On a botched Dengue Fever vaccine, that actually _increased_ your risk of hospitalization/death by about 45% if you hadn't contracted Dengue Fever before.
The craziest thing is this _was_ known, but the WHO recommended all children be given the vaccine anyway, regardless of infection status.
"'No, you can't give a vaccine to a perfectly normal, healthy person and then put them at an increased risk for the rest of their lives' Halstead says. "You can't do that.""
@pete how was it even approved based on the trials data, which must've shown increased risk? Unless the vast majority of the test subjects had infection earlier, which could happen if that's true for the whole population and Sanofi didn't control for it
@121 In the areas where Dengue Fever is common - where the vaccine was tested - about 80% to 90% of the population have already been infected before. The trials were just 30,000, so it would have been tested on only 1,500 to 3,000 people who hadn't been infected.
Now, this issue was 100% forseeable: it's been known for a *long* time that Dengue Fever works this way. And according to the article, even with the reduced #'s, the potential issue was clear in the data.
But, easy to gloss over...
@121 So sounds to me like it's a case of corruption and/or a lapse in ethics. The company had spent $2 billion on development, and it had taken 20 years. That happens to be around the time that patents expire, so I wouldn't be surprised if they needed the vaccine deployed to have a chance at making their money back.
I think the takeaway here is that the WHO probably has some rather unethical people working for them.
@121 Note how the researcher who raised the alarm had spent his career studying the disease for the US military: Dengue Fever is a genuine problem for them, and they're in the business of buying vaccines, not selling them. So his incentives are to find something that works.
@pete TIL in Germany, doctors are required by law to report suspicious cases possibly/likely/certainly linked to a vaccination (unlike VAERS in US which is voluntary).
In the latest report by PEI, by 2021/03/12 there were ~2300 "serious" such cases reported for ~4.5mil people fully vaccinated and 351 deaths reported. They don't claim causal links in the report of course, but the numbers seem very high anyway. However, the number is probably skewed higher b/c of old age of many of the vaccinated
@121 What's their definition of "linked"?
A simple post-vaccination mortality stat might be more useful to know. :/
@pete the language is open to interpretation (see the translation below). I think there is an item on the form to report the likelihood of connection to the vaccination (possible/likely/very likely/certain), but these statistics are not included in the report
Simple post-fact mortality is expected to be much higher: assuming mortality of 1/1000 person/month, for 4.5mil it would be 9,000 in two months, and 350 would be a small blip
@121 Or even had higher depending on age distribution. Or lower.
According to CDC there are currently 2,200 deaths reported via VAERS for 126mil vaccinations, which is more than an order of magnitude lower than expected normal mortality for that many people in the last two months. But age distribution is also unknown, so 🤷♂️
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html
@121 Morality varies by multiple orders of magnitude in the US, so it's impossible to say much without knowing age distributions of those reports, those getting vaccinated, and how likely reports are to be made.
That said, it's always suspicious if far *fewer* reports of something that you'd expect to happen by coincidence are coming in... VAERS is obviously not including most deaths, which could easily hide something.
@pete interesting graph...
even taking 45-54 age group as baseline, for 126mil vaccinations (~80mil people), the expected mortality number would be ~30k/month, much higher than whatever they have in VAERS
@121 Exactly. There is *no* way that all potential vaccine deaths are being reported, making it difficult to impossible to use VAERS data to find problems.
@pete yeah, that's why the German data is interesting... Extrapolating it to the US vaccination numbers would yield ~7K, not 2.2K as in VAERS
@121 ...and even the German data is probably undercounting!
It's not hard to use that vaccine safely either: just give it to people who have already been infected. Then it does a perfectly good job of reducing the risk from further infections. That's exactly how the US now uses it.
I'm amazed that the WHO wouldn't recommend the obvious in favor of getting more vaccines in more arms, even though they knew a selective approach would save more lives. Smells like corruption frankly.