It was that time again, there on the turbulent waves of the sea called corona. Because nice, those corona vaccines, but generally speaking, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. To be precise: the chance of serious side effects is three times higher than the chance of ending up in hospital with severe corona. The cure is worse than the disease, you would be crazy to get vaccinated.
It has been buzzing and reverberating for a few weeks now, there on the internet. ‘Shocking. So this puts a bomb under the claim that there are virtually no side effects. I think it’s over with this,” says former general practitioner and publicist Dick Bijl, in a statement internet video about the issue that was viewed a hundred thousand times. Comment below: ‘It remains astonishing that the mainstream media does not pick up on this!!! Our loved ones are in danger.’
You could shrug it off, if it weren’t for the fuss and the fact that the study in question looks so reliable. One on the eye neat pre-publication, not yet officially published in a professional journal, but written by seven respectable researchers, led by medical anthropologist Peter Doshi of the stately Stanford University. Already over half a million times the study was consulted. Exceptional for a technical article full of quibbles about p-values and confidence intervals, but it will mainly be because it feels so nice in the hand: ideal for beating all those stupid sheep that have had themselves vaccinated.
In the study, Doshi re-analyzes the results of the first trials with the corona vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, from the end of 2020. extensive checklist of possible side effects that other scientists drew up early in the pandemic.
The result? Per ten thousand vaccinates, the Pfizer vaccine caused 10.1 more side effects, and that of Moderna 15.1 more side effects than in people who received a placebo shot. In the meantime, there were 2.3 and 6.4 hospital admissions due to corona, respectively, among the vaccinated. In other words: the disadvantages with Pfizer are four times greater than the advantages and with Moderna more than twice. “Our results show a risk of serious side effects that is greater than the reduction in Covid-19 hospitalizations,” the team writes.
Can’t get a pin in between, you might say. Well, until you look under the hood. ‘They make some very strange choices’, says professor of biostatistics Miriam Sturkenboom, after perusing the study. Sturkenboom has the right to speak: she is one of the authors of the side effects list who used Doshi. And her verdict is damning: ‘What they report here is absolutely not a correct analysis of harmfulness and efficacy, and therefore misleading.’
That starts with Doshi’s comparison between vaccine side effects and hospital admissions. The ‘serious’ list of side effects also includes fairly harmless things such as diarrhea and skin rashes, which usually don’t end up in hospital. Not fair to compare that to a hospital patient with serious covid. Doshi also did not count the unvaccinated who died of corona. A dead man is not a hospital patient, is he?
Another thing: the people with the vaccine side effects sometimes count double. Someone who got more than one side effect after vaccination – say: diarrhea and high blood pressure – counts as two. That’s coming along nicely.
But perhaps the most dