Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

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Why did Pfizer data for their COVID-19 vaccine not report the injury and paralysis of a 12-year-old participant in the clinical trial? From a June 2021 article by Robert Kennedy's CHD non-profit org, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/sen-johnson-ken-...

> Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) held a news conference Monday to discuss adverse reactions related to the COVID vaccines — giving individuals who have been “repeatedly ignored” by the medical community a platform to share their stories ... Among them was Maddie de Garay from Ohio who volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial when she was 12. On Jan. 20, Maddie received her second dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine as a participant in the clinical trial for 12- to 15-year-olds and is now in a wheelchair ... “Why is she not back to normal? She was totally fine before this,” said Stephanie de Garay, Maddie’s mother. She volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial “to help everyone else and they’re not helping here. Before Maddie got her final dose of the vaccine she was healthy, got straight As, had lots of friends and had a life.”

> ... Upon receiving the second shot, Maddie immediately felt pain at the injection site and over the next 24-hours developed severe abdominal and chest pain, de Garay said at the press event. Maddie told her mother it felt like her heart was being ripped out through her neck, and she had painful electrical shocks down her neck and spine that forced her to walk hunched over ... She developed gastroparesis, nausea and vomiting, erratic blood pressure, memory loss, brain fog, headaches, dizziness, fainting, seizures, verbal and motor tics, menstrual cycle issues, lost feeling from the waist down, lost bowel and bladder control and had an nasogastric tube placed because she lost her ability to eat.

> ... Johnson argued that while most people don’t suffer significant side effects following vaccination, he is concerned about “that small minority that are suffering severe symptoms.”

80-min video of June 2021 news conference: https://rumble.com/vj5xbf-senator-ron-johnson-milwaukee-news...

The more we know about the statistical minority who suffer severe adverse reactions, the better we can screen vaccine recipients to avoid unusual but life-altering injuries.

Great question. The unfortunate thing about the reporting from Kennedy's org is they raise questions like this without chasing them.

They are only half curious and the result is a half story.

They also seem to have limited understanding of statistics, chasing anecdotes and ignoring results (the data eventually has tended to contradict their messaging). Unfortunately, I agree that makes them rather useless as a source for answers, and means even if they do find an anomaly, it will be lost in their self-generated noise ratio. Plus, a broken clock is right twice a day, and all that.

What do you think of Steve Kirsch's analysis of VAERS and his testimony to the recent FDA advisory committee meeting? https://www.skirsch.com/covid/Deaths.pdf

> Analysis of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database can be used to estimate the number of excess deaths caused by the COVID vaccines. A simple analysis shows that it is likely that over 150,000 Americans have been killed by the current COVID vaccines as of Aug 28, 2021 ... I’m offering a $1M academic grant to anyone who can show the analysis is flawed by a factor of 4 or more in either direction and provide a more accurate analysis to the correct number. We’ll have a panel of 3 judges decide if we disagree. Please send me an InMail on LinkedIn if you think you found I was off by a factor of 4 or more. First one to show the “correct” answer gets the $1M research grant.

2021-09-17 testimony to FDA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFph7-6t34M&t=15617s

Kirsch founded the C-19 Early Treatment Fund, https://www.treatearly.org/

Even if I was to accept that 150k deaths was plausible (which I don’t, since that would show up in excess deaths and other gross statistical measures), that’s still more 10x safer than being unvaccinated (we’ve vaccinated far more people than have gotten COVID, and at a much lower death rate). If the high estimates by someone openly against this vaccine still tell you it is far safer to be vaccinated, what does tell you about what I think of Steve Kirsch?

Kirsch is advocating for the identification of high-risk groups and screening of recipients, not a blanket criticism of vaccines for all people.

We are living in the era of sophisticated micro-targeting of groups via advertising profiles and machine learning. Why are our online narratives degenerating into dualistic debates, as if we can only count to two? We have the technology to perform granular, data-driven risk assessment across a wide range of variables.

At a minimum, we can fund forensic investigations of the reports in VAERS, collecting whatever data is needed to trace the root cause of each injury, removing every report that is not credible. Where necessary, we can identify the need for additional data collection, e.g. baseline testing of high-risk individuals before vaccination, for comparison to post-vaccination tests. Standard scientific analysis.

There are also non-public reporting systems (e.g. HMOs) for vaccine adverse events. That additional data is available to CDC.

They aren’t permitted to delete reports, even non-credible ones.

It would also likely cost far in excess of $1M to investigate these. It is a clever trick though, because it sounds like a big bounty, while being actually a joke amount (he’s proposing spending far less $10 per person to investigate their medical records or autopsy). And seems possibly in bad-faith too, as he seems to be rejecting the population statistical data that already seem to refute his claims.

Advocating for identification of high-risk groups is another good smoke-screen since he’s saying nothing new, but making it sound like he’s smart and aware. Yes, there are people who need to talk to their doctor about risks, but the overwhelming majority of people aren’t in that group, but are made needlessly worried by such rhetorical tricks.

I can't be certain what he meant, but it seemed that the bounty was for an analysis that was comparable to those in his paper, not a full forensic review of each entry in VAERS.

An actual investigation could only be done by CDC, who have access to non-VAERS reports and other health surveillance infrastructure. A handful of independent autopsies have been done, they are expensive.

Do you take seriously the proposition that more than 100k Americans could die from the vaccine without us noticing? This would easily put it in the top 10 causes of death in America. And presumably this w would be happening worldwide, at an even greater scale.

More than 2 billion people have gotten a vaccine worldwide.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. VAERS is self-reported and (as this shows) not reliable data.

Honestly I think you're proving the need for this ban on YouTube. You seem to be trying to get it right, but you've been hoodwinked by the misinformation.

It is indeed hard to get it right, and this is killing people.

A successful (somewhere between millionaire and billionaire) entrepreneur has put his credibility on the line with those extremely astonishing claims. He put $1M of his own money into an institution to investigate early treatment for Covid, using existing drugs. Donors to CETF include Marc Benioff, Elon Musk Foundation & Vint Cerf, i.e. reputable tech entrepreneurs, https://www.treatearly.org/donors. The work of CETF was endorsed by staff at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, UCSF, Yale & others, https://www.treatearly.org/testimonials.

He provided a 30 page document referencing the analysis of other doctors, explaining the rationale for those estimates. He has further offered $1,000,000 dollars to anyone who can show that the estimate is off by a factor of 4X, i.e. making the task easier for the person challenging his extraordinary claims.

His claims are so far from anyone's expectations that it should be trivial to disprove, right? There's a bug bounty of $1M dollars available to anyone. Why is no one bothering to claim it?

> His claims are so far from anyone's expectations that it should be trivial to disprove, right? There's a bug bounty of $1M dollars available to anyone. Why is no one bothering to claim it?

Because no one who would be interested in disproving it trusts the person offering the bounty to be doing so in good faith.

For some reason, this makes me think of duels :) Both parties would need to trust the judging entity and he didn't name the individuals in the panel of three. In theory, that panel could be refined until both parties were happy. Funds could be put in escrow.

> Why is no one bothering to claim it?

I think of that old joke:

>>>>

The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, "Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!"

Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, "Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now."

>>>>>

Surely there is not a $1M bill lying on the ground, ripe for the taking. That's why I'm not bothering to claim it.

>A successful (somewhere between millionaire and billionaire) entrepreneur has put his credibility on the line with those extremely astonishing claims.

Credibility? You have to be joking, what does he actually have to lose? According to Wikipedia he had a quarter of a billion dollars 15 years ago! He gets to live by rules you and I don't even know are possible, but suffice it to say that credibility is only ever a problem for the little people. Look at trump, after all.

Sure, Just like Elon and Zuck he'll couch his ego trips as for the people and pursued at great personal cost, but what actual price is failure to him? I'm guessing his true risk is limited to some teasing in the sauna.

(non-American) what does it mean to be "flawed by a factor of 4"?

Is he referring to being off by 4 or more orders of magnitude?

As a non-affiliated, random reader of his document, I interpreted that as a linear multiple, i.e. show that deaths are less than 150,000 / 4 = 37,500.

If I were going to invest effort into a challenge, I would first contact Kirsch and obtain written clarification on terms.

There is a lot of shoddy methodology and data interpretation in Kirsch's testimony.

https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/do-pfizer-vaccines-ki...

Thanks for posting this detailed analysis.

The FDA estimated hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses in that age group to save one life, accepting dozens of cases of Myocarditis in the process. That is assuming literally no one dies from the vaccine.

Let us say the vaccine kills one in 100,000, that would be easily dismissed as chance. None of the trials could capture this. Yet, it would make the vaccine worse than the disease for that age group.

So your hypothesis is that the FDA correctly identified dozens of mild cases of myocarditis through their surveillance and reporting, while simultaneously failing to notice hundreds of deaths?

Do you see why that sounds implausible?

The Myocarditis cases aren't all mild, they have led to heart failure and at least some of them are likely to lead to premature death. Consider that the JCVI (UK) does not recommend the second vaccine dose for children, due to this risk.

Secondly, I'm not saying that this has happened, there is no way for me to know. I'm saying that it is possible to identify such cases and still dismiss them. Sudden cardiac death in youth isn't that rare and even hundreds of excess cases could fall under the radar.

I'd also argue that the incentives are such that a dismissal is likely, now that the CDC has recommended the vaccine for children. The CDC used VAERS data in this assessment, which is incomplete to some degree and the window within which a possible side-effect is considered is small (two weeks).

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