I am not surprised by all this, having followed every accessible (outside MSM) event with regards to the products, from well before they were rolled out. But it sickens me to the stomach. In February 2021 a fit woman aged about 60, a runner, was paralysed by the AZ vaccine after one dose and was in hospital for nearly a year. Her brother reported that the hospital didn't have a clue what was wrong and apparently (although unbelievably) AZ medical associates went to the hospital to advise. Of course it was GBS. (My partner knows both the woman and her brother, and spoke to the latter about her, so this is not gossip). A bit later that year, in the same week two women, very fit and healthy, were hospitalised after the AZ for brain bleeds. Another man I know had a heart attack after his AZ jab, and he told me the hospital were querying where his medical history could be found - when he told them he had "no medical history", being a fit and healthy man, always out with his dog, never taking medication if he could help it, they were apparently amazed, as whatever presentation he had - requiring several stents, ultimately - it appeared to them as a chronic condition (compare Dr Aseem Malhotra's account of his father's heart attack).
Worst of all, when I told a group of people I was with about the woman with GBS, shortly after she was hospitalised, no-one reacted beyond - literally - a shrug of the shoulders. I can't understand why people aren't more enraged - I didn't have the stuff and I am angry!
(I could list dozens more effects in people I know but don't want to drag on my first post on here , as a new subscriber, ad nauseam.
From this thoroughly sickening compilation of the EWG 'work' one can only come to one conclusion: the 'political' drive, to have the first vaccine and to get as many people vaccinated as possible hugely outweighed any scientific and medical evidence.
Obviously, when one tells people that the ;risk' is of dying of covid, now, then the 'benefits' gain weight. The reasoning is beyond cynical: 'those 'risks' like e.g. thrombosis or Guillaume-Barre Syndrome are negligible and anyway if you got covid and didn't die you'd have got those things instead ...
Topping it all though is this cold statement: "The events reported in fatal cases were explained away as expected due to the patient's age and comorbidities." Did nobody ask why, if these fatal outcomes were expected anyway, those poor people had to get vaccinated, especially since so many other 'deserving' people needed that clot shot which was still in short supply?
Indeed! They all died of covid, regardless of whether they had other major health issues. I have posted about this many times on X and then you get accused of being a eugenist, cold and heartless, but a 92 year old with lung issues and a heart condition does not die OF covid.
Happily a lot of things are now coming out and even the BBC query things!
The issue is well illustrated in Figure 23-1 in the book by Spiegelhalter and Masters, entitled "Covid by Numbers" (published in 2021, by the way). On one side of this little picture we have "potential benefits", on the other, "potential harms". And the graph does, indeed, offer an argument against vaccination for anyone younger than 30. The problem - and it is a huge one - is that the "benefits" are counted in "prevented" ICU admissions, a wholly tendentious modelled outcome (you can only guess prevented things, you can't count them, any more than you can count the bears the little boy scared away with his horn.) On the other side of the equation, are things you really can count - dead bodies.
Former UK Secretary of State admits Pfizer-BioNTech expected pay outs of up to £300 billion for vaccine injuries in the UK before its injections were approved for use.
Lord Alok Sharma, a Secretary of State in the previous UK government, has admitted that the government knew, before they received regulatory approval that people would be injured by the covid vaccines.
It was a lie to say that the vaccines were "safe" and it was unethical to coerce and mandate people into taking them. Worse still, it was pure evil to expose our nations children to this unnecessary and entirely avoidable risk of serious injury and death. This is too late.
Shocking. And during that following year, people like me were still being called "misinformation-mongers", even when that well-known radio presenter (Lisa Shaw?) died from this vaccine. But the EWG knew the evidence all along. But they needed to "retain public confidence". They have zero public confidence now.
"The EWG advised that the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine still had a favourable benefit-risk profile."
Well, a "favourable risk-benefit profile" is pretty easy to achieve, when (as _everybody knew_) the vaccine was absolutely _miraculous_ in preventing COVID-19; and when (ditto), COVID-19 itself was something worse than airborne Ebola multipled by bubonic plague to the power of anthrax, for all ages.
Even acknowledging that we do have the benefit of hindsight, I still can't understand why the MHRA did not act more swiftly to suspend AZ vaccination on 11th March and the EWG did not act on 17 March or 23 March.
Also why did Oxford push on with the AZ children's trials, not suspending them until 7.4.21, which was nearly a month after the vaccine had been suspended in Denmark, Norway and Iceland? Even Canada had suspended the product in the under 55s by the end of March. More to the point, why they were trialling this on children (whose risk from the virus was negligible) in the first place?
These public bodies owe it to the people who were injured and died to scrutinise this timeline carefully and approach these questions openly, without falling back what seems to be the default defensive rationalisation for decisions made at the time (that the risk from the virus was worse... for these young healthy people.).
'The EWG stated that evaluating individual risk-benefit profiles for sub-populations based on age-stratified data for the AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine is not feasible. However, the overall benefit-risk balance was still acceptable' - This appears to my mind a clear dereliction of responsibility. Pooling of risk estimates is what got us into this situation.
Also why was it not feasible? We did have a brief glimpse of how individualised risk could be honestly communicated with the Winton Centre charts produced in May 2021 (https://wintoncentre.maths.cam.ac.uk/news/latest-data-mhra-blood-clots-associated-astra-zeneca-covid-19-vaccine/). These charts helpfully highlighted that infection-related risk also depends on population disease prevalence. However they had limitations. Firstly, population risks were stratified only by age and not by co-morbidities including obesity. For healthy normal weight individuals of any age, these charts of pooled risk would over-estimate their infection-related risk. Secondly, they assumed population infection-related risk was static, but it would change as the virus evolved (eg with the less pathogenic Omicron variant). Thirdly, they focused only on one specific risk but vaccine-related risks are multiple and varied. It would have been good to see similar charts for myocarditis or Guillan Barre for instance. What we were provided for risk communication was too little, too late.
30.3.21 Canada on Monday suspended the use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine for people under 55 following concerns it might be linked to rare blood clots…“There is substantial uncertainty about the benefit of providing AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines to adults under 55 given the potential risks,” said Dr Shelley Deeks, vice-chair of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/30/canada-suspends-use-of-astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-for-those-under-55
Would it be too sweeping to state that no vaccine recipient in the UK was informed of their medical and ethical right to a personal risk versus benefit assessment ? Consequently, no one ( least of all those forcibly and repeatedly vaccinated in institutions) ‘choosing’ to have the vaccine made an informed choice regarding their decision to be vaccinated?
The risk communication was and still is a mess, so I think your statement has merit.
It is a worry that this question of personal risk-versus-benefit assessment continues to be glossed over - even yesterday at the Inquiry Whitty said in his testimony, '..for example, legitimately, people were concerned about the risks of myocarditis in -- with -- following vaccination. The rates of myocarditis are actually higher in people who get Covid. So that's an example where you've got to actually look at both the effects of having a drug or vaccine but also the effects of not having it, and very often it's that balance which actually gives you the correct information'.
One potential interpretation of his statement would be that vaccination reduces the risk of infection-related myocarditis at the expense of conferring a risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis, so that there is a net benefit overall, but I don't believe that is an evidence based assertion, and he blatantly ignores the age gradient.
As Vinay Prasad pointed out back in December 2021,
'It is now clear for men <40, dose 2 and dose 3 of Pfizer have more myocarditis than sars-cov-2 infection, and this is true for dose 1 and dose 2 of Moderna.
Pfizer boosters (Dose 3) have more myocarditis for men <40 than infection.
Myocarditis post infection is more common as you get older, in contrast with myocarditis post vaccination, which is more common as you are younger (reverse gradients).'
Prasad critiqued the Hippsley Cox paper, the first iteration of which missed the strength of the myocarditis signal in young men because they pooled the risk data. Also the denominator of infection-induced myocarditis was unknown so not a fair comparison.
Maybe it is cognitive dissonance on Whitty's part to ignore this nuance over pooled risk given he over-ruled the JCVI in September 2021 in recommending vaccination of 12-15 year olds to avoid school disruption or mental health or something like that (https://www.hartgroup.org/whitty-ignores-jcvi-advice/). By that point data from Israel up to May 2021 had put the myocarditis risk at 1 in 6637 for males aged 16-19 within 21 days of the second vaccine (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2109730). That data wasn't published til October but didn't Van Tam say yesterday he liaised closely with Israel over the myocarditis signal in Spring 2020 ,so one assumes they were made aware of this, even though it was all 'a bit foggy'. Also McCullough and Rose had found in 2021 that the VAERS data the rate of myocarditis was 19 times higher than expected in 12-15y olds. Their paper was withdrawn shortly after publication.
The MHRA had issued us a warning on 25th June 2021 that the risk of myocarditis was ‘extremely rare’ https://www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/covid-19-vaccines-updates-for-july-2021 (I’m not sure how ‘extremely rare’ is defined but rare = 1 in 10 000 to 1 in 1000 and very rare = less than 1 in 10000). On 29th November 2021, the UKHSA belatedly issued guidance for healthcare professionals, warning of the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis after Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines. Disappointingly, they quoted pooled risks of 10 myocarditis REPORTS per million doses of Pfizer and 36 per million for Moderna. I know that this would have led some clinicians to conclude that the risk of myocarditis with Pfizer was 1 in 100,000 (very rare), as they would not appreciate the under-reporting bias and the paradox where age-stratified risk is lost in pooled analysis. Only a day earlier, a population cohort study in Hong Kong was published, demonstrating that amongst 12-17 years old males, there was a risk of 1 in 2679 (rare) with the second dose (https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/75/4/673/6445179).
Thanks. I have the benefit of the notes I made at the time. Having looked at the evidence then I could not agree with the strategy of exposing young people to unnecessary risk. But I also feared that I might lose my GMC registration if someone perceived I was speaking out of line.. so all advice given had to be thoroughly evidence-based, with careful appraisal of evidence as it emerged piecemeal, and advice had to also include the rationale for the official NHS and govt guidance, as well as highlighting areas of uncertainty. Actually most people seem to weigh official guidance far more highly than any other source of evidence. People really trust the regulators to make thorough and impartial risk assessments on their behalf.
To give fully informed consent to a teenager took longer than 15 minutes. It also felt potentially very risky so always there was that in the background. Far easier and quicker to simply signpost people to MHRA/ukhsa statements on risk, but also not entirely honest once you have seen how pooled risks can be really misleading for the individual.
Sadly for many people the drive to conform with their peer group was far more important than even very carefully laid out evidence. Simply put it mattered more to them that they might not be allowed to go on a school trip or go on holiday with their mates or to a nightclub than whether their decision might have life changing health consequences.
I hope we never have to relive such times. We can only hope for that if we actually learn from our mistakes, which in turn can only happen if we admit that mistakes were made and try to understand how it all played out. These sorts of issues divided families. It was so very very toxic.
That thing about the decision makers not wanting to send out the wrong message in case it fuelled vaccine hesitancy is so important in my opinion. I wish we could outlaw pharma-generated terms like vaccine hesitancy, conspiracy theorist, misinformation and anti-vax, as they can lead to loss of objectivity when it comes to individual risk assessment and risk communication.
I so agree. Another very serious factor to consider is the governmental and mass media fuelled hatred and disgust of anyone deciding against being vaccinated for what ever reason. This was broadcast ad infinitude, daily month in month out.
The zeitgeist became ANYONE unvaccinated was a pariah, a selfish irresponsible granny killer. A terrifying shift emerged whereby to be unvaccinated was to be a second-class citizen. This was made clear all over the world with leaders falling over themselves to express their hatred of anyone unvaccinated.
I’ll never forget Macron proudly saying he wanted to make life as difficult as possible for anyone in France who remained unvaccinated. Self appointed, so called celebrities jumped on the band wagon - all suddenly experts in vaccination, urging everyone, everywhere to get vaccinated urgently as quickly as possible. Famous rock stars announced they would only permit vaccinated fans into their concerts.
Workers in certain sectors refusing mandatory vaccines lost their jobs - apparently they will now be compensated in the United States. I wonder what will happen here. Nursing homes sacked qualified workers who refused to be vaccinated - the residents were vaccinated up to the hilt but were found to be dying from starvation and neglect due to lack of staff.
I cannot contemplate the horror that we’ve experienced over the last few years. My anchor has been TTE. I have never seen such madness in my life and I am no spring chicken I could not believe that this country went through 2 World Wars to have succumbed to this madness wherein two people couldn’t sit together on a bench, in the fresh air, on a mountain having a cup of coffee without being prosecuted. Did all those millions die in the Wars for the UK to become a police state, I’m sorry if this appears very emotional Helen I think I’m still in a state of shock.
The Canadian trackers for refusing to be forced to be vaccinated had their bank accounts frozen and list their livelihoods. We know here at TTE Carl and Tom were under state surveillance and were subjected to all sorts of professional and personal abuse - undermining them, questioning their work and basically trying to destroy, their credibility describing them as f******s.! Phew ….. I am off to meditate. Thank you for letting me let off steam.
