I am a physician-epidemiologist who has consistently questioned the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines. In the summer of 2021, I was the lead author on the first major study pointing out the risks of post-Pfizer vaccination myocarditis in adolescents. We found that the potential benefits of full vaccination did not appear to outweigh the risks in healthy adolescent males just looking at post-vaccination myocarditis risks alone. Not long after, I was senior author of another analysis published in BMJ-Journal of Medical Ethics that found the harms of the booster dose in college age students likely outweighed potential benefits by at least 18-fold. What is more, I have written multiple times about the COVID-19 vaccines being implicated in numerous deaths and have a related peer-reviewed paper hopefully coming soon. Finally, I have most recently voiced my concern about the production process of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine and the potential risks of DNA plasmid contamination to the Public Health Integrity Committee.
But if you want to bring attention to safety issues with the mRNA vaccines or other pharmaceutical products, using biased publications or prematurely jumping to conclusions is not the way to do it. We can’t complain about the pharmaceutical industry publishing biased research if we turn around and promote equally, if not more biased research about vaccine side-effects. Not only do we need scientists who are not captured by pharma, we need scientists who are not captured in general – by any ideology. We need scientists who are critical thinkers and can acknowledge limitations in data and identify inappropriate methods and causal inference.
Furthermore, avoiding inappropriately scaring people – be it about Covid or the vaccines – is good public health.
17 million deaths due to the vaccines?
Bret Weinstein (in his fascinating interview) on Tucker Carlson said he “saw a credible estimate of 17 million [deaths] globally from this technology”, meaning the vaccines. Now, this was a bit confusing since they were discussing mRNA vaccines at this moment and it was unclear if he meant all types of Covid vaccines. But I immediately thought: 1) Woah… what percent of vaccinated people would have died and how many people would that mean would have died in little, highly-vaccinated Denmark? (For those who don’t know, I am a Danish citizen). Then I thought: 2) What confounded dataset did he use to get this estimate?
But I also want to point out I found it interesting Bret did not give any sort of range in terms of potential numbers of people killed, how this estimate was arrived at or what kind of residual uncertainty there was about the estimate.
To answer the second question so you are not scrolling ahead, I quickly learned Bret was referring to this analysis by Rancourt, Baudin, Hickey and Mercier, J.: ‘COVID-19 vaccine-associated mortality in the Southern Hemisphere.’
Hellbound and Down 