The study, published by a science writer working with the David Hume foundation, has been discussing for days ago, according to which the deaths as a result of Covid vaccines would exceed those of any other vaccination campaign. But how are things?
A study published by Mario Menichella, science communicator engaged with the David Hume Foundation led by Luca Ricolfi, dedicated to adverse effects of vaccines. According to the study, deaths from Covid vaccines would exceed those of any previous vaccination campaign, with peaks among the very young. How are things?
The work of Menichella, a nuclear physicist, is very long and complex. No.This is not a study published in a scientific journal regulated by the mechanism of peer reviewing, i.e. the review by experts of the research topic. And we will see later that this has its importance.
According to Research, since the dead in the US reported to Vaers in the 2019-2020 flu campaign there were about 45 out of 170 million vaccinated (equal to 0.26 deaths per million inhabitants), the mortality from flu vaccines was about 0.26 deaths per million doses. Conversely, since the deaths reported in relation to Covid vaccines in the USA were, from 14 December 2020 to 19 February 2021 (about 2 months), 966 out of 41,977,401 doses administered, the incidence was about 23.0 cases per million doses. Therefore, the excess deaths produced by the 2 anti Covid Pfizer + Moderna vaccines are estimated at (23.0-0.26 =) 22.7 deaths per million doses administered.
But
so is the Vaers o Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System? the passive pharmacovigilance system managed in the US by the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and by the Food and Drug Administration.
Passive pharmacovigilance means that all reports of adverse events end up in Vaers they might be related to a vaccination. But, even if the reports are purged of the most blatantly false ones, the Cdc are very clear in the underline that reports of adverse events to Vaers following vaccination, including deaths, they don’t necessarily mean a vaccine caused a health problem, why the reports end up in that register
before any verification of an effective causal link, rather than mere temporal succession (Vaers, like other similar registers, is used to identify suspicious statistical trends that deserve to be investigated).
In other words, in Vaers there are reports of adverse events that occurred temporally after vaccination, and without any verification of whether those events were caused by vaccination. To take for granted that every post-vaccine death report to Vaers is a vaccine death, in short, a serious error of method.
To be precise, Menichella, in his work, attributes the above discovery to Angela Tsiang, chemical engineer in the front row, with the controversial Environmental Health Trust, even in the battle against the alleged harmful effects of 5G, which in turn would have said that she was inspired – in practice by copying it – from a item published last March, also in Italian version, on The Epoch Times, that the Butac anti-buffalo site describes as follows: It is a newspaper that we have already encountered in the past on Butac, a site known to be one of the most absurd containers of conspiracy theories. The authors of
Epoch Times
they believe in everything from chemtrails to Protocols of Zion. They have been spreading disinformation online for years. It is a newspaper linked to a Chinese religious movement, Falun Gong. The newspaper, also very close to Trump, is criticized not only by fact-checkers and debunkers, but also by other journalists (for example those of the New York Times, ed). They are among the outlets that have spread anti-vaccine theories, 9/11 hoaxes, Qanon-style conspiracy theories and so on.
By quickly scrolling through the bibliography of Menichella’s work, it turns out, moreover, that it composed largely of citations of sites and newspapers, rather than scientific publications, but also makes extensive use of works such as that of Steve Ohana and Alexandra Henrion-Caude, on the excess of deaths of young adults in Israel during the Covid crisis which – something that should perhaps have been reported in the notes – is withdrawn from publication on the Social Science Research Network (Ssrn), a pre-print research archive that belongs to the Elsevier publishing house.
Menichella then cites as a well-known vaccine expert
Robert Malone
, self-styled inventor of mRna vaccines, who, as recalled in Corriere Goffredo Buccini, is not only considered by the medical community a great diffuser of lies about Covid and vaccines that would induce tumors and infertility, but was also forced to downsize the news that he was “inventor of mRna vaccines”: the credit would go to biochemistry
Katalin Karik
(he then claimed to be his mentor, she claimed to have met him only once in 1997 …).
Among the cited is not even lacking Bret Weinstein, co-author of works with Malone (including some without foundation that the spike protein kills cells) e great paladin of Covid cures with ivermectin, a pesticide for horses not only useless against Covid, but potentially harmful.
The TrialSite News site also appears several times, whose advisory committee includes the aforementioned Malone e Pierre Kory, another proponent of ivermectin, which he defined the penicillin of Covid, as Scientific American recalled.
