CV-19 Vaccines and Vaccine Safety

I picked up a number of readers during the epidemic who were happy to find someone who challenged the terrorist public health approach and tried to provide more accurate data and analysis across a number of issues.  This included pointing out pretty early on that the vaccines had limited effectiveness and at some point weren’t offering much protection even against serious disease.  But some of these readers got pretty annoyed when I refused to succumb to the “gene therapy, killing everyone” nonsense about CV-19 vaccines.  Sorry about that but the truth is the truth.  Here are a several studies related to vax effectiveness and safety.  But let me preface that by restating my general views about the CV-19 vaccines.

No one should have been forced to take them as a condition of working, going to school, getting health care or for any other reason.

They probably prevented some number of deaths among the elderly in particular.

Within a short period of time, effectiveness against infection drops to zero–those who are vaxed are as likely to get infected as those who don’t.  Effectiveness against serious disease or death also drops, but at a slower rate.  Boosters have a minimal impact on protection.

Immunity from an infection is at least as good as that from vax and appears to last longer.  Combined immunity appears somewhat stronger yet.

As with any product used by billions of people, there are some adverse events.  The rate of overall adverse events with the CV-19 events is not high, in fact is quite low.  There are some serious adverse events, including various heart issues like inflammation, and things like stroke.  Particularly for children and young people at low risk from CV-19, to me this suggests that there is no reason for them to be vaccinated or boosted.  But the best studies, done with very large claims and electronic medical record databases, do not find any evidence for widespread adverse events of any type.  And that is what the data say.  People like to ignore confounders like most vaxed people having also been infected and people who have been infected having higher rates of the same events supposedly attributable to the vax.  And people like Alex Berenson and Peter McCullough are running immense scams based on phony vax safety issues and making millions of dollars doing so.  Now on to the research.

Most of the CV-19 vaccines use full spike protein sequences, so it would not be surprising that they could cause some of the same longer term health effects that an infection does.  And this study suggests that there may in fact be a long-vax syndrome for a few people.   As with more serious and longer term consequences of an infection, it appears that “long vax” may be largely due to an immune system over-reaction.   (Science Article)

This study from Denmark was a nationwide cohort study of adverse events in the 28 days following the bivalent booster administration.  It found no association with any of 27 putative events, other than a possible link with myocarditis in a longer followup, which multiple other studies have found.  (BMJ Article)

A slightly lower risk of adverse events with the Moderna vaccine was found compared to the Pfizer one in this research covering over 6 million Medicare-covered adults, which was a little surprising to me only because as I recall other studies had found the opposite, which made sense because the Moderna vaccine had a higher dose.  Neither vaccine had a high rate of adverse events.  (JAMA Article)

This study among about 775 hospital employees looked at risk of heart inflammation following vaccination, by sex.  It found that there was an apparent association in 22 people, 20 of whom were women, but none developed any clinically relevant outcomes.  (Wiley Article)

This population study from Estonia compares vax-derived, infection-derived and combination immunity.  Those who had a prior infection were at lower risk during the Delta period, and somewhat higher risk during Omicron than those persons with no prior infection, probably because their infection was with a variant closer to Delta, although it is an odd finding.  Similarly, those who were vaxed had a higher risk of both infection and hospitalization than those with infection-derived immunity.  Natural immunity for the win!  And as usual, a hybrid immunity offered stronger protection during Delta, but not during Omicron.  In general, the results, as with other studies, suggest there was no compelling need to push population wide vax, especially for those already infected.  (Medrxiv Study)

Mixing vaccine types offered greater protection than using the same type vaccine, according to this study, likely because more segments of the virus may have been targeted.  (BMJ Article)