Covid News: Covid jabs – benefits and risks from real-life data

In this Covid News we get to the heart of the matter of how effective covid vaccinations were and whether the benefits really did outweigh the risks given what we know about how to support our innate immunity with vitamin C, D, zinc and other nutrients.

Those who followed my Covid News reports will know that I have never been ‘anti-vax’ but have had serious concerns about the scale of benefit – and the scale of potential harm from the covid vaccinations. My concerns were both because no flu vaccine has even been 50% effective and since new vaccine technology was being employed the potential risk of unknown adverse effects was always going to be high. This is because the final stage of any scientific assessment has to involve ‘post-surveillance’ that is an objective measures of actual benefits and harms. This information was not available until recently.

Cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, whom many will know was an advocate for vaccination,  has published an in-depth analysis of the actual benefit and risks of vaccination in the peer-reviewed Journal of Insulin Resistance which helps us to step back and look at the actual facts, not rhetoric, about harms and benefits. These facts were not easily available during the pandemic since there was an unprecedented control of information to ensure as many as possible got vaccinated.

A good way to measure benefit and risk is to work out what’s called the ‘Numbers Needed to Treat’, or NNT, for one to benefit; and the Numbers Needed to treat for Harm to one person, or the NNH.

Here’s a few key findings.

The NNT for vaccination to prevent one infection was 119 during the delta wave of infection. The source of this is the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

The NNT to prevent a death from COVID was:

  • 230 for those over 80
  • 520 for 70-79 year olds
  • 1,300 for 60-69 year olds
  • 2,600 for 50-59 year olds
  • 10,000 for 40-49 year olds
  • 27,000 for 30-39 year olds
  • 93,000 for 18-29 year olds

During the Omicron wave, when vaccines became less effective, the NNT to prevent one covid death dropped to:

  • 7,300 for 80+ year olds
  • 17,000 for 70-79  year olds
  • 30,000 for 60-69 year olds
  • 63,000 for 50-59 year olds
  • 167,000 for 40-49 year olds

This scale of benefit concurs with the original controlled trial of 40,000 people which reported no statistically significant reduction in death. This was the big red flag that you’d have to be vaccinating at least more than 40,000 to potentially save a life.

How harmful were the covid vaccinations?

There are a few ways to investigate this question, one being the Yellow Card reporting system set up by the Medicines Health product Regulatory Authority (MHRA), which is the Government’s watchdog for the pharmaceutical industry, yet receives 86% of its funding from big pharma. There are a few caveats when looking at numbers from this system. Firstly, remarkably few people reporting symptoms use it. In other studies the degree of under-reporting is never less than 50% but usually 90%. In other words, real-life figures are likely to be 2 to 10 times higher. There have been close to half a million – 432,819 yellow card reports –  of adverse drug reactions. In reality it is highly likely there have been at least double this, namely over a million adverse reactions occurring in the over 50 million people who were vaccinated.

Quoting Dr Malhotra in his first paper listed below “The MHRA figures show around 1 in 120 suffering a likely adverse event that is beyond mild.(30) However, the MHRA are unclear about the rate and furthermore do not separate out the serious adverse events. Nevertheless, this level of reporting is unprecedented in the modern medical era and equals the total number of reports received in the first 40 years of the Yellow Card reporting system (for all medicines – not just vaccines) up to 2020.(33) In comparison, for the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, the number of reports per person vaccinated was around 1 in 4000, more than thirty times less frequent than the 1 in 120 Yellow Card reports for COVID-19 vaccine recipients.(34)” (See Malhotra’s paper below for these references.)

A report by Peter Doshi of the British Medical Journal concluded that a person was “more likely to suffer a serious adverse event from mRNA jab than be hospitalised from covid.” A serious adverse event, or SAE, is one that requires hospitalisation or results in death.

In North America researchers looking at data from the FDA, Health Canada and the Pfizer and Moderna trials concluded that one in 800 vaccinated have an SAE, which is considerably higher than the risk of hospitalisation from covid infection reported in randomized controlled trials.  In Norway 1 in 926 people given an mRNA vaccination have an SAE. This is based on a two month trial so knock on events after two months may worsen this situation.

