to keep up with the unprecedented number of reports since the rollout of COVID vaccines.
Reports are not being followed up, and signals are being missed.
Moreover, it’s a passive reporting system,12 so it relies on individuals or healthcare providers to take the initiative to report their experiences.
There are multiple papers that estimate that this grossly underreports the true rate of adverse effects. For peer-reviewed papers on this see here, here, here, or Appendix A here. Other useful articles on this topic are here, here or here or here or here.
Despite all this, VAERS has shown a safety signal going through the roof since the rollout of the COVID vaccines. The number of deaths since the rollout is the highest it’s been since we started recording data in 1990:
You can look at the VAERS data here, or the more user friendly OpenVAERS project. For more on VAERS, go to the section “Evidence from medical records or official databases of adverse events” here.
COVID-19 vaccines are much riskier than traditional vaccines
Vaccine manufacturers get to conduct their own trials, and they report on the results however they like. Since they have conflicts of interest, it’s important that independent researchers analyze their data.
The researchers of this study did just that: Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults
One of the researchers was Dr. Peter Doshi, who we heard from earlier. As already mentioned, this study, which analyzed Pfizer and Moderna vaccine trials, showed that “serious adverse events” occurred at a rate of about 1 in 800.13 “Serious adverse events” were events of the highest concern, and usually required hospitalization.
As already mentioned, this is much more common than for other vaccines, where rates are ~1 or 2 per million vaccinated.
In past years, 1 in 800 would have been more than enough to take a vaccine off the market; in 1976 an influenza vaccine was pulled from the market because of a 1 in 100,000 rate of Guillain-Barré syndrome.
These results raise concerns that mRNA vaccines are associated with more harm than initially estimated at the time of emergency authorization.
Do the risks outweigh the benefits?
Crucially, their analysis found that for both vaccines, the risk of AESIs, or “adverse events of special interest,” was higher than the amount by which they reduced risk of COVID-19 hospitalization:
In the Moderna trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs (15.1 per 10,000 participants) was higher than the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group (6.4 per 10,000 participants).
In the Pfizer trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs (10.1 per 10,000) was higher than the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group (2.3 per 10,000 participants).
Now here’s a study that looked at COVID vaccine trials in children, by Dr. Christine Stabell Benn who we heard from earlier: Overall Health Effects of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines in Children and Adolescents A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
From the RCTs in children aged 6 months to 15(17) years, neither of the mRNA vaccines had a beneficial effect on overall health, assessed as the incidence of SAEs, Severe AEs, RTIs, and other organ-specific diseases.
“RCTs” are randomized controlled trials, “SAEs” are serious adverse events, “Severe AEs” are severe adverse events, and “RTIs” stands for respiratory tract infections.
They found that “Both mRNA vaccines were associated with increased risk of severe AEs in older children.”14 And in younger children, “mRNA vaccines were associated with a nearly 3-fold increased risk of LRTI, including a nearly 3-fold increase in the risk of RSV.”
“LRTI” stands for lower respiratory tract infections. “RSV” is respiratory syncytial virus.
So the COVID mRNA was making some children more susceptible to lower respiratory tract infections. It sounds like this could be the result of vaccine non-specific effects, as Dr. Benn discussed earlier.
Interestingly, this study found that those who were “up-to-date” on the latest booster actually had a higher incidence of COVID infection compared to those that were not “up-to-date.” So there are clearly things we do not understand here.
Are trial results reliable?
It should be mentioned that these analyses were based on data from trials that were conducted by the vaccine manufacturers themselves.15
But clearly they have conflicts of interest.
This report from the British Medical Journal, reports that a whistleblower saw fraudulent and irregular practices, like falsifying data and prematurely unblinding trial participants, during Pfizer’s pivotal phase III vaccine trial.
And even when there isn’t overt fraud, companies can design trials to produce favorable results for themselves: more here and here.
If these were the safety signals present in trials that were conducted by the vaccine manufacturers, what would it have looked like if an impartial party had conducted the trials?
Studies showing harms from COVID-19 vaccines
Two important notes about reading studies
In today’s political climate, it is perilous for a scientist or doctor to be seen as “anti-vax.” For this reason, when you see scientific papers related to vaccine injury, it may sometimes seem like the authors go out of their way to praise the vaccines, sometimes even stating things that do not agree with their own data (more on this here).16
It is for this reason that one should always focus on the data of the studies, more than how the authors of a paper editorialize and describe their results.
If you do this, you will be way ahead of what even most doctors do, who often don’t go beyond reading the Abstract or Conclusion sections of papers, if they read papers at all.17
I will sometimes mention that a scientific paper is published in a “prestigious” journal. In reality, the process by which papers get accepted into journals is highly flawed, and studies published in the “best” journals are not necessarily better than ones in “lower tier” journals.18 However, I sometimes mention prestige of journals just to illustrate that these studies are not “fringe.”
We’ll now go into the litany of studies showing harms from COVID-19 vaccines.
Blood clots in the eyes
This study was published in Nature, a prestigious science journal.
They found that “risk of retinal vascular occlusion,” aka blood clots in the eye retina, “increased significantly after the first and second doses of BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 in a 2-year period.”
Specifically, “The overall risk of retinal vascular occlusion in the vaccinated cohort was 2.19 times higher than that in the unvaccinated cohort at 2 years.”
Retinal vascular occlusion is potentially serious and can lead to visual disturbances or loss of vision.
Changes in women’s menstruation
This study was published in Science, one of the most prestigious science journals. They found:
In postmenopausal women, the risk of unexpected vaginal bleeding (i.e., postmenopausal bleeding) in the 4 weeks after COVID-19 vaccination was increased two- to threefold, compared to a prevaccination period.
They state that “it seems probable that both pre- and postmenopausal women are at increased risk of unexpected vaginal bleeding after COVID-19 vaccination.”
