Thank you for your reply Phil McCurdy. We called my wife’s reaction an allergic reaction also, but it was certainly atypical for an allergic reaction and she certainly wasn’t panicking. She had an out of body feeling and some vision alteration, as well as a sustained rise of pulse to 130 before it decreased to normal after 30 minutes. Hard to explain I know.
My friend’s husband is a healthy farmer, and has never had a stroke or TIA before or since, just that episode with garbled speech and confusion for 30 minutes about 6 hours after the vaccine, given at the VA. Interestingly, he did not go to the ER, and the VA insisted he take the second dose, which he did, and had no further stroke. I was upset with him for not going to the ER, and for taking the second dose.
Let me tell you a story about vaccine side effects. I was an intern at the Tampa VA when the swine flu vaccine was rushed out because the CDC thought this would be the great pandemic repeating the 1918 flu pandemic. I took the vaccine and was sick for 2 days, with no reactions to flu shots before or since. I took care of a gentleman who took this flu shot and within an hour did not feel well, and within 24 hours developed severe Guillain-Barre that went on to paralyze him from neck down and become ventilator dependent. We kept him alive in the ICU for 6 months but eventually he succumbed to resistant pneumonia. After 25 deaths and 300 cases of Guillain-Barre, eventually 52 deaths, the government stopped the vaccine program. The pandemic never materialized. Contrast that to the present VAERS death total of about 9,000 or 14,000+ depending on the parameters put in, and the FDA, CDC and NIH are all recommending that not only do we not stop this, but vaccinate every single human being. It makes no medical sense to me at all.
I always take my vaccines, and gave thousands of Pneumovax shots, flu shots, tetanus shots, Shingrix and on and on to my patients over the years, but I believe we have a problem with these particular mRNA vaccines. We need to face up to it that these are really not very safe and not very effective. We need to move on to other means to fight the SARS-COV-2 and all the variants coming to us soon. Thanks for letting me express my concerns Phil.
Just to be clear (and I am asking for confirmation of this from any of you that know) … VAERS doesn’t mean these people all died from the vaccine or that the vaccine even necessarily caused any problems - these are just reports submitted of any (even suspected) adverse reactions, right? And I’m pretty sure it would be huge news if the vaccine was known to have killed thousands. There will have been thousands of vaccinated people by now who will have died for reasons unrelated to the vaccine. Are those the ones you’re including to get these inflated figures?
[And just to answer my own question here …yeah - VAERS are unverified reports of just any and all deaths no matter how they were caused. And even if these were all vaccine-related (they aren’t) - but even these inflated numbers make up only a miniscule percentage of the total population vaccinated.]
Just to throw my own anecdotal numbers and experience into the mix - none of my own fully vaccinated family suffered any more than the usual slight side effects after the 2nd shot. And of our relatives and friends - we have lost a few (elderly ones) by now; none of them were vaccinated; one or two by choice and most of them because they died before the vaccine was available.
Yet for all this, Phil remains right. Our anecdotal experiences cannot capture what’s going on like the actual research and statistics on millions of people can.
I think caution is a good trait. I have always avoided being a early adopter of new drugs and technology myself. My feeling with this is that the risks of the disease make the risk of the unknown with the vaccine justified, and now with close to 3 billion people vaccinated worldwide, the data is really pretty good.
a) the higher the percentage of people that are fully vaccinated, the proportion of infected people who were previously vaccinated will be higher. it can be helpful to break this down by case rate per capita instead
b) is your experience usual or unusual? how could you test this idea? it turns out that many states track the rate of cases in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated populations, here is some CDC data:
How are you judging this? Because these people were infected? Does that mean the vaccine was a failure or not so effective? On average, people who are infected but fully vaccinated would have been worse off.
I was infected after being fully vaccinated after 8 hours of exposure and had a very mild case. I’ll call that a success/win for the vaccine! Plus on average, fully vaccinated people clear the virus quicker and have a less infectious viral load.
Not only did the pandemic fail to appear, but the vaccine apparently harmed some people. Health officials suspended the vaccination campaign on Dec 16, 1976, after receiving numerous reports of Guillian-Barre syndrome (GBS), a paralyzing neurologic illness, after vaccination, according to an August 1979 report in the American Journal of Epidemiology . Nationwide surveillance detected 1,098 patients with GBS onset from October 1976 through January 1977. Epidemiologic evidence suggested that many cases were related to vaccination, with an estimated risk of 1 case for every 100,000 vaccinations.
Interestingly, scientists never saw the same concerning safety signal with GBS again after that particular year. How they do that is that you have to compare the rate of adverse effects to the background rate in the population. But VAERs is awful for doing this because there is no control group. It is useful to help point out potential safety signals, but each case report needs to be investigated further by medical researchers.
Sadly over 1500 unvaccinated Americans were dying everyday during the month of September and could still be alive to spend another Christmas with their families.