Yes that was the most frightening aspect, the global dehumanisation and social death of this newly defined categorisation of 'other' ('the unvaccinated'). I also had sleepless nights for a long time. The momentum was so strong, especially in late 2021, with the de-banking of people who even made donations in support of the Canadian truckers; the job losses through mandates; the move towards compulsory vaccination in places like Austria and Germany even in the face of known risk of injury; the censoring, silencing and abuse of good scientists and clinicians like the TTE team, Gupta, Kulldorf, Bhattacharya & co (no doubt to make public examples to the rest of us); the general public ignorance, apathy, if not outright vocal support of all those things. And the relentless drip drip drip of poisonous invective channelled through the media. You've made me feel emotional too, remembering. But we should remember.
For example, a quick search reveals the 1955 Cutter incident in which defective polio vaccines killed 10. The CDC calls this 'a defining moment in the history of vaccine[s]'. Yet this is a very small number compared to those killed by astrazeneca - many of whom were younger people at negligible risk from covid (whereas polio was a very real risk for the Cutter incident victims). The CDC lists a number of other past vaccine controversies, none of which seem to have resulted in deaths. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccine-safety/historical-concerns/index.html
Could it be argued that the Astrazeneca deaths are one of the worst vaccine scandals in history - perhaps the worst?
If only Keith, those responsible should explain their grounds for continuing to ‘push’ ineffective and possibly dangerous drugs. I believed ‘drug pushing’ was a criminal offence in the UK.
I am not surprised by all this, having followed every accessible (outside MSM) event with regards to the products, from well before they were rolled out. But it sickens me to the stomach. In February 2021 a fit woman aged about 60, a runner, was paralysed by the AZ vaccine after one dose and was in hospital for nearly a year. Her brother reported that the hospital didn't have a clue what was wrong and apparently (although unbelievably) AZ medical associates went to the hospital to advise. Of course it was GBS. (My partner knows both the woman and her brother, and spoke to the latter about her, so this is not gossip). A bit later that year, in the same week two women, very fit and healthy, were hospitalised after the AZ for brain bleeds. Another man I know had a heart attack after his AZ jab, and he told me the hospital were querying where his medical history could be found - when he told them he had "no medical history", being a fit and healthy man, always out with his dog, never taking medication if he could help it, they were apparently amazed, as whatever presentation he had - requiring several stents, ultimately - it appeared to them as a chronic condition (compare Dr Aseem Malhotra's account of his father's heart attack).
Worst of all, when I told a group of people I was with about the woman with GBS, shortly after she was hospitalised, no-one reacted beyond - literally - a shrug of the shoulders. I can't understand why people aren't more enraged - I didn't have the stuff and I am angry!
(I could list dozens more effects in people I know but don't want to drag on my first post on here , as a new subscriber, ad nauseam.
Two main issues as I see it.
In the past, vaccines were withdrawn quite quickly if side-effects were suspected. Why not in this case?
Secondly, by hiding and downplaying these possible issues, informed consent went out of the window.
From this thoroughly sickening compilation of the EWG 'work' one can only come to one conclusion: the 'political' drive, to have the first vaccine and to get as many people vaccinated as possible hugely outweighed any scientific and medical evidence.
Obviously, when one tells people that the ;risk' is of dying of covid, now, then the 'benefits' gain weight. The reasoning is beyond cynical: 'those 'risks' like e.g. thrombosis or Guillaume-Barre Syndrome are negligible and anyway if you got covid and didn't die you'd have got those things instead ...
Topping it all though is this cold statement: "The events reported in fatal cases were explained away as expected due to the patient's age and comorbidities." Did nobody ask why, if these fatal outcomes were expected anyway, those poor people had to get vaccinated, especially since so many other 'deserving' people needed that clot shot which was still in short supply?
It's thoroughly sickening ...
Good catch Vivian.
"The events reported in fatal cases were explained away as expected due to the patient's age and comorbidities."
Isn't it _funny_ that that line of reasoning was never used about "COVID-19 fatalities"?
Indeed! They all died of covid, regardless of whether they had other major health issues. I have posted about this many times on X and then you get accused of being a eugenist, cold and heartless, but a 92 year old with lung issues and a heart condition does not die OF covid.
Happily a lot of things are now coming out and even the BBC query things!