This study also found menstrual irregularities in vaccinated women. They reported:
…approximately 50–60% of reproductive-age women who received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine reported menstrual cycle irregularities, regardless of the type of administered vaccine. The occurrence of menstrual irregularities seems to be slightly higher (60–70%) after the second dose.
Effect on exercise capacity
This study looked at how athletes responded to getting “boosted” with the Pfizer vaccine. They measured VO₂ max before and after booster dosing. VO₂ max is a measure of aerobic capacity; having a higher VO₂ max generally means you’re more fit.
Here’s what they found:
In our study, we found a statistically significant decrease in VO2max 1 week after booster vaccination with BNT162b2 mRNA. A clinically relevant decrease was found in 19% of subjects. We did not observe any major side effects from this vaccination.
More specifically they found a 2.7% decrease in VO₂ max after vaccination. In 8 (19%) of the athletes, they found a “clinically relevant” decrease of 8.6% or more.
They found other side effects in some participants: 1 out of 42 had heart palpitations. 4 out of 42 had chest pain; that’s close to 10% of the participants. More here:
Constant boosting could lead to “immune tolerance”
When the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine gets taken up by our cells, it makes the cells produce something called spike protein. The body is then supposed to make antibodies against spike protein.
However, too much of this can backfire.
This paper came out last year in the journal Vaccines: IgG4 Antibodies Induced by Repeated Vaccination May Generate Immune Tolerance to the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein
They reviewed recent studies which found abnormally high levels of a type of antibody, IgG4, in people who got two or more mRNA vaccine doses. They stated that an increase of IgG4 antibody levels may promote an “immune tolerance” mechanism (see footnote 5) that could promote SARS-CoV2 infection:
Emerging evidence suggests that the reported increase in IgG4 levels detected after repeated vaccination with the mRNA vaccines may not be a protective mechanism; rather, it constitutes an immune tolerance mechanism to the spike protein that could promote unopposed SARS-CoV2 infection and replication by suppressing natural antiviral responses.
Increased IgG4 could also lead to other serious issues:
Increased IgG4 synthesis due to repeated mRNA vaccination with high antigen concentrations may also cause autoimmune diseases, and promote cancer growth and autoimmune myocarditis in susceptible individuals.
We’ve started to see evidence of immune tolerance. For example, as mentioned earlier, this study found that those who were “up-to-date” on the latest booster actually had a higher incidence of COVID-19 infection compared to those that were not “up-to-date”:
The cumulative incidence of COVID-19 was lower in the “not up-to-date” than the “up-to-date” state.
And this study in mice found that multiple vaccine boosters negatively impacted immune response:
Mechanistically, we confirmed that extended vaccination with RBD boosters overturned the protective immune memories by promoting adaptive immune tolerance.
“RBD” stands for the receptor binding domain of the spike protein. The kind of vaccine these mice got were ones that targeted that specific segment of the spike protein.
Specifically, extended vaccination not only fully impaired the amount and the neutralizing efficacy of serum RBD-specific antibodies, but also shortened the long-term humoral memory.
“Humoral memory” refers to the kind of immune “memory” that’s provided by antibodies.19
Heart injuries
Our health agencies have acknowledged that heart issues like myocarditis or pericarditis can occur as result of the COVID vaccines. It seems to disproportionately affect boys and young men. But how forthright have health agencies been about this condition?
This study found that the incidence of myopericarditis in young men was around 1 in 2700, or 1 in 1900, depending on the age group. They said:
The true incidence of myopericarditis is markedly higher than the incidence reported to US advisory committees.
More on this study can be found in this short video.
This study found similar incidences of myocarditis (1 in 2680) after a second dose, for this demographic.
But sometimes one can get myocarditis from COVID-1920; don’t we have to weigh this risk with the risks of infection? Absolutely. But the vaccines don’t prevent infection anyway, and to our knowledge, don’t prevent myocarditis from infection either. Plus, it’s likely that myocarditis attributed to COVID-19 is way overcounted.
Moreover, especially for younger age groups, which generally have exceptionally good COVID-19 outcomes, the risk of heart issues from the vaccines may be higher than from infection, according to this study published in the journal Nature Medicine.21 This paper agrees, and highlights the need for risk-benefit analyses for different groups.22
And yet the CDC still recommends boosters for young people, and booster shots are still mandated at many schools and universities.
Subclinical heart injuries
It gets worse if we look at subclinical myocarditis, when there is damage to the heart that doesn’t manifest in obvious symptoms. Subclinical damage is still potentially serious, since heart tissue has extremely limited capacity to repair, so any damage to the heart could potentially lead to serious issues down the road.
This study found that 7/202 boys, or 3.5%, appeared to have either overt or subclinical myocarditis after Pfizer vaccination. For more on this study from a cardiologist’s point of view, see this.
This study found about 40/777 (5.1%) had elevated troponin levels23, a marker for heart injury, after booster vaccination. Of those, 22 (2.8%) were “adjudicated” as myocardial injury from the vaccine. That’s about 1 in 35. That’s not that rare.
Surprisingly they found that injury was more frequent in women compared to men. And the median age of participants was 37 years of age, so this was not even in the highest risk group (young males). Moreover, this was likely a conservative estimate.24
Long term outcomes for the heart injured
The CDC has said that vaccine-induced myocarditis is “mild” and short-lived, but is that backed up by studies that track long term outcomes?
This study from the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, followed up on kids at least 90 days since myocarditis onset:
…consistent with the few published case series of myocarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination, we observed that nearly half of patients (71/151) with follow-up cardiac MRIs had residual late gadolinium enhancement, suggestive of myocardial scarring.
So about half the kids had scars on their hearts. Will this lead to other issues like arrhythmias, heart failures, etc. down the road? We don’t know.