They are amazing at saving lives, but let’s look at safety signals. They are constantly being weighed against the benefit by recommending bodies. But let’s look at the safety signal.
For example, let’s say you took ten million people who are over the age of 75 and vaccinated them. The mortality rate is approximately 0.069 per year for this age group. This background mortality rate is fairly evenly spread throughout the year so we could expect that on average, how many will die within a month of getting the vaccine?
Approximately 57,500 people in this age range will die every month on average, vaccine or not.
How many people will have heart attacks during this window?
It turns out there were 60 heart attacks in the control group and… 59 in the vaccinated group. 284 people had arrhythmia in the control group and 254 in the vaccinated group. They also compared this to people who were infected by covid-19:
You do actually see a small increase in GBS in the AstraZeneca vaccine, at a rate of about 38 per 10 million vaccinated (about 1 in 260k). There were no statistically significant signals for the mRNA-based vaccines and these conditions. The rate of GBS in the infected group was about 4x higher than with the Astrazeneca vaccine.
I hope perhaps you might reconsider a $20 game changer that has saved many lives so far and will save many more to come.
Welcome! Maybe you can tell us more about yoursefl.
I’m a missionary kid from Africa (my family is originally from West Michigan, but I was born and grew up in Africa). I am a family doc in West Michigan, and in addition to daily dealing with new Covid cases (nearly all are non vaccinated), we get biweekly news from our major health group’s stats on Covid. The effectiveness of protection remains about 90%. The death rate is astoundingly higher in those who have not been vaccinated. Many, many of my patients have had Covid… Those who are sick, without a vaccine, are usually about 50 and have 2 major medical problems; and those who are sick, with a vaccine history, are on average 70 and have 4 major problems.
I plead with my patients and friends to protect themselves.
I am not sure what to make of the strokelike experience. I am sorry to hear of that. However, it is very important to make sure of correlation and causation not being mistaken. Covid is much more likely to cause a clot–it has way many more antigens, and causes a huge inflammatory reaction. I see many DVTs (deep venous thromboses) from Covid, but have never seen one from the mRNA vaccines, and they are not listed as being high risk. In the 70s, the H1N1 was inappropriately thought to be related to stroke and death. Because of the confusion, many would not take the shot, unfortunately.
I am glad when people feel achy and miserable after a Covid shot, as it shows they have a strong immune system. The body is making memories to never let that thing come back. Frequently, the elderly and immunocompromise do not get the interferon reaction, and do not make good responses. They are the ones more likely to get sick and not be protected by the vaccine.
CDC has much better, larger stats.
Thanks. I look forward to further discussion.
Is there anything other than the science that concerns you?
Thanks
Hi Mervin, Yes I agree it is difficult to get real numbers concerning deaths after the Covid-19 vaccines. I went to the VAERS site and a quick search of all deaths showed 12,939, but that is without parameters. The WONDER search system at VAERS is exceedingly cumbersome to use. Here is another site where the raw data appears to have been downloaded and analyzed and they came up with 17,128 deaths from the COVID vaccines.
I agree that the deaths may or may not relate to the vaccines, but with the hockey stick spike of deaths from vaccines from all years since 1990 to now occurring since the vaccines were introduced, one would have to think that the “unrelated deaths” factor is not relevant, since they would have been present all previous years. I can’t find the chart right now but as I recall usually only about 30 deaths per year from vaccines were reported to VAERS until this year.
Have you ever filed a VAERS report? I have and it’s a bear, with at least 30 minutes of work and attestation you are not filing a false report, and sometimes follow up. Under-reporting of the actual numbers is a serious problem. In this 2020 study on VAERS sensitivity of anaphylaxis and Guillain-Barre, VAERS sensitivity ranged from 13-76% on anaphylaxis and 12-64% on Guillain-Barre.
Unfortunately, I think the problem is much worse than we are being told, and I base that belief on several whistleblower reports. I think the most convincing is the interview on thehighwire.com with Deborah Conrad, PA-C, an emergency room PA in New York state who is quite credible. I believe she is sincerely interested in the welfare of patients in her hospital, and I would have been honored to work with her, but she has been forced to resign.
The interview is about an hour long, but I hope you will take time to listen to it. It is well worth your time.
Sorry, yes, I meant to say that was in 1976 during the swine flu epidemic. That’s very interesting data from the Israeli study. Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think they mentioned the ultimate adverse effect: death.
Hi Randy, the other reply was meant for pevaquark above. Anyway, thanks very much. I am a preacher’s kid and primary care internist. I retired just in time, Jan 2020, after 41 years of practice. Yes, I have very serious concerns that the CDC, FDA and NIH have completely let us down, and perhaps to see why you might want to listen to the interview with Deborah Conrad, PA-C on thehighwire.com I mentioned above to Mervin. It’s a long interview but well worth your time.