Dr Aseem Malhotra, being a cardiologist, was particularly focussed on cardiovascular problems which are on the WHO list of potential SAEs from covid vaccinations, and especially mRNA vaccines. It is now well established that the injected spike protein and nano particles used to deliver the load are distributed around the body and stay for up to 4 months with the potential to induce inflammation. I discussed this with cardiovascular disease expert Dr Malcolm Kendrick in his podcast The Clot Thickens. He made it clear that clotting is part of the response to an mRNA vaccine, and to covid infection.

What is especially concerning is the increase in heart attacks among young people. A study in Israel reported a 25% increase in heart attacks and associated deaths in 16-19 yr olds post vaccination. Leaked audio from a June 2022 meeting between Israeli researchers and the Israeli Ministry of Health reveals the Pfizer jab caused long-term adverse effects and is associated with more severe side effects upon rechallenge (i.e., with repeated doses).  Data from Israel shows the inflammatory heart condition, myocarditis, is occurring at a rate of 1 in 6,000 post-vaccination. Hong Kong data from male children and teens reported a rate of 1 in 2,700. Myocarditis risk is a reality yet one that is still denied by the UK MHRA despite listing 2,183 yellow card reports of myocarditis following vaccination.

When finding an association the next step is to explore the mechanism that could explain this. Pathologist, Ryan Cole, concludes that the injected gene sequence designed to produce spike proteins, and the nano particles that accompany the load, circulate for at least 60 days. Some studies have shown they can circulate for 4 months post injection.

These spike proteins from the vaccine, says Cole, promote cholesterol crystal release from arteries, and amyloid protein, which is hard to break down and found in the brains of those with Alzheimer’s dementia, as a response to inflammation. Muscles cells are attacked and potentially destroyed by cytokines produced by the inflammatory process,forming scarring. This mechanism could explain the muscle aches, tiredness and reduced lung capacity experienced by many post vaccination (and also  in long covid).

In the UK there are a number of inquests going on regarding young adults who died shortly after Astra Zeneca vaccination. How many, I don’t know. There have been 80 ‘yellow card’ deaths due to thrombocytopenia reported for the COVID-19  AstraZeneca vaccine. The MHRA “has received 820 UK reports of suspected ADRs to the COVID-19 Pfizer/BioNTech Vaccine in which the patient died after vaccination, 1,301 reports for the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca, 70 reports for the COVID-19 Vaccine Moderna and 49 reports where the brand of vaccine was unspecified.” That’s 2,240 deaths associated with vaccination of which 55 occurred in people under the age of 30.

Yellow card reported deaths are usually less than half what occurs in real life so it is not unreasonable to assume that somewhere in the order of at least 5,000 deaths following vaccination may have occurred. For comparison, annual deaths from road traffic accidents are 1,516. Total UK deaths with covid on the death certificate were 172,383. Total deaths of those under 30 within 28 days of testing covid positive were 592.

The Office of National Statistics records 36,175 deaths involving covid in the ‘ever-vaccinated’ and 109,891 deaths in the unvaccinated up to May 2022. If one was even to falsely assume that all the deaths in the unvaccinated would have been prevented with vaccination this would mean that for every 22 lives potentially saved by vaccination one person would die as a consequence of it. Would even this be an acceptable risk? Given what we know about how boosting vitamin D levels, and taking high dose vitamin C upon infection reduces covid severity and risk of death, and how easy it would have been for governments to promote these public health strategies, there is very good reason for outrage.

As of now the UK’s National Institute of Clinical Evidence (NICE), and their RAPID-C19 expert group, having confirmed that there are ‘18 potentially relevant studies’ of vitamin C for covid and, says NICE, ‘We can confirm that neither NICE nor RAPID C-19 carried out a review of any of the 18 papers’. It is strange how they know they are potentially relevant yet have not carried out a review of any of them.

References

Dr Aseem Malhotra’s article is published here, in two parts:

Malhotra A. Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine – Part 1. J. insul. resist. 2022;5(1), a71. https://doi.org/10.4102/jir. v5i1.71

Malhotra A. Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine – Part 2. J. insul. resist. 2022;5(1), a72. https://doi.org/10.4102/jir. v5i1.72

His presentation, at the World Council for health, is viewable here:

https://worldcouncilforhealth.org/multimedia/aseem-malhotra-press-conference/

All statements in this article come from these sources.