The issue is well illustrated in Figure 23-1 in the book by Spiegelhalter and Masters, entitled "Covid by Numbers" (published in 2021, by the way). On one side of this little picture we have "potential benefits", on the other, "potential harms". And the graph does, indeed, offer an argument against vaccination for anyone younger than 30. The problem - and it is a huge one - is that the "benefits" are counted in "prevented" ICU admissions, a wholly tendentious modelled outcome (you can only guess prevented things, you can't count them, any more than you can count the bears the little boy scared away with his horn.) On the other side of the equation, are things you really can count - dead bodies.
20th Jan 2025 The Expose.
Former UK Secretary of State admits Pfizer-BioNTech expected pay outs of up to £300 billion for vaccine injuries in the UK before its injections were approved for use.
Lord Alok Sharma, a Secretary of State in the previous UK government, has admitted that the government knew, before they received regulatory approval that people would be injured by the covid vaccines.
It was a lie to say that the vaccines were "safe" and it was unethical to coerce and mandate people into taking them. Worse still, it was pure evil to expose our nations children to this unnecessary and entirely avoidable risk of serious injury and death. This is too late.
Shocking. And during that following year, people like me were still being called "misinformation-mongers", even when that well-known radio presenter (Lisa Shaw?) died from this vaccine. But the EWG knew the evidence all along. But they needed to "retain public confidence". They have zero public confidence now.
"The EWG advised that the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine still had a favourable benefit-risk profile."
Well, a "favourable risk-benefit profile" is pretty easy to achieve, when (as _everybody knew_) the vaccine was absolutely _miraculous_ in preventing COVID-19; and when (ditto), COVID-19 itself was something worse than airborne Ebola multipled by bubonic plague to the power of anthrax, for all ages.
Even acknowledging that we do have the benefit of hindsight, I still can't understand why the MHRA did not act more swiftly to suspend AZ vaccination on 11th March and the EWG did not act on 17 March or 23 March.
Also why did Oxford push on with the AZ children's trials, not suspending them until 7.4.21, which was nearly a month after the vaccine had been suspended in Denmark, Norway and Iceland? Even Canada had suspended the product in the under 55s by the end of March. More to the point, why they were trialling this on children (whose risk from the virus was negligible) in the first place?
These public bodies owe it to the people who were injured and died to scrutinise this timeline carefully and approach these questions openly, without falling back what seems to be the default defensive rationalisation for decisions made at the time (that the risk from the virus was worse... for these young healthy people.).
'The EWG stated that evaluating individual risk-benefit profiles for sub-populations based on age-stratified data for the AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine is not feasible. However, the overall benefit-risk balance was still acceptable' - This appears to my mind a clear dereliction of responsibility. Pooling of risk estimates is what got us into this situation.
Also why was it not feasible? We did have a brief glimpse of how individualised risk could be honestly communicated with the Winton Centre charts produced in May 2021 (https://wintoncentre.maths.cam.ac.uk/news/latest-data-mhra-blood-clots-associated-astra-zeneca-covid-19-vaccine/). These charts helpfully highlighted that infection-related risk also depends on population disease prevalence. However they had limitations. Firstly, population risks were stratified only by age and not by co-morbidities including obesity. For healthy normal weight individuals of any age, these charts of pooled risk would over-estimate their infection-related risk. Secondly, they assumed population infection-related risk was static, but it would change as the virus evolved (eg with the less pathogenic Omicron variant). Thirdly, they focused only on one specific risk but vaccine-related risks are multiple and varied. It would have been good to see similar charts for myocarditis or Guillan Barre for instance. What we were provided for risk communication was too little, too late.
Before 11 March:
16.1.21 Dr Stephen Wright, 32y AZ vaccination 26.1 21 died VITT https://x.com/MrsCharWright/status/1758646235194417237
8.2.21 Jennifer Rose, 65y AZ vaccination 25.2.21 died https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/mum-died-blood-clot-astrazeneca-5511612
13.2.21 Trainee paramedic Kasey Turner 18y AZ vaccination 27.2.21 died VITT https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/people/aspiring-south-yorkshire-paramedic-18-died-after-receiving-astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-inquest-told-3622033
February 2021: AZ vaccine trials in children commence https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56052673
4.3.21 Dawn Williams, 52y AZ vaccination 20.3.21 died CVST https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/woman-died-rare-complications-astrazenecas-22433480
7.3.21 Michelle Barlow, 51y AZ vaccination 23.3.21 died VITT https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-blood-clots-from-astrazeneca-jab-killed-mother-coroner-finds-12479406
11.3.21 Marina Waldron, 21y AZ vaccination 31.3.21 died VITT https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2g921rd2lo
March 2021 Richard Todman AZ vaccination - died 1 week later - catastrophic blood clots in his bowel. c https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10863571/Why-no-compensation-people-lives-destroyed-Covid-jab.html
After 11 March:
14.3.21 Kim Lockwood, 34y AZ vaccination 24.3.21 died VITT https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9478665/Mother-two-34-rare-condition-dies-10-days-getting-AstraZeneca-jab.html
17.3.21 Neil Astles 59y AZ vaccination 4.4.21 d CVST, VITT https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/family-warrington-man-who-died-20340980
19.3.21 Oli Akram Hoque 26y AZ vaccination 15.4.21 died VITT https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10755311/Ambitious-trainee-solicitor-26-died-rare-blood-clot-having-Astra-Zeneca-Covid-vaccine.html
21.3.21 Tanya Smith, 31y AZ vaccination 3.4.21 died VITT https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10313969/amp/Healthy-mother-three-43-died-rare-blood-clots-AstraZeneca-jab.html
After 23.3.21:
30.3.21 Jack Last 27y AZ vaccination 10.4.21 died VITT https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12016301/The-victims-AstraZenecas-vaccine.html
30.3.21 Canada on Monday suspended the use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine for people under 55 following concerns it might be linked to rare blood clots…“There is substantial uncertainty about the benefit of providing AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines to adults under 55 given the potential risks,” said Dr Shelley Deeks, vice-chair of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/30/canada-suspends-use-of-astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-for-those-under-55
7.4.21 Astra zeneca vaccine trials on children paused https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/56592907
March 2021 Alpa Tailor 35y AZ vaccination 8.4.21 hospitalised VITT stroke https://www.visionnews.online/post/coroner-mother-of-two-killed-by-astrazeneca-vaccine 24.4.21 died VITT
21.4.21 Nicola Weideling 45y AZ vaccination 15.5.21 died VITT https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10627157/Covid-UK-Marketing-executive-45-died-stroke-caused-AstraZeneca-jab.html
23.4.21 Jamie Scott, 44y AZ vaccination 3.5.21 life changing injuries with brain damage from VITT https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/dad-sues-astrazeneca-claiming-developed-31402810
27.4.21 Tom Dudley 31y AZ vaccination 14.5.21 died VITT https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/people/popular-sheffield-dad-of-two-tom-dudley-31-died-two-weeks-after-receiving-astrazeneca-vaccine-inquest-told-3610708
29.4.21 Lisa Shaw, 44y AZ vaccination 21.5.21 died VITT https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-58330796
5.5.21 Zion 48y AZ vaccination 19.5.21 died VITT https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9728411/Rock-musician-48-died-brain-haemorrhage-two-weeks-AstraZeneca-vaccine.html
About 8.5.21 Mattthew Dibble 40y AZ vaccination died 12.5.21 catastrophic brain haemorrhage https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10233341/Musician-40-suffered-brain-haemorrhage-induced-AstraZeneca-Covid-vaccine-inquest-hears.html
10.5.21 Helena Ashton 48y AZ vaccination 25.5.21 died vaccine induced thrombosis https://www.sussexexpress.co.uk/news/woman-died-after-covid-vaccine-induced-thrombosis-3732914
20.5.21 Adam Bounds 41y AZ vaccination 31.5.21 died intracerebral haemorrhage https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/popular-devon-dad-footballer-died-6320625
29.5.21 Jack Hurn, 26y AZ vaccination 11.6.21 died VITT https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Jack-Hurn-Prevention-of-future-deaths-report-2022-0167_Published.pdf
Adenovirus vectors seemed so promising except for a couple of potential issues...
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2402592
Would it be too sweeping to state that no vaccine recipient in the UK was informed of their medical and ethical right to a personal risk versus benefit assessment ? Consequently, no one ( least of all those forcibly and repeatedly vaccinated in institutions) ‘choosing’ to have the vaccine made an informed choice regarding their decision to be vaccinated?
The risk communication was and still is a mess, so I think your statement has merit.
It is a worry that this question of personal risk-versus-benefit assessment continues to be glossed over - even yesterday at the Inquiry Whitty said in his testimony, '..for example, legitimately, people were concerned about the risks of myocarditis in -- with -- following vaccination. The rates of myocarditis are actually higher in people who get Covid. So that's an example where you've got to actually look at both the effects of having a drug or vaccine but also the effects of not having it, and very often it's that balance which actually gives you the correct information'.
One potential interpretation of his statement would be that vaccination reduces the risk of infection-related myocarditis at the expense of conferring a risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis, so that there is a net benefit overall, but I don't believe that is an evidence based assertion, and he blatantly ignores the age gradient.
As Vinay Prasad pointed out back in December 2021,
'It is now clear for men <40, dose 2 and dose 3 of Pfizer have more myocarditis than sars-cov-2 infection, and this is true for dose 1 and dose 2 of Moderna.
Pfizer boosters (Dose 3) have more myocarditis for men <40 than infection.
Myocarditis post infection is more common as you get older, in contrast with myocarditis post vaccination, which is more common as you are younger (reverse gradients).'
Prasad critiqued the Hippsley Cox paper, the first iteration of which missed the strength of the myocarditis signal in young men because they pooled the risk data. Also the denominator of infection-induced myocarditis was unknown so not a fair comparison.
(https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/uk-now-reports-myocarditis-stratified)
Maybe it is cognitive dissonance on Whitty's part to ignore this nuance over pooled risk given he over-ruled the JCVI in September 2021 in recommending vaccination of 12-15 year olds to avoid school disruption or mental health or something like that (https://www.hartgroup.org/whitty-ignores-jcvi-advice/). By that point data from Israel up to May 2021 had put the myocarditis risk at 1 in 6637 for males aged 16-19 within 21 days of the second vaccine (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2109730). That data wasn't published til October but didn't Van Tam say yesterday he liaised closely with Israel over the myocarditis signal in Spring 2020 ,so one assumes they were made aware of this, even though it was all 'a bit foggy'. Also McCullough and Rose had found in 2021 that the VAERS data the rate of myocarditis was 19 times higher than expected in 12-15y olds. Their paper was withdrawn shortly after publication.
The MHRA had issued us a warning on 25th June 2021 that the risk of myocarditis was ‘extremely rare’ https://www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/covid-19-vaccines-updates-for-july-2021 (I’m not sure how ‘extremely rare’ is defined but rare = 1 in 10 000 to 1 in 1000 and very rare = less than 1 in 10000). On 29th November 2021, the UKHSA belatedly issued guidance for healthcare professionals, warning of the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis after Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines. Disappointingly, they quoted pooled risks of 10 myocarditis REPORTS per million doses of Pfizer and 36 per million for Moderna. I know that this would have led some clinicians to conclude that the risk of myocarditis with Pfizer was 1 in 100,000 (very rare), as they would not appreciate the under-reporting bias and the paradox where age-stratified risk is lost in pooled analysis. Only a day earlier, a population cohort study in Hong Kong was published, demonstrating that amongst 12-17 years old males, there was a risk of 1 in 2679 (rare) with the second dose (https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/75/4/673/6445179).
Thank you Helen for such a well constructed explanation so perfectly backed with facts not speculation. Greatly appreciated.
Thanks. I have the benefit of the notes I made at the time. Having looked at the evidence then I could not agree with the strategy of exposing young people to unnecessary risk. But I also feared that I might lose my GMC registration if someone perceived I was speaking out of line.. so all advice given had to be thoroughly evidence-based, with careful appraisal of evidence as it emerged piecemeal, and advice had to also include the rationale for the official NHS and govt guidance, as well as highlighting areas of uncertainty. Actually most people seem to weigh official guidance far more highly than any other source of evidence. People really trust the regulators to make thorough and impartial risk assessments on their behalf.
To give fully informed consent to a teenager took longer than 15 minutes. It also felt potentially very risky so always there was that in the background. Far easier and quicker to simply signpost people to MHRA/ukhsa statements on risk, but also not entirely honest once you have seen how pooled risks can be really misleading for the individual.
Sadly for many people the drive to conform with their peer group was far more important than even very carefully laid out evidence. Simply put it mattered more to them that they might not be allowed to go on a school trip or go on holiday with their mates or to a nightclub than whether their decision might have life changing health consequences.
I hope we never have to relive such times. We can only hope for that if we actually learn from our mistakes, which in turn can only happen if we admit that mistakes were made and try to understand how it all played out. These sorts of issues divided families. It was so very very toxic.
