Monday, October 17, 2022
Menstrual Abnormalities Lasting for Months Following COVID-19 Shot ‘Very Concerning’: Doctor
The data collected from Israel’s adverse events reporting system showing that some women experienced menstrual disorders for more than 12 months after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine raises concerns, according to Dr. Shelly Cole, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Texas.
“Looking at the Israeli data is very concerning,” Cole told The Epoch Times.
Of the 282 Israeli women who reported menstrual abnormality following COVID-19 vaccination, 88 reports contained information on the duration of the condition. And of the 88 reports, 83 disclosed that the menstrual problems lasted over a week. Some of the women’s problems had still not resolved.
All but one of the reports were from adults. The single child report detailed a disorder lasting between one and six months.
Of the other 82 reports, 11 reported that their condition lasted between one week to one month, 42 that their condition lasted one to six months, 22 that they suffered for six to 12 months, and seven that their condition lasted for over 12 months.
The reports were from women who received a Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. The reports were submitted between December 2021 and May 2022. They were discussed during a secret meeting over the summer.
Health experts say the actual number of menstrual cases is much higher than what is being reported to the system and others like it. Many women may have thought that their condition was not vaccine-related, been unaware of the reporting system, or not been encouraged by their doctor to lodge a report.
Cole said that she wasn’t surprised that women were complaining of irregular menstruation, including abnormal bleeding following vaccination. She’s seen it “throughout the pandemic” in her clinic and discussed the matter with other doctors.
She was still shocked when she learned Israel’s Ministry of Health (MoH) presented a lower risk of menstrual abnormality than what the adverse event reports showed in a public report (pdf) published in August, two months after the closed-door meeting.
The MoH used the total vaccine doses administered since the shots were cleared—over 18 million—as a denominator to calculate the risk of adverse events. The shots were cleared in late 2020, but the new reporting system was not launched until December 2021.
“They took the 18 months of doses of the Pfizer vaccination and they only looked at the side effects for six months,” Cole said. “So how can this be even remotely valid?”
That minimized the calculated risks of the adverse events reported, including menstrual abnormalities. And they included doses given to males when calculating risks despite men not menstruating. “They minimized menstrual irregularity by implementing men in the data,” Cole said.
The MoH did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
“The reported phenomena are known phenomena in the professional literature and were also found in the previous reports of the Ministry of Health, and there was no observation of an increase in a new phenomenon (new signal),” the ministry said in the report. That statement was false, according to the presentation in the secret meeting.
Presentation
The MoH commissioned a group of researchers to analyze reports of adverse events submitted to their new reporting system following vaccination from December 2021 to May 2022. The researchers found that the duration of some events, including menstrual disorders, were not short-lived or mild as health authorities claim.
The researchers also said that Pfizer officials informed them that the company was unaware of any long-term symptoms. Pfizer didn’t return multiple emails requesting comments.
Sasha Zhurat, the main presenter at that time, said that many of the complaints of menstrual abnormalities lasted for several months and not the couple of days that is mentioned in the brochure distributed to vaccine recipients.
“But compared to the leaflet where it says that the symptoms go away after a few days, we saw that there were many reports, and only 5 percent had symptoms that lasted between two weeks and a month, all the rest were much longer,” Zhurat said.
She added that “over 90 percent of the reports in which there appears some kind of topic of duration and long-term changes,” 60 percent reported a change lasting three months.
In 10 percent of these women, Zhurat said that they experienced the same menstrual issue following additional vaccine doses, a phenomenon known as rechallenge.
Rechallenge is one factor to establish causality between a vaccine and an adverse event when the re-administration of the same vaccine causes the reoccurrence of a side effect that had gone away.
Some side effects are officially recognized by vaccine makers and health authorities, such as heart inflammation. But the researchers discovered that some others were also caused by the shot.
The meeting was recorded without the participants’ knowledge and leaked to Israeli journalist Yaffa Shir-Raz, who broke the story in August. The Epoch Times has reviewed the full recording.
Some of the findings, including the finding of rechallenge, were omitted from the MoH’s report to the public
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Israeli Ministry of Health Confirms Leaked Video Is Real, but downplays it
Israel’s Ministry of Health has confirmed that a leaked video showing an expert warning the agency about potentially facing lawsuits over COVID-19 vaccine side effects is real, but issued false statements about the discussion.