Even among the kids that were categorized as “fully or probably fully recovered,” 28% still had “patient restrictions on physical activity” at the time of their last health-care provider follow up. 21% were still taking some kind of medication for their heart. It’s strange to consider these kids “fully or probably fully recovered.”
Among those not considered “recovered,” 48% still had restrictions on physical activity at the time of their last health-care provider follow up, and 51% were still taking medications for their heart condition.
This study from a major cardiology journal followed up on teens up to 1 year since vaccine-induced myocarditis diagnosis, and found that 56% still had “features of myocarditis.” And 2 out of 3 still had “abnormal findings.”
And according to this study, 54.8 % of patients diagnosed with vaccine-associated myocarditis reported ongoing symptoms at 6 months. Interestingly, females were significantly more likely to have ongoing symptoms.
Death from vaccine-induced injuries
It’s likely that vaccine-induced myocarditis can sometimes lead to unexpected death. In this study, researchers performed autopsies on 25 people who had died unexpectedly within 20 days of vaccination. In 5 of them, “vaccine-induced myocardial inflammation” was “the likely or possible cause of death.”
All 5 of them had died within 7 days following vaccination. None had SARS-CoV-2 infection prior to vaccination; nasopharyngeal swabs were negative in all cases.25
Thus, myocarditis can be a potentially lethal complication following mRNA-based anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.26
Interestingly, the cases were between the ages of 46-75, and 3 out of the 5 were women; this is not the demographic that’s considered the highest risk for vaccine-induced myocarditis.
This study did a review of autopsy findings in deaths following COVID vaccination.
A total of 240 deaths (73.9%) were independently adjudicated as directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.
And:
The most implicated organ system in COVID-19 vaccine-associated death was the cardiovascular system (53%), followed by the hematological system (17%), the respiratory system (8%), and multiple organ systems (7%). Three or more organ systems were affected in 21 cases. The mean time from vaccination to death was 14.3 days. Most deaths occurred within a week from last vaccine administration.
Long COVID-like symptoms from the vaccine
A small subset of people who get vaccinated experience symptoms similar to long COVID27. These people develop symptoms like fatigue, myalgia, neuropathy, tremors, brain fog, tachycardia (extremely elevated heart rate) at rest, etc. in the absence of infection.
According to this study, these people often have severe symptoms. In some cases, symptoms have lasted for years.
Interestingly, this study found that among the “statistically significant predictors of long COVID” were “two doses of COVID-19 vaccination”:
An observational paradox in our study was that the participants who took two doses of COVID-19 vaccination had higher odds of developing Long COVID.
This doesn’t mean that all people diagnosed with long COVID got it because of their vaccine; reports of long COVID happened even before the vaccine rollout. However, it’s quite possible that some people who have been diagnosed with long COVID actually have a closely related, vaccine-associated disease.
By the way, you’ll sometimes see media headlines claiming that the COVID vaccines reduce the risk of getting long COVID. These are based on shoddy information; for more on that, see the following footnote.28
Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome (TTS)
The CDC has acknowledged that adenovirus vector vaccines (like J&J) vaccines can cause thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS). TTS is a blood clotting disorder.
Other blood disorders
According to this recent study, “COVID-19 vaccination increased the risk of hematologic abnormalities.”
Incidence rates of hematologic abnormalities in the vaccination group 3 months after vaccination were significantly higher than those in the nonvaccinated group: 14.79 vs. 9.59 (P<.001) for nutritional anemia, 7.83 vs. 5.00 (P<.001) for aplastic anemia, and 4.85 vs. 1.85 (P<.001) for coagulation defects.
There was no risk difference between mRNA vaccines and viral vector vaccines (like J&J).
Guillain-Barré Syndrome, Bell’s palsy
The CDC has acknowledged that COVID-19 vaccines can cause Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), a disorder in which the body’s immune system damages nerve cells, causing muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis. The CDC says it’s “largely been observed among people ages 50 years and older.”
Bell’s palsy is a condition that causes temporary facial paralysis. According to this and this, COVID-19 vaccination is associated with higher rates of Bell’s palsy.
Seizures in children
This FDA study found an association between COVID vaccines and seizures in young children:
In the primary analysis, seizures/convulsions met the statistical threshold for a signal in children aged 2- 4 years following BNT162b2 vaccination in all three databases, and in children aged 2-5 years following mRNA-1273 vaccination in two of the three databases.
There were several statements in this paper, however, that were questionable. For more on that, see this video from Dr. Mobeen Syed MD.
Other injuries
There’s evidence that the FDA and CDC are not doing enough to research or detect safety signals.
Recall how Dr. Gregory Poland said that the CDC was not interested in studying the link between the COVID-19 vaccines and tinnitus.
And in this paper, which we discussed earlier, they mentioned:
In July 2021, the FDA reported detecting four potential adverse events of interest: pulmonary embolism, acute myocardial infarction, immune thrombocytopenia, and disseminated intravascular coagulation following Pfizer’s vaccine based on medical claims data in older Americans.
But apparently the FDA has not followed up on this: “FDA stated it would further investigate the findings but at the time of our writing has not issued an update.”
There are other adverse events that the CDC or FDA have not been interested in. But luckily, we have case reports.
Case reports are sometimes dismissed as “mere anecdotes” that are inferior to larger studies. However, this is misguided. Case reports can go deep into individual cases, and include information that gets lost in larger studies, which just present summary statistics.
This spreadsheet compiled by Ashmedai, contains thousands of vaccine-associated injury case reports. Note that this list was compiled by a Substacker (no offense to Substackers), instead of, say, the FDA, whose budget is $8.4 billion, and whose mission it is to “help the public get the accurate, science-based information they need.”
I’ll just list a small sample of the case studies here. This is not to suggest that all of these were definitively caused by a COVID vaccine. However, keep in mind that if a case report exists, it usually means that a physician thought that COVID vaccination might have played a role in the patient’s symptoms; enough for them to take the time to write a case report and submit it somewhere to get published.