And, again, works of Josh Guetzkow and of Megan Redshaw published in Children’s Health Defense, whose president Robert F. Kennedy Jr
, icon no vax and no pass, recently passed also from Milan (here the portrait that Beppe Severgnini made of it). Guetzkow also co-authored a work on anti-vaccine researchers who feel harassed and discriminated against by withdrawing or not publishing their work in scientific journals peer reviewed.
But, to return to Vaers, to put it again with the words CDC: Vaers a passive reporting system, which means that relies on users to send reports of their experiences to Cdc and Fda. Vaers
not designed to determine if a vaccine has caused a health problem
, but especially useful for detect unusual or unexpected patterns by reporting adverse events that could indicate a possible safety concern with a vaccine. In this way, Vaers can provide the CDC and FDA with valuable information on the need for further work and evaluation to further consider a possible security issue.
Of course, subsequent checks on the possible causal links between Covid vaccines and deaths have been made. The Cdc report, for example, that one has been ascertained plausible causal relationship between administration of the Jannsen vaccine (Johnson & Johnson) and 5 deaths from thrombotic syndrome associated with thrombocytopenia, out of 15.7 million administrations (approximately 0.00003%, or 3 deaths for every 10 million vaccinated).
But it is worth noting that, at the end of these verifications, the FDA approved the use of numerous anti Covid vaccines and the CDC write, on their website, that the vaccines for Covid-19 are safe and effective
(bold in the original, ed) and that the CDC recommends that anyone over the age of 5 be vaccinated as soon as possible to help protect against Covid-19 and the related, potentially serious complications that can result from it. Also for the vaccines approved in Europe by the EMA and in Italy by the Aifa there have been some recommendations and limitations of use based on the adverse effects actually ascertained (for example for the AstraZeneca vaccine), but vaccinations continue to be considered the best weapon against the virus.
A very different conclusion from that drawn by Menichella, according to which, with regard to the age groups for which vaccination would be advisable, today, with the new data, the new break-even point is shifted towards higher age groups: I would say that he’s around 40-45 years old, to be careful. This means that, while vaccinating over 50s certainly makes sense (since 99% of Covid deaths are over 50), that of young people and children should be stopped (at least until the issues raised by the various analyzes and sources cited are clarified). In the case of young people under 30 and children, in reality, there are even more numerous and strong reasons that advise against proceeding with their vaccination (much less through a surreptitious obligation).
Now, if it is true that, on the vaccination of the under 12, there are still different opinions (here the opinion of Paolo Rossi, director of the pediatrics department of the Bambino Ges hospital and here that of Maurizio Bonati, pediatrician-epidemiologist of the Mario Negri institute) is also true that, if Menichella’s instructions had been followed, that already last spring he recommended vaccinating only those over 25 and now only the over 50s, the percentage of vaccinated in Italy would probably be similar or worse than that of countries today in the middle of the fourth wave and in some cases already returned to lockdown (if the infections are very numerous, given that the vaccine protects a lot, but not 100%, even the vaccinated could return at risk, even more in the case of the development of more aggressive variants).
Menichella also claims that Vaers’ real shortcoming would be to have too few, not too many reports of adverse events (so, to be clear, the reported vaccine damage would be only the tip of the iceberg).
A commentary article published last May in Science, titled Anti Vaccine Activists Use Government Side Effects Database to Scare Public Opinion, reported, for: One of Vaers’ strengths – its openness – also a potential weakness in the politicized era of Covid-19. Anyone who receives a vaccine authorized in the US can report an adverse event to Vaers, how can doctors, family members or others. This opening means that Vaers receives an abundance of reports, 228,000 for Covid vaccines alone since December 2020, more than four times the number received in the last year for all other vaccines.
Moreover, the studies based only on the data of open archives such as Vaers cannot be considered sufficiently robust scientifically, as is also shown by history, rebuilt by Juanne Pili on Open, of the withdrawal of one of these studies, in that case based on Adverse Drug Reactions (ADR) of the European Medicines Agency (Ema), retracted by the scientific journal Vaccines of the Swiss publishing house MDPI.
The scientific discussion on Menichella’s work we leave, of course, to the scientists. In our own small way, however, we hope to have made a modest contribution to the evaluation of some of the sources used.
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