Tuesday, February 20, 2024



Largest Covid vaccine study ever finds shots are linked to small increased risk of neurological, blood and heart disorders - but they are still extremely rare

Covid vaccines have been linked to small increases in heart, blood, and neurological disorders, according to the largest global study of its kind.

An international coalition of vaccine experts looked for 13 medical conditions among 99 million vaccine recipients across eight countries in order to identify higher rates of those conditions after receiving the shots.

They confirmed that the shots made by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are linked to significantly higher risk of five medical conditions - including a nerve-wasting condition that leaves people struggling to walk or think.

But the study also warned of several other disorders that they said warranted further investigation, including the links between a brain-swelling condition and Moderna's shot.

Still, the team says the absolute risk of developing any one of the condition remains small. For instance, 13 billion doses of vaccines have been administered and there have only been 2,000 cases of all conditions.

Dr Harlan Krumholz, director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation and a lead investigator behind the study, said: ‘Both things can be true.

'They can save millions of lives, and there can be a small number of people who’ve been adversely affected.’

Covid vaccines are estimated to have averted more than 19 million deaths worldwide, including three million in the US alone.

Among their discoveries was a twofold increase in the risk of a neurological condition known as Guillain-Barre syndrome,an autoimmune disorder in which the immune system attacks the body's peripheral nervous system, leading to damage to the protective casing around nerve cells.

The report said that of the 23 million AstraZeneca shots administered worldwide, they would have expected 76 cases of GBS - but 190 events were observed, accounting for a 2.9-fold increased risk.

While it cannot be proven that the vaccine caused these events, there is some evidence the vaccine triggers the immune system to attack its own nerves.

Meanwhile, the study also confirmed a threefold higher risk for a type of heart inflammation called myocarditis, though researchers did not give the number of expected cases versus actual cases.

Myocarditis was seen most commonly in young men. It's believed to be related to immune response triggered my the mRNA vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna, which work by instructing cells to produce the same protein that sits atop the coronavirus.

This prompts the immune system to produce antibodies against the spike protein, providing protection against Covid. In rare cases, this immune response may lead to inflammation in the heart muscle.

Typically, the myocarditis instances have been relatively mild, leading to just 28 deaths.

Additionally, both the first and fourth doses of the Moderna vaccine had between 1.7 and 2.6 times greater number of instances of pericarditis, an inflammation affecting the protective sac encasing the heart.

They looked at more than 39 million Moderna vaccine doses administered.

Like the link between mycarditis and the vaccines, links to pericarditis are still under investigation. It is believed to be caused by the same mechanism, an overactive immune response that attacks the thin sac-like membrane.

There was a greater than 3.7 times risk of a condition called Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM), which causes swelling in the brain and spinal cord that damages the protective covering of nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord, after the first dose of the Moderna vaccine.

Seven instances of ADEM occurred following vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, surpassing the anticipated count of two cases.

There were nearly 190 million shots considered in the study.

The study also found that after getting the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, there were 1.9 and 3.9 times increased risks of transverse myelitis and ADEM, respectively.

Bell’s palsy, which causes temporary weakness or paralysis of the muscles on one side of the face, had an increased odds of 1.05 after a first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

There was also a 1.3 to 1.4 times greater risk of having a seizure following the first and second doses of the Moderna vaccine, as well as the fourth dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

Landmark study finds sudden cardiac deaths in sport fell over time

UK cardiologists say the findings from the 'landmark' Swiss and US study should reassure people about the safety of the mRNA Covid vaccines and the risk of myocarditis.

The researchers added a major caveat to this finding: ‘Chances of having a neurological event following acute SARS-CoV-2 infection were up to 617-fold higher than following COVID vaccination, suggesting that the benefits of vaccination substantially outweigh the risks.’

After a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, there was a 3.2-times-greater than expected risk of Cerebral Venous Sinus Thrombosis (CVST).

The risks after the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine and after the second dose were 1.49 and 1.25 times higher.