Strokes
Pulmonary embolisms
MIS-C
Multiple sclerosis
For more on the possible mechanism here, see this video: 2 Cases of Multiple Sclerosis after mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine (Discussion of Mechanism)
Thyroid issues
Skin issues
Alopecia
Liver issues
Liver injury and cytopenia after BNT162b2 COVID‐19 vaccination in an adolescent
Severe de novo liver injury after Moderna vaccination – not always autoimmune hepatitis
Musculoskeletal disorders
Correlation between COVID-19 vaccination and inflammatory musculoskeletal disorders
Musculoskeletal Sequelae following COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination: A Case Report
Inflammatory arthritis
New-onset inflammatory arthritis after COVID-19 vaccination: A systematic review
New Onset of Inflammatory Arthritis Following Moderna COVID-19 Vaccination
New-onset type 1 diabetes
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Some of these symptoms may represent types of autoimmunity. For more on that, see: Insights into new-onset autoimmune diseases after COVID-19 vaccination
How are so many harms possible?
How is it possible that the vaccine could cause such a diverse array of symptoms?
The vaccine can go into vital organs
You’ll often see media articles claiming that the vaccine only stays near the injection site.
This is not true. We have evidence that it can circulate widely and go into various different organs.
This study from the prestigious journal Nature, showed that mRNA vaccine could be found in the hearts of those who have been vaccinated.
“LV” and “RV” are the left and right ventricles of the heart, respectively. As you can see, mRNA was detected in the hearts of some individuals. In one individual, it was found even as late as 19 days after the last dose of their vaccine.
This corroborated an earlier study, which found mRNA vaccine in the hearts of mice that had been vaccinated. See this graph from their supplementary materials:
This shows COVID-19 mRNA vaccine found in heart tissue of the mice; the higher the “spike gene copies/β-actin,” the higher the amount of mRNA vaccine was found.29
And according to documents that Pfizer submitted to the Japanese health authorities, the lipid nanoparticles that encase the mRNA vaccines, can end up all over the place, including the liver, spleen, ovaries:
Spike protein is harmful
The mRNA vaccines encode for a protein called the “spike protein.” The mRNA vaccines are designed to be taken up by our cells, and make those cells “express” or produce spike protein.
Unfortunately, spike protein itself is not benign. There are multiple studies showing that spike protein itself is harmful:
SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Impairs Endothelial Function via Downregulation of ACE 2
Here, researchers created a “pseudovirus” that was surrounded by SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins, but did not contain any actual virus. When hamsters inhaled the pseudovirus, it damaged their lungs and vascular endothelial cells (the inner lining of arteries, veins, or capillaries).
The S1 protein of SARS-CoV-2 crosses the blood-brain barrier in mice
The S1 subunit of the spike protein was able to cross the blood-brain barrier in mice, at least when injected intravenously.
The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein alters barrier function in 2D static and 3D microfluidic in-vitro models of the human blood-brain barrier
This study used an advanced in vitro model of the human blood-brain barrier to show that the spike protein promoted loss of barrier integrity, i.e., poked holes in the blood brain barrier.
The SARS-COV-2 Spike protein disrupt human cardiac pericytes function through CD147-receptor-mediated signaling: a potential non-infective mechanism of COVID-19 microvascular disease
The spike protein binds to cells in the heart called pericytes, which line the small vessels of the heart. This triggers a cascade of changes which disrupt cell function, and leads to inflammation.
SARS-CoV-2 spike protein S1 induces fibrin(ogen) resistant to fibrinolysis: implications for microclot formation in COVID-19
The S1 subunit of spike can interact with proteins in our blood to cause excessive blood clotting (hypercoagulation), which could “interfere with blood flow.”
Non-Receptor-Mediated Lipid Membrane Permeabilization by the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein S1 Subunit
The S1 subunit of spike can essentially poke holes in cell membranes.
Media articles consistently say that the spike protein is “harmless,” but we now have plenty of studies suggesting otherwise.
More on the spike protein can be found here:
Even if spike protein were not harmful, the fact that mRNA vaccine can go all over the body is enough to be concerned.
That’s because cells expressing any foreign protein on its surface can get targeted by the immune system, regardless of whether that protein is harmful by itself or not. If the cells expressing the foreign protein happen to be in tissues or organs that have limited capacity for repair, like in the heart of brain, the damage can be catastrophic.
Spike protein can remain in the body for a long time
As mentioned, the COVID-19 vaccines work by getting the body’s cells to produce spike protein, but this spike protein is supposed to get cleared quickly from the body.
Unfortunately, sometimes it can last for many months.
This study looked at people who had long COVID-like symptoms from the vaccine. Most of them had a piece of the spike protein (the “S1 subunit”) persisting in some of their immune cells. Spike protein was found to remain for many months in some cases.
This does not just affect people with this specific vaccine injury. This study found spike protein on exosomes found in the blood of otherwise healthy people, for at least 4 months post-vaccination.
None of this was “expected.”
mRNA vaccine technology is not mature
You’ll often see claims that research on mRNA vaccine technology has been going on for decades.
Technically this is true. The problem is that most of that research was not about safety; it was focused on solving issues with mRNA delivery, increasing protein output, or achieving markers of efficacy.
The CEO of Moderna said mRNA tech was risky as recently as 2016
Even the CEO of Moderna said in 2016, that mRNA technology is “highly risky”:
Big pharma companies had tried similar work and abandoned it because it’s exceedingly hard to get RNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects.
And:
…those nanoparticles can lead to dangerous side effects, especially if a patient has to take repeated doses over months or years.
Are we to believe that these long-standing safety issues were solved by 2020?
What we are learning about mRNA technology
We are gradually finding out about mRNA technology, and the studies show that it still has a long way to go.
