I Am Done With Coronamonomania, Part 4, Vax Safety Edition

This study from Norway comes to the conclusion that vaccinated persons are less like than unvaxed ones to have “long” covid symptoms and to have certain post-acute consequences, like blood clotting.   I don’t disbelieve this, but my major quibble is that once again there was inadequate addressing of the primary confounder–whether a person had a prior CV-19 infection.  What is useful about the study is that reminds us, especially those among us who are vax safety nuts, that a CV-19 infection often had the same supposed effects as being vaxed, but at a greater rate.  (Lancet Article)

Once again, a complete nothing burger of a study is used, or rather misused, by the vax safety nuts.  This time it is some complete minor league researchers hypothesizing that IF a certain amount of a particular chemical was added to mRNA vaccines, in a model, that’s right a model, of melanoma, there might have been some suggestion that maybe, just possibly, there was some enhanced risk.  The mechanism hypothesized by the authors has not been found in other extensive research on the biochemical in question.  Nothing to do with humans, no evidence that this has actually happened.  No real world research anywhere that suggests vaxed people have a higher rate of melanoma or cancer.  But by God, if a bunch of hacks can figure out a way to get some attention from the VSN community, then who cares about real evidence.  (IJBM Article)

This study from Japan appears to suggest a link between cancer deaths and CV-19 vax, but it actually doesn’t.  People who aren’t intensely involved in health care and don’t keep up treatment trends, but only look at raw data, often do not understand common effects.  Cancer is a great example.  Trends in prevention, diagnosis and treatment can impact mortality statistics in various ways.  Incidence of a disease is the number of new cases in a time period, typically a year.  Prevalence is the total number of cases existing at any one time.  Prevalence changes over time by incidence in a year, deaths in the cancer patients in that year, or cures.  Incidence can be impacted by prevention efforts–lung cancer being a prime example–incidence has plunged due to less smoking.  Prevalence has not fallen by as much, because at the same time there are new treatments that extend survival, sometimes even cure the cancer.  So the average lung cancer case is living longer.  That creates a temporary decline in mortality rates, unless the new treatment is actually curative.  Lymphoma is another good example.  New treatments have extended survival, dropping mortality for a time, but many multiple myeloma patients still eventually die. An improved diagnostic tool that leads to earlier detection may make incidence seem higher, but also may reduce mortality rates by allowing for earlier treatment.  All of this is a long-winded way of saying looking at mortality rates for cancer without accounting for prevention, diagnostic, and treatment changes over the same time period is essentially worthless.  And it doesn’t appear that this was done in this study, although the researchers did look at mortality by cancer, finding that only in a few did mortality appear to rise during the epidemic.  In others it declined.  It is not clear how the authors treated cancer patients who died with a CV-19 infection.  Cancer patients are more likely to die from a CV-19 infection due to weakened immune systems.  You would need to look at each case to decide if cancer or CV-19 was the cause of death.  Since the vast majority of the supposed excess cancer deaths were in the elderly, who also accounted for almost all CV-19 deaths, you can see the problem.  The other thing that is obvious is that there was no change in the number of cancers, which meant that any rate change was purely due to a population change and since a number of people did die of CV-19 in Japan, it is highly unlikely there was any real change in mortality rates.  This is further demonstrated by the very small number of supposed excess cancer deaths in relation to the population size.  No explanation given for why only a few cancers showed supposed (but actually non-existent) excess mortality.  As usual a lot of hypothesizing and no actual human data for what possible mechanism could have an mRNA vaccine cause a cancer death, particularly in such a short time period.  Cancer, especially today, typically takes an extended time to kill a person.   If the vaccines were responsible for the cancer types with “excess” mortality, were they also responsible for those with lower than expected mortality?   In short, this study is garbage and one way you know it is garbage is that all the studies it cites for a supposed vax/cancer link are garbage.  Disappointing that researchers from Japan would fall into the same bilge water.  (Cureus Article)

And the VSNs will totally disregard this study from the National Academy of Medicine which examined vax safety.  This 300-plus page report looked at every major adverse event alleged to be associated with vaccines and all the research that related to that event.  Out of 85 supposed harms, there were sufficient cases and associated research to reach even a tentative conclusion for only 20, and of those 20, in regard to 19 events the committee concluded it was unlikely there was any causative relationship.  The sole exception, myocarditis or heart inflammation, has been well-established by multiple pieces of research.  If you really want to understand vaccine safety research, read the entire report.    (NAM Report)

And here is another study on myocarditis and CV-19 vaccine, from South Korea.  It found that about an incidence of about 1 case in 100,000 vaccinees, mostly in young males.  One in 500,000 vaccinees had severe heart inflammation and there were 21 deaths, although the deaths could not all be definitively tied to the vaccines.  Please note that the rates of myocarditis in CV-19 infections is much higher and the study did not do an adequate job of ruling out the involvement of a CV-19 infection.  And just given background rates of myocarditis, some recent vaccinees would be expected to develop it, so that should have been taken into consideration.   (EHJ Article)

And no discussion of CV-19 would be complete without hearing from the CDC.  In this case CDC tried to debunk an association of the vax with sudden cardiac death in young people with data from one state-Oregon. This debunking has already occurred in much larger and better studies.  But as you might expect, the CDC found no association in this data.  Almost all the young people who died from sudden cardiac issues did so long after vaccination and in the three cases that were close to vaccination it appeared that other causes were clearly present.  I agree with the conclusion due to the prior research, but have a jaundiced view at this point of anything coming from the CDC.  (CDC Study)