Video footage recorded during a meeting held behind closed doors over the summer showed that experts hired to analyze post-vaccination adverse event reports said the analysis proved a causal relationship between some of the events and the vaccines and warned about presenting the data in a certain way in order to avoid lawsuits.
In an official report authorities released about two months later, in August, they said, “The report presents all the cases that were reported in close proximity to the receipt of the coronavirus vaccine, and does not necessarily indicate a causal relationship between receiving the vaccine and the reported phenomenon.”
The ministry, or MoH, repeatedly declined to comment to The Epoch Times about the video and also did not return queries from Yaffa Shir-Raz, a health journalist and professor who obtained the video from a source.
Officials present during the meeting also declined to comment or did not respond to comments and have not commented publicly on the situation.
An unnamed official at the MoH now says the video is legitimate. The remarks were made to Reuters, which posted a “fact check” on clips of the meeting that Shir-Raz has posted online and in social media posts sharing the clips.
The official did not address why key portions of the discussion were left out of the final report. The official asserted that all the data presented during the meeting appeared in the final report. The official also claimed that the clips were “taken out of context.”
“The meeting participants can confirm that the sections were taken out of context,” the official said. “The leaked clips were carefully selected and edited in a biased manner, so that their presentation deliberately omits the fact that this is a discussion about raw data that has not undergone any analysis or standardization, during an initial attempt by an assisting team to understand from epidemiological professionals how to proceed and analyze raw data correctly.”
Shir-Raz told The Epoch Times that she found it interesting that an anonymous MoH source responded to Reuters when the ministry would not respond to repeated requests from her.
“It is unfortunate that the Ministry of Health does not have enough courage to stand behind its response officially, and instead prefers to hide behind an anonymous responder,” she said in an email.
Falsehoods
The MoH official offered several falsehoods in their comments to Reuters. The official falsely said, for instance, that the reports that were analyzed “cannot be verified,” when the reports were submitted to a new system that requires submitters to include information such as their name and a number from their citizenship certificate. The new system replaced an older system in December 2021 and the data was garnered through May 2022.
MoH also claimed that “there are no unknown side effects or new signals.”
But according to Sasha Zhurat, one of the presenters, that’s not true. She said during the meeting that the data “allowed us to really identify new phenomena like tinnitus, like hypoesthesia and paresthesia” and that “we actually identified new phenomena that do not appear in the consumer brochure such as dizziness, tinnitus, hypoesthesia, paresthesia.”
Zhurat also pointed out that the brochure, handed to prospective vaccine recipients, listed certain durations for possible side effects.
The leaflet says the problems are “supposed to pass within a few days and we saw that this was not the case,” Zhurat said. Some problems lasted for more than a year, including menstrual irregularities, with no end in sight.
Zhurat declined to comment on the discussion, telling The Epoch Times in a Facebook message that she’s no longer part of the team analyzing the data.
Shir-Raz had said on Twitter that one of the meeting portions showed that only one of the four health maintenance organizations (HMOs) in Israel provided adverse event reports. MoH said that reports were received from all of the HMOs, or organizations that provide citizens with healthcare.
The HMOs have not responded to requests for comment.
During the meeting, presenters said that many of the reports came from Meuhedet, one of the HMOs. Maccabi, another, “did not send that much because … they collected phenomena by themselves and not through your form,” Maya Berlin, another member of the team said.
Dr. Mati Berkovitch, the leader of the team, said the point was “super important.” “This means that there are HMOs that keep the information close to their chest,” he said.
Additionally, according to a draft copy of the report the MoH ultimately released, which Shir-Raz also obtained, a person on the team questions whether they should point out that “there are HMOs that did not send messages and therefore there is a bias in the reporting?”
The final report makes no mention of this point. “They could have reliably reported how many reports there were from each HMO. Why didn’t they do it?” Shir-Raz wondered.
Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Israeli native who has been closely following the situation, says that the MoH “lost the trust of the public in Israel exactly because of behaviors like that.”
It would take a new leadership and different behavior to undo the tremendous damage that was caused,” he told The Epoch Times in an email.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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