Hi Dale, you don’t have to agree with thehighwire.com folks to listen to the interview. Please keep an open mind and listen to the interview. Let me know what you think. Thanks.
Additionally, I followed up on ICAN. Consider reading this response paper, they are still fighting the vaccines cause autism angle https://www.icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/No-50.pdf
Their funding and other mechanisms are not transparent and have suspicious elements.
Deborah also does not disclose her ongoing lawsuit prior to this, and refused to get tested regularly in place of the vaccine, did not mention understanding VAERS while working 15 years, and the entire process is edited and one-sided.
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for your comments. I think the point is no one ever told her about VAERS in her ongoing education. When she tried to help her doctors to comply with adverse event reporting she was shut down, and her world was turned upside down. I don’t blame her for filing a lawsuit. Anyway, thanks for listening to the interview.
Warwick
Even if we were to accept the entirely unsupported number you put forward of 14000 deaths as being “because of the vaccine”, even then - that would still be a quite low percentage of the hundreds of millions who have been vaccinated without significant incident. And if even a fraction of those actually existed as documentable real cases, there would be explosions of “sorry vaxxer” web sites and obituaries that would be trumpeted all across the web and conservative media outlets. We would never hear the end of it. Instead we see bottomless lists of “sorry anti-vaxxers”, and realities that again and again fail to support your fears.
Can you understand why there are so many people who regret listening to these unsupportable fears that have so riveted your attention? We want to be promoting real data like Pevaquark does above. How should you respond when real data continually shows your fears unjustified and even harmful?
Every time I have a patient admitted, intubated, or die with Covid, I have a sick feeling in my stomach. It is happening all too often lately. The morbidity is incredibly less with the vaccine. Thanks.
This is getting into the realm of blatant false statements. It misrepresents numbers as being something they are not. Even if 17,128 people have died, it in no way means it was FROM the vaccines. Here are a couple of articles explaining how VAERS works. One of the articles stated that there were actually only 3 deaths directly attributed to the vaccine, which may be low, but shows the difference in what is being presented and what is actually verified as causative.
The last 2 years have been pretty difficult. However, I’m just starting to get some more hope with the vaccine.
Thank you for your hard work.
I am curious–how do you feel about other vaccines? Andrew Wakefield, MMR, polio, Hep B?
I grew up in West Africa, where 1/3 of the population had Hep B, an easily preventable disease… About a third of them died of cirrhosis and cancer. In addition, many, including some missionary kids, died of preventable diseases.
I do think that more people, including PAs and medical students, need to know about both VAERS and drug post marketing reports. That would take away a lot of angst. I am afraid that it’s probably better to trust people who know what they’re talking about, like epidemiologists and virologists; folks like Dr Fauci and Dr Collins. They really know their stuff–more than you or I do.
One example of post marketing confusion with meds you may have run in to-- levothyroxine “causes” fatigue. This is misleading, likely post marketing, and not really a true, or factually based, report. In fact, a relative of mine with heart disease felt tired. When he read that his levothyroxine, which improves energy by replacing a lack of thyroid, could cause fatigue (on the pharmacy print out of post marketing list, I think), he stopped his levothyroxine. Instead of reporting an anginal problem, he treated himself by stopping his thyroid med. Unfortunately, he felt more tired. He did eventually see the cardiologist, but post marketing information needs clarification.
Thank you for your excellent service to the folks in Gastonia (near Charlotte; my sister was an ICU nurse across the state to the north, in Greensboro. She took care of quite a few people who died of Covid. She is now a missionary in Africa). It is a pleasure to meet and discuss with you.
A wider view to the topic can be seen by looking in the history of vaccinations. I just read a bit about that.
As far as I understood, the first vaccinations were against the smallpox. At least in my country, the most eager opponents of the vaccinations were people offering ‘natural’ treatments to sick people. They had ideological and possibly also financial reasons to oppose medical treatments. Some believers and other people joined them, strengthened by international connections between people having similar kind of ideas. When reading old advertisements of that time, one can find almost all claims that are used today against covid vaccines.
The first vaccinations were made by a method that sometimes lead to serious side effects. The method was ‘hand to hand’, where the virus was put into a small wound in the arm. When the wound formed fluids, these fluids were used in the vaccination of the next patients. This method also transfered other diseases between the patients. This naturally caused suspicion and opposition against vaccines.
When the vaccination developed by the use of needles and vaccines that did not originate from humans, the acceptance of the vaccines increased. One fact that worked in favor of vaccinations was that a high number of unvaccinated people died while only few of the vaccinated succumbed.
When new vaccines were developed and the benefits of vaccination became more evident, the majority of people started to have a positive or neutral attitude towards vaccination. Only a small and loud minority remained critical against vaccinations.
So, nothing new in the current situation. The facts about the benefits of vaccination will convince most people, sooner or later. As during earlier history, a small and loud minority will continue to oppose vaccinations.