For example, mRNA was generally thought to only last on the order of hours or days, in the body. This was what the CDC website said in 2022:
They said, “Our cells break down mRNA from these vaccines and get rid of it within a few days after vaccination.”
They’ve quietly removed those statements; maybe because recent studies have shown that the mRNA (and spike protein) can last much longer than we’d anticipated.
A paper from the prestigious journal Cell, shows that the mRNA of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines could last at least 2 months post-vaccination. Two months was the limit of the study, so in some cases it may last even longer. More here.
Part of the reason this might be happening is that the mRNA in these vaccines is not like normal mRNA. Modifications were made; N1-Methylpseudouridine was used to replace the uridine molecules in the mRNA.30 The problem is, the modifications did too good of a job making this synthetic mRNA last in the body; no one knows what the long term impacts of this will be.
This study, published in the prestigious journal Nature, also found that this mRNA modification increased something called “frameshifting.” mRNA in our cells gets “read” by something in our cells called “ribosomes.” As ribosomes read and “translate” the mRNA, if frameshifting occurs, mRNA is “read” in the wrong way.
This can result in unexpected proteins getting made within our cells. The long term implications of this is completely unknown.
The findings also corroborate other studies that found unexpected proteins sometimes getting made as a result of the COVID-19 vaccines:
The COVID-19 vaccines also used a technique called “codon optimization,”31 in order to increase protein output. Though this shouldn’t change the amino acid sequence of the protein expressed (theoretically), it can affect how a protein folds, or its 3-D conformation (see here or here).32
It’s also theoretically possible that the vaccine mRNA can interact with our cell’s natural RNA in unexpected ways; this field is still in its infancy. I wrote about that here:
LNP technology is also immature
What about the technology used to encase and deliver the mRNA vaccines, the lipid nanoparticles (LNPs)?
Even this technology is immature. These novel lipids are highly inflammatory, untargeted, and we don’t even really understand how they work.
For more on that, see this:
By the way, remember when Dr. Christine Stabell Benn talked about non-specific effects of vaccines; how vaccines can affect the immune system in unexpected ways? Not only do we not understand the non-specific effects of mRNA vaccines; it turns out that the LNPs alone affect the immune system in unexpected ways.
According to this study, mice exposed to LNPs were more resistant to infection from influenza, but their resistance to a yeast33 decreased.
…the mRNA-LNP vaccine platform induces long-term unexpected immunological changes affecting both adaptive immune responses and heterologous protection against infections.
This illustrates how little we understand about how LNPs interact with the immune system.34
The pharmaceutical industry cannot be trusted
Big Pharma is not your friend. More on this can be found in this interview with Dr. Peter Gøtzsche35: Big pharma, the corruption of science, and millions of unnecessary deaths
There’s also this podcast with Dr. John Abramson (key takeaways here), author of Overdosed America.
And this article by Dr. Jason Fung is an excellent introduction into the way in which money from pharmaceutical companies influences doctors.
Pfizer
Pfizer has paid some of the biggest fines in corporate history, for bribing doctors, making false claims, etc. Take a look at the past violations from Pfizer and its subsidiaries: here.
As mentioned earlier, The British Medical Journal (BMJ), a prestigious medical journal, released this report from a whistleblower. According to the report, a research contractor for the Pfizer vaccine trial found that the company had falsified data and prematurely unblinded trial participants, among other infractions. Several other employees for the contractor corroborated the findings.
The whistleblower submitted dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails, to the FDA, but the FDA did nothing:
Pfizer also quietly gives money to consumer, medical, and public health organizations, to influence decisions that will affect their bottom line. Often organizations do not disclose the funding. See this from investigative reporter Lee Fang:
Johnson & Johnson
J&J has paid $70 million to settle charges for bribing doctors.
They’ve also been sued for baby powder tainted with asbestos. But they used a quirk of Texas state law to spin off a new subsidiary called LTL, in order to dump its avalanche of lawsuits onto it.
More violations from Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries can be found here.
Moderna
Moderna, formerly known as ModeRNA, is relatively new. At the time of the COVID vaccine rollout, its only commercial product was its COVID mRNA vaccine.
Before that, Moderna was in danger of hemorrhaging investors. From 2016 right up until the emergence of COVID-19, Moderna was in turmoil, its stock was slumping, all while they were shedding key executives, top talent, and losing partners and investors. Their mRNA technology had had persistent safety problems.
There was little, if any, evidence that those once-well-recognized safety concerns were addressed prior to the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The emergence of COVID-19 saved Moderna.
More recently, investigative reporters detailed how Moderna has worked with former law enforcement and public health officials to monitor and influence vaccine policy:
Moderna works closely with social media platforms, government agencies and news websites to shut down claims they consider “misinformation.” Often the veracity of the claims are not disputed, but are automatically deemed “misinformation” if they might encourage vaccine hesitancy.
The FDA and the CDC
What about our health regulators? How trustworthy are they?
The FDA does not test drugs themselves. Drug manufacturers get to test their own drugs, and submit their results to the FDA for review:
The FDA used to be entirely funded by taxpayer money, but today nearly half of the FDA’s budget comes from the very companies it is supposed to regulate.
FDA advisers can accept money from pharmaceutical companies.
Drug companies can buy access to meetings where they can meet with FDA officials and possibly influence them.
Roughly 32% of drugs approved by the FDA between 2001-2010 were later found to have a safety issue, according to a Yale-led study. The FDA has had a history of approving unsafe drugs, and all signs point to the problem getting worse.
The FDA (and other institutions) can make journalists compliant.
The FDA has promised “full transparency” on Covid vaccines. And yet, a group of more than 30 scientists and doctors had to sue the FDA to get it to release all the data and documents it relied upon to license Pfizer’s Covid vaccine. The FDA’s response? It asked a federal judge for 55 years to fully release the data. Then it kept delaying the release of the data: more here, here, and here.
According to a survey, 18.4 % of FDA scientists had been “asked, for non-scientific reasons, to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information or their conclusions in a FDA scientific document.”
We already mentioned Maddie de Garay earlier. Her life-altering vaccine injuries were ignored by the FDA, as well as the CDC and NIH.
When the FDA was deciding on whether to approve Pfizer for children, a voting member of the FDA advisory committee admitted that we wouldn’t know how safe the Pfizer Covid vaccine was until we started administering it. His exact words were: "We're never gonna learn about how safe the vaccine is unless we start giving it. That's just the way it goes." Video here.
When the FDA and CDC advised boosters for Omicron, data indicated that the booster had an effectiveness of 37%, but they approved it anyway, even though in the past they had said they would not accept vaccine efficacy of less than 50%. It was also unclear a vaccine was needed at all, since Omicron was much milder than previous strains.
In fact, two of FDA’s scientific advisers reportedly resigned because they disagreed with the Biden administration’s booster plans (more here).
There’s a “revolving door” between Pharma and regulatory agencies. If regulators can leave the FDA for high-paying Pharma jobs, they are incentivized to go easy on pharmaceutical companies in order to get that great Pharma job later.
Exhibit A:
Dr. Robert Califf, the current FDA Chief, has made millions as a consultant in the pharmaceutical industry and holds millions more in Pharma investments (see here or here).
Like the FDA, the CDC receives money from companies. This is often under the guise of “public-private partnerships.” Here’s a list of their partners. The list not only includes pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Gilead, but also Facebook, Google, McDonalds and Coca-Cola.
Just like with other regulatory agencies, there’s a revolving door:
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which sets the U.S. immunization schedules, is full of members that own vaccine patents, or receive money from vaccine manufacturers. More here, for an overview on conflicts of interests, and even accounts of data manipulation.
The Office of Inspector General, which is responsible for reducing fraud of our regulatory agencies, found that the CDC often didn’t comply with its own ethics requirements (see here and here).
A Congressional Government Reform Committee report criticized the FDA and CDC for routinely allowing scientists with conflicts of interest to serve on the advisory committees that influence vaccine policy.
In 2016, The Hill published a letter by more than a dozen senior CDC scientists charging that the agency was participating in research fraud.
In 2010, there was a scandal where Congress found that the CDC had deliberately manipulated documents about the safety of Washington D.C. drinking water.
The CDC seems to have a cozy relationship with Pfizer.
Large amounts of data have not been made public for fear that “they might be misinterpreted as showing the vaccines being ineffective.”
Many of these problems are found in regulatory agencies all over the globe. For more on that see this, or the “Global health organizations” section here.
The reality of science and “consensus”
There is no “consensus” here
When it comes to COVID vaccine safety, we can’t say that there’s a “consensus”; we’ve seen that there are plenty of experts who do not agree with the prevailing narrative on COVID vaccine safety.
We’ve also seen that companies like Pfizer and Moderna fund and influence medical and health organizations, and the media. So the dominant narratives out there are often shaped by pharmaceutical companies.
Dissident viewpoints have also gotten censored, which affects what other experts think on the topic. After all, scientists and doctors, just like any other group, are susceptible to groupthink.
Besides, the “consensus” is often wrong
Even when there appears to be a consensus, the consensus is often wrong.
There have many times in the history of science when the majority or “consensus” was wrong. Carl Woese, a biologist who revolutionized the fields of microbiology and evolution, initially had a reputation among his peers as a “crank.”36 But today, his findings are considered textbook orthodoxy. More here:
Then there was Stanley Prusiner, who discovered prions. For decades, his work was subjected to ridicule. Prusiner went on to win the Nobel Prize for his discovery.
See this for more examples:
The Nobel Prize committee has made some mistakes too. In 1949, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Dr. António Egas Moniz for pioneering the lobotomy. This is a bit embarrassing for them now:
The reality of science
Scientists or doctors are not immune to things like careerism, groupthink, or greed. The publication of scientific studies is faith-based; it’s done almost entirely on the honor system. Researchers are taken for their word that they haven’t fabricated data or committed fraud, and it’s rare that their work gets checked up on.
In a world in which researchers need to “publish or perish,” this can be a powerful incentive to commit fraud.
For a particularly egregious series of incidents where both researchers and scientific journals were covering up mistakes for decades, see this:
And for how science has been corporatized and turned into “Big Science,” read this: How science has been corrupted or see this.
Science and medical journals
It doesn’t help that medical journals have become dependent on the pharmaceutical industry for their survival. For more, read this: Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies
That was written by Dr. Richard Smith, former editor at the prestigious medical journal The BMJ. It starts with a quote from Richard Horton, editor of the prestigious medical journal the Lancet: “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”
Science is messy
Science is extremely messy. Studies often conflict with each other in their findings.
Take this example, where hundreds of biologists analyzed the same data set but came up with drastically different conclusions:
And most people, even so-called “experts,” think that results of scientific studies are more definitive than they actually are: An illusion of predictability in scientific results: Even experts confuse inferential uncertainty and outcome variability
Why don’t we hear about this in the media?
Why haven’t we seen more of this information in the media?
Censorship, and the merger of state, media, and tech
The pharmaceutical industry spends an enormous amount of advertising money in media:
This obviously means that those media companies do not want to do or say anything to drive their advertisement money away. For an account for what that looks like from a journalist’s perspective, read this.
There’s also what journalist Sharyl Attkisson calls “Astroturf,” which is when political, corporate, and special interests disguise themselves to publish ads and articles to smear or “debunk” those who disagree with them. Her TED talk from 2015 is still highly relevant today:
By the way, it seems like Attkisson herself was smeared by Wikipedia.
But we should take everything on Wikipedia with a huge grain of salt, because even one of Wikipedia’s co-founders, Larry Sanger, no longer trusts Wikipedia:
And see this, on Moderna’s sprawling media operations, aimed at discrediting and shutting down skeptics in independent media.