CVST is a rare but serious condition characterized by the formation of blood clots in the large channels that drain blood from the brain and deliver it back to the heart after the AstraZeneca vaccine.

In total, 21 events were expected, while 69 events were observed.

Also after the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, there was a 1.07 times higher risk of thrombocytopenia, a condition characterized by a lower-than-normal number of platelets in the blood.

After a third dose of ChAdOx1, the risk notably rose to 1.95.

Their research was published in the journal Vaccine.

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Oh, So Shutting Down Schools And Making Kids Dumber Wasn't Required to Stop COVID

When the COVID pandemic hit, we shut down the schools to protect the kids. Everyone got subjected to remote learning, which didn’t work. When schools tried to re-open, teachers’ unions rioted, claiming selfish parents were trying to kill them. Teachers once again overshot their mark for a profession that doesn’t work year-round and who constantly want raises for mediocre test scores, especially when the damage from remote learning was revealed.

Besides test scores being the lowest in decades, the mental health crisis caused by extended periods of isolation is going to be a generational issue. The number of suicides was one of the most tragic stories coming out of the pandemic. And now, we have this study out of Canada showing that we never needed to shut down schools in the first place (via CP24):

An “extensive,” two-year review of COVID-19 in schools and daycares has revealed that these settings were not a significant source of transmission of the virus when infection prevention and control measures were used, researchers at McMaster University have found.

The review was published Thursday in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health and examined more than 34,000 references, including databases, websites, and studies, related to transmission in child-care settings and schools across the globe.

The results of the review appear to cast doubt on the necessity of the repeated interruptions to in-person learning during the pandemic.

In Ontario schools were closed for a minimum of 135 days to prevent the spread of COVID-19, with disruptions in three successive school years.

“We found that after that initial shutdown where everything was locked down, schools did not appear to have much impact on community level transmission when infection prevention control measures were in place,” Sarah Neil-Sztramko, an assistant professor at the university and the lead author of the review, said in a written statement.

When the masking rules flopped around, followed by the science fiction that followed once the Omicron wave hit that upended the narrative about getting the COVID vaccine, we should have expected this outcome regarding the educational fallout from keeping kids away from each other.

Meanwhile, teachers’ unions have tried to gaslight who was behind and supported the classroom shutdowns. If this pandemic had hit ten years before the Trump presidency—would we have all lost our minds? Even Dr. Anthony Fauci initially took a blasé attitude to the virus until the 2020 election season blossomed. Would we not have reacted with such insanity? Who knows, but what is a fact is that the chasm in American education created by the lockdowns might be one too great to bridge, especially with the burgeoning bureaucracy associated with this sector.

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FDA Official Acknowledges VAERS Faced 'Avalanche' of Reports After COVID Vaccine Rollout

A top FDA official admitted Thursday during a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing that the government's vaccine safety reporting system was not prepared for the “avalanche” of submissions entered after the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.

“As of February 2024, VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] reports for COVID-19 vaccines total significantly higher than all other vaccines combined since 1990 as reported,” said Chairman Brad Wenstrup of Ohio. “This is a surprising figure. Dr. Marks, was the government prepared for an avalanche of reports to VAERS?”

Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA, acknowledged it wasn't.

“We tried to be prepared for that,” he said, "but the avalanche of reports was tremendous. And again, it required re-tasking people on the fly…we had to usually staff up and had many meetings working to increase our ability to go through these reports because as you already mentioned, what the public sees on the public VAERS page is just a small fraction of the information that we ultimately collect and sift through that is very important to determine whether an adverse event is truly related to the vaccine

“One of the things we often receive is that we do not make additional information available,” he added. “I would say to you that it's a challenge. What we have learned is that it is very challenging to make available, essentially, protected health information...”

VAERS is an early-warning system but does not "prove that a vaccine caused a problem," according to the CDC. The information submitted, however, can highlight patterns and important information the agency and FDA can then investigate. Reports can be submitted by anyone

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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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