That thing about the decision makers not wanting to send out the wrong message in case it fuelled vaccine hesitancy is so important in my opinion. I wish we could outlaw pharma-generated terms like vaccine hesitancy, conspiracy theorist, misinformation and anti-vax, as they can lead to loss of objectivity when it comes to individual risk assessment and risk communication.
I so agree. Another very serious factor to consider is the governmental and mass media fuelled hatred and disgust of anyone deciding against being vaccinated for what ever reason. This was broadcast ad infinitude, daily month in month out.
The zeitgeist became ANYONE unvaccinated was a pariah, a selfish irresponsible granny killer. A terrifying shift emerged whereby to be unvaccinated was to be a second-class citizen. This was made clear all over the world with leaders falling over themselves to express their hatred of anyone unvaccinated.
I’ll never forget Macron proudly saying he wanted to make life as difficult as possible for anyone in France who remained unvaccinated. Self appointed, so called celebrities jumped on the band wagon - all suddenly experts in vaccination, urging everyone, everywhere to get vaccinated urgently as quickly as possible. Famous rock stars announced they would only permit vaccinated fans into their concerts.
Workers in certain sectors refusing mandatory vaccines lost their jobs - apparently they will now be compensated in the United States. I wonder what will happen here. Nursing homes sacked qualified workers who refused to be vaccinated - the residents were vaccinated up to the hilt but were found to be dying from starvation and neglect due to lack of staff.
I cannot contemplate the horror that we’ve experienced over the last few years. My anchor has been TTE. I have never seen such madness in my life and I am no spring chicken I could not believe that this country went through 2 World Wars to have succumbed to this madness wherein two people couldn’t sit together on a bench, in the fresh air, on a mountain having a cup of coffee without being prosecuted. Did all those millions die in the Wars for the UK to become a police state, I’m sorry if this appears very emotional Helen I think I’m still in a state of shock.
The Canadian trackers for refusing to be forced to be vaccinated had their bank accounts frozen and list their livelihoods. We know here at TTE Carl and Tom were under state surveillance and were subjected to all sorts of professional and personal abuse - undermining them, questioning their work and basically trying to destroy, their credibility describing them as f******s.! Phew ….. I am off to meditate. Thank you for letting me let off steam.
Yes that was the most frightening aspect, the global dehumanisation and social death of this newly defined categorisation of 'other' ('the unvaccinated'). I also had sleepless nights for a long time. The momentum was so strong, especially in late 2021, with the de-banking of people who even made donations in support of the Canadian truckers; the job losses through mandates; the move towards compulsory vaccination in places like Austria and Germany even in the face of known risk of injury; the censoring, silencing and abuse of good scientists and clinicians like the TTE team, Gupta, Kulldorf, Bhattacharya & co (no doubt to make public examples to the rest of us); the general public ignorance, apathy, if not outright vocal support of all those things. And the relentless drip drip drip of poisonous invective channelled through the media. You've made me feel emotional too, remembering. But we should remember.
In 2022 48 deaths in England and Wales were acknowledged to have been caused by the astrazeneca vaccine. Of course there were also deaths in other countries. https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/astrazenecavaccinedamage
Are any readers aware if previous vaccines have caused comparable or greater numbers of deaths?
Thanks to the geezers for this important research.
For example, a quick search reveals the 1955 Cutter incident in which defective polio vaccines killed 10. The CDC calls this 'a defining moment in the history of vaccine[s]'. Yet this is a very small number compared to those killed by astrazeneca - many of whom were younger people at negligible risk from covid (whereas polio was a very real risk for the Cutter incident victims). The CDC lists a number of other past vaccine controversies, none of which seem to have resulted in deaths. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccine-safety/historical-concerns/index.html
Could it be argued that the Astrazeneca deaths are one of the worst vaccine scandals in history - perhaps the worst?
A Pandemrix vaccine report which includes input from Tom Jefferson.
https://archive.hshsl.umaryland.edu/bitstream/handle/10713/8270/Doshi_Pandermrix2018.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
I think it's true that this vaccine (although withdrawn from sale) continues to enjoy regulatory approval in the UK. Judicial Review?
If only Keith, those responsible should explain their grounds for continuing to ‘push’ ineffective and possibly dangerous drugs. I believed ‘drug pushing’ was a criminal offence in the UK.
It seems highly likely that the MHRA were reassured that the AstaZeneca shot was, in fact, a Welsh Choirboy.
Nice set of gongs they received and still wear with pride!