Then there’s The Trusted News Initiative (TNI), which includes organizations like the BBC, Facebook, Twitter, Associated Press, Reuters, Washington Post, etc.:
The TNI was originally started to battle “disinformation which threatens human life or disrupts democracy during elections,” but since the era of COVID it’s been weaponized to stamp out any dissent from mainstream COVID narratives, and vilify individual scientists and doctors (example here).
What about “fact checkers”? These are often written by poorly trained people with little to no science knowledge. I previously wrote about the abysmal quality of fact-check articles here:
Anatomy of the Reuters fact-check article
The ubiquitous Reuters fact-check article You’ve probably come across Reuters “fact-check” articles at some point. They frequently trend on Twitter or appear near the top of google searches whenever you search for anything remotely controversial. Reuters, the news agency, has been around since 1851, but their fact-checking initiative only
Meanwhile, mainstream news corporations, which are increasingly becoming less relevant, want to convince you that misinformation on social media is what we need to worry about:
But perhaps it’s more worrying that all the major news networks parrot propaganda from powerful interests, not matter whether they’re FOX or ABC or NBC.
Propaganda in the past
When you see how corporate media constantly tries to make us panic, or mislead us, or “nudge” us, or frequently back tracks to the point where supreme court justices believe wildly false claims about COVID, we end up doing absurd things, it can seem like we are living in an era of unprecedented artificial paid-for reality.
But there are historical precedents for what we are experiencing now.
In his 1928 classic Propaganda, Edward L. Bernays explains how governments, corporations, and foundations are capable of manipulating people en masse in all areas of life, including war, politics, education, and medicine:
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
During World War I, America was bombarded with propaganda in order to enlist people into the army. The media spread stories of the Germans (“Huns”) impaling babies, cutting off the breasts of Red Cross nurses, and crucifying a Canadian. The German army was ruthless, but they had done none of those things.
During World War II, The New York Times consistently downplayed the Holocaust, and news of Hitler’s “final solution” was hidden from readers (more here).
How do governments spread propaganda? Sometimes journalists are put on the payroll of the government. But often it’s subtler than that.
Frank Snepp used to be an analyst at the CIA, and during the 1970s he revealed how the CIA would circulate disinformation in news outlets like The New York Times:
When we, the CIA, wanted to circulate disinformation on a particular issue—this information is not necessarily a lie, it may be a half truth—we would pick out a journalist, I would go do the briefing and hope that he would put that information in print. We would go after these gentlemen and I would be directed to cultivate them, to spend time with them, to socialize with them and slowly but surely try to gain their confidence by dropping out valid information, information which was true. And then I would drop in into a conversation the data that we wanted to get across, which might not be true. We were interested in targeting those reporters who can get their material in the New York Times or Los Angeles Times and so forth.
Remember the supposed “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq? The New York Times was consistently a conduit for propaganda coming from the Bush administration and U.S. security state (more here). Meanwhile, color codes by Homeland Security served to elicit fear in the public, all while our civil liberties were eroded with The Patriot Act.
By the way, have you noticed how we lurch from crisis to crisis?
If members of the government have been behind the manipulation of the public in the past, why wouldn’t it happen now?
Where to get better information
Given that powerful interests propagandize the public and censor information in the mainstream media, where can one go for better information?
Though this will obviously be biased, I’ve started a list of links to independent media outlets:
I don’t necessarily agree with everything in those sources, but they generally do a better job than most corporate media outlets. Obviously this is my opinion, so in the end you need to do your own research.
Oh, and don’t listen to those patronizing messages we sometimes see in the media that try to discourage the public from doing their own research:
You should, absolutely, do your own research:
On doing your own research
In my last article, I reviewed some of the top arguments used by sophists and midwits. I saved the last argument for a separate article, because it’s the one that drives me the craziest. This argument says that people shouldn’t do their own research, at least when it comes to “complex topics” like science.
If you liked this article, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or you can buy me a coffee.
These are also not very good at stimulating the immune system and usually require several doses. They usually contain an “adjuvant” which is an ingredient, usually highly toxic, that can elicit a noticeable immune response.
Intriguingly, the negative effect of the DTP vaccine was strongest for girls.
Like the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID vaccines
The immune system is divided up into the “adaptive” immune system and the “innate” immune system. The adaptive immune system involves antibodies, B cells, and T cells, and is capable of developing a “memory” of past diseases. The innate system was not considered to involve memory, but more recently it’s been shown that they also have a kind of “memory.” This memory of the innate immune system is called “trained” immunity. It’s been speculated that the non-specific effects of vaccines are due to the “memory” of the innate immune system. There is still a lot that’s unknown here.
Tolerance is when the body no longer mounts as much of an immune response to something after repeated exposures. Allergy shots are based on this.
You may hear factcheckers say that this claim is “misleading” because part of the FDA’s decision to give authorization for this booster was also based on a small human trial from a “similar booster” that targeted BA.1. You can decide for yourself whether that was good enough, but it should be made clear that the booster that was authorized was a different product; the authorized booster was a bivalent mRNA vaccine that has mRNA from the original strain plus the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants.
“Serious adverse events” were events that the companies classified as of the most concerning; usually something that leads to hospitalization.
Here he is referring to the localized immune system that lines our our nose, mouth, throat, lungs, etc. This includes barrier cells, mucus, proteins in the mucus that protect against infections, etc. More on that here.
And of course, some of his fears came true. The media now regularly paints him as a kook.
By the way, he is now co-chairman of REACT19, a “science-based nonprofit” offering support for those suffering from long-term COVID-19 vaccine adverse events.
This is in contrast to an active surveillance system, where people are actively sought out to solicit reports.
In the paper they report the rate as 12.5 in 10,000. This is the same as 1 in 800.
Part of the reason the older children suffered from more serious adverse events might have been because they received higher vaccine dose.
