Friday, July 15, 2022
Israel's fourth vaccine dose and Omicron
There are two research results reported below and both were reported on very positively. The reports below portray vaccination as protective in an Omicron-infected population.
Being a retired academic, however I looked at the results more closely and was not convinced. The final conclusion from the study report of the healthcare workers agreed well with my conclusions. It reads:
"a fourth vaccination of healthy young health care workers may have only marginal benefits"
The second study -- of the elderly -- compared only the results of third and fourth vaccinations with one-another. There was no control group so no conclusions about absolute efficacy were possible.
My takeaway is that existing vaccinations are probably totally useless against Omicron
The Middle Eastern nation became the first place in the world to offer its adult citizens a second booster in January, just as the Omicron wave charged across the globe.
Any Israeli over the age of 18 was able to get the jab, as long as five months had passed since they received their previous booster or had recovered from the illness.
More than 830,000 Israelis — mostly the elderly, health workers and immunocompromised residents — have so far taken up that offer.
The World Health Organization is yet to give an official recommendation on the efficacy of a fourth COVID-19 dose.
Experts are divided on the efficacy of a second booster for younger people.
Earlier this year, researchers studied the effects of a fourth shot on the immune responses of young Israeli health workers.
The results suggest the effectiveness of the fourth dose is no different from the effectiveness of a third dose.
While the jury may be out on the benefits for younger people, Israeli researchers say one age group clearly receives significant additional protection.
Results of a newly published study by Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev showed the fourth COVID-19 vaccine reduced the risk of death by 72 per cent among Israel's elderly.
"This is a huge step forward to control the spread of COVID in Australia and other countries, that plan to introduce the fourth dose," lead researcher Khitam Muhsen said.
The study of 40,000 nursing home residents found those vaccinated with a fourth dose of the Pfizer vaccine had a 34 per cent reduced risk of contracting the Omicron variant.
They also had a 64 to 67 per cent reduced risk of requiring hospitalisation.
"When there was a variant that had so many mutations, there was a lot of questions about whether the vaccine would be protective, or effective," Dr Muhsen said.
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Worrisome reports of adverse vaccine events
Since the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first vaccines for COVID-19 in late 2020, the government and much of the media have insisted that the medicines developed in record time are safe and effective. Those who raised questions about them have been routinely dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
And yet an online database co-administered by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control has compiled more than 1.3 million reports of vaccine-implicated “adverse events” running the gamut from mild to severe, including 29,000 deaths.
Representative entries include:
A 44-year-old male from California with a blood clot in the brain (CVST) five days after receiving Pfizer vaccine, dose unknown.
A 31-year-old female from Pennsylvania with heart inflammation (myocarditis) two days after receiving Moderna’s booster.
A 58-year-old female from California with blood clots in legs (DVT) after receiving Johnson & Johnson booster. She reported:
“Day after booster on 11/16/21 my right leg was aching. 7 days later on 11/23/21 my sole of my right foot was very painful upon walking. This resolved 2 days later by 11/25/21. On day 11 (11/26/21) my ankle was slightly swollen and painful to touch. These symptoms continued to migrate up my leg to my inner thigh. On 12/13/21 I was seen by my primary care Doctor and was sent for a d-dimer blood test which was 1.77. I was seen in vascular dept and ultrasound indicated multiple DVT from my groin to my ankle.”
These reports are not anecdotes from “anti-vaxxers” on the dark web. They come from the federal government’s open-source log, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. It allows anyone to go online and report a bad reaction that could be linked to any vaccine, including those for COVID-19. (RealClearInvestigations has linked above to VAERS reports posted at Openvaers.com, an independently run and easier to navigate database that copies reports verbatim from the CDC’s less user-friendly “WONDER” system.)
While the reports are unfiltered and unexamined, the idea is that such public input will allow researchers to identify potential problems. But the sheer number of reports, and their specificity, have the attention of concerned scientists and even some politicians like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has invited people harmed by vaccines to testify before Congress and advocates compensation for them.
Johnson's office said he has been admonishing the health authorities over the VAERS reports for a year. "The senator believes the CDC and FDA need to take their own adverse event early warning system seriously and be transparent with the American people," it said in a statement. "To date, they have not been."
VAERS was created in the late 1980s as an outgrowth of a congressional mandate to create a system for compensating vaccine victims and their families. In 2015, the CDC said the average number of annual reports was roughly 30,000. In 2021, there were nearly 1 million. Given the large increase during a politically charged pandemic, the usefulness of VAERS is the subject of great debate even among scientists
Some health experts believe that the number of reports is primarily a function of increased publicity around the COVID vaccines, a high number indicating only that many more people are aware of the system and concerned about potential side effects from the shots. Others say the number and strong indications in certain symptom categories – such as the cardiovascular examples cited above – paint a bleaker picture of the vaccines’ safety.
Dr. Peter McCullough, a renowned cardiologist and academic physician with over 600 papers published in medical literature, was one of the first professionals to publicly question the safety of the COVID-19 injections. On April 21, 2021, on his podcast The McCullough Report, he read out some of the early, alarming statistics from VAERS including reports of 502 heart attacks, 84 miscarriages, 321 cases of low blood platelet counts (thrombocytopenia) and 2,342 deaths. For Dr. McCullough, these numbers were a huge red flag. For comparison, he cites the last “mass vaccination program” undertaken in the United States, the 1976 swine flu vaccine. Dr. McCullough noted that there were approximately 55 million people vaccinated, with an accompanying 500 cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, and around 25 deaths. “And the government officials at that time said, ‘we’re going to pull it.’”
Dr. McCullough said that by April 2021, VAERS reports were already so numerous that he felt the COVID vaccines should be pulled off the market. That same month, Fox News host Tucker Carlson voiced doubts about the vaccines' effectiveness, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden's top medical adviser, blasted him for pushing "a typical crazy conspiracy theory."
As of today, the system has more than 29,000 reports of deaths.
VAERS reports, however, are not hard evidence. Its website explains: “A report to VAERS generally does not prove that the identified vaccine(s) caused the adverse event described. It only confirms that the reported event occurred sometime after vaccine was given. No proof that the event was caused by the vaccine is required in order for VAERS to accept the report. VAERS accepts all reports without judging whether the event was caused by the vaccine.” Some of the FDA and CDC’s most senior veterans advise caution in interpreting the data.
Susan Ellenberg, PhD, the former Director of the Office of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the FDA’s Center for Biologics, told RCI that “anything that gets reported goes directly into the [VAERS] system … so mostly what you get is noise.” She said that it’s nearly impossible to prove causation with this dataset alone. Dr. Walter Orenstein, formerly the CDC’s director of immunization, concurs. He said, “That’s why it’s called adverse ‘events’ as opposed to reaction because reaction implies causation. Event is basically something that follows.” Elderly people, for example, die regularly; if they are dying days or weeks after being vaccinated, that does not necessarily mean the vaccine is killing them.
More here:
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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)
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