More precisely, usually the pharmaceutical company will hire a contractor to conduct the trial, but contractors, since they are paid by the pharma company, are incentivized to play nice with the company that has hired them.
This may even be a prerequisite for getting published in certain journals.
Most medical doctors don’t spend much time reading scientific papers, especially outside their immediate field. I don’t blame them for this by the way. They’re typically very busy and spend all day seeing patients, dealing with administrative duties, etc.
Just as an example: as a graduate student, biochemist Kary Mullis got a paper accepted into one of the most prestigious science journals, Nature. But by his own admission, that paper was sophomoric. Later, he invented PCR, which he would later win the Nobel Prize for. But initially his paper on PCR was rejected by the top science journals. Later in his autobiography he would go on to say that these experiences made him realize that there was “no one minding the store.”
This in contrast to the immune “memory” we have that’s due to T cells for example, or the “trained immunity” of our innate immune system (see footnote 4).
It’s quite possible that the incidence of myocarditis from COVID-19 is highly overblown however; see this from cardiologist Anish Koka, MD.
It showed that in men younger than 40 there’s a higher myocarditis rate with the Moderna vaccine compared to infection. And when we compare the rate of myocarditis from infection with dose 2 of the AstraZeneca vaccine and doses 2 and 3 of the Pfizer vaccine, it looks to be a tossup (info on dose 3 of AstraZeneca and Moderna was left out because there wasn’t enough data):
It gets worse, because the real rate of myocarditis under SARS-CoV-2 infection is likely lower than what’s here in pink, based on the methods used in this study. The rate of myocarditis cases from infection is calculated by taking the # of myocarditis cases attributed to COVID-19 and dividing it by the # of COVID-19 cases. But this paper is only counting people with documented COVID-19; aka people who got tested for SARS-CoV-2, etc. In reality, most people don’t get tested and often don’t know they’ve been infected. So the true # of COVID-19 cases is higher than what this study found, which means the true rate of myocarditis cases from infection is lower than what the graph in this paper reflects.
Specifically, they said, “Weighing post-vaccination myo/pericarditis against COVID-19 hospitalization during delta, our risk-benefit analysis suggests that among 12–17-year-olds, two-dose vaccination was uniformly favourable only in nonimmune girls with a comorbidity. In boys with prior infection and no comorbidities, even one dose carried more risk than benefit according to international estimates.’
Specifically they measured high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T, or hs-cTnT.
This is likely a conservative estimate of subclinical myocarditis because injuries were only attributed to the vaccine if everything else had been ruled out first. Moreover, this only looked at the marker for heart injury (elevated troponin levels) in people after days 3 and 4 of their vaccine dose. They observed that troponin levels fell between days 3 and 4. This should make us wonder what the levels were at day 1, when troponin was likely around its peak. If the study had looked at days 1 or 2, it might have found even more people with elevated troponin levels.
However, case 5 did detect low levels of human herpesvirus 6, so it was classified as “possible.” Case 3 was also classified as “possible”; no other cause for the inflammatory infiltration was found, but “the infiltrate was discrete and mainly observed in the pericardial fat.”
They state the following:
In general, a causal link between myocarditis and anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination is supported by several considerations: (A) a close temporal relation to vaccination; all cases were found dead within one week after vaccination, (B) absence of any other significant pre-existing heart disease, especially ischaemic heart disease or cardiomyopathy, (C) negative testing for potential myocarditis-causing infectious agents, (D) presence of a peculiar CD4 predominant T-cell infiltrate, suggesting an immune mediated mechanism.
Or post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC)
The studies that look at associations between long COVID and vaccination are hopelessly confounded. See Table 1 from this study, as an example. In wave 1 (2/2020-9/2020) when we had the “wild type” virus and no vaccine, there was a 48.1% chance of getting long COVID. By wave 3, most had had a second vaccine dose, and there was a 16.5% chance of getting long COVID. So unless we can disentangle the effects of different variants on long COVID risk, we can’t say that the vaccines helped reduce risk of long COVID.
They used RT-qPCR to quantify the amount of mRNA vaccine found in heart tissue. They call it “spike gene copies” because the mRNA vaccine encodes for the spike protein. It is “normalized” to something called a “housekeeping gene,” which is supposed to be a gene that is expressed at constant, steady levels; in this case β-actin. So we are looking at COVID-19 mRNA vaccine levels relative to the expression of this housekeeping gene.
This was done to bypass our cell’s natural systems for detecting and clearing foreign RNA.
Codon optimization is an alteration to mRNA that’s supposed to help produce more protein from the mRNA. The alterations are done in a way using “synonymous codon substitutions” that are supposed to, theoretically, not change the output amino acid sequence, aka translated protein.
See this paper for more on how the modifications to the mRNA might have led to unexpected consequences.
The yeast was Candida albicans.
This study also looked at how LNPs interacted with the immune system: The BNT162b2 vaccine’s empty lipid nanoparticle is able to induce an NF-κB response
To go more in depth, see his book Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime.
By the way, part of the reason Woese may have initially had a hard time convincing microbiologists of his work was that he was a physicist. It goes to show that paradigm-shifting work can sometimes come from outside a field. Another example of this is Francis Crick; he was trained as a physicist, and would go on to do groundbreaking work on the structure of DNA, along with James Watson.
This synthesis is great Joomi. Many thanks for all you've done making this information available and accessible.
This is amazing. we are fighting against the doctors college in Québec, an organisation reinfoquebec.ca, presented a very well written dossier to them and hundreds of doctors, with 60+ papers referenced.
The response was essentially this few lines
"The position of the College of Physicians on this question remains unchanged: these vaccines have saved lives, have greatly contributed to the end of the pandemic and are safe. We closely monitor the situation through studies, assessments, and findings made at regular intervals by INESSS and INSPQ."
My question is this: can we expect anything else from the people who are paid to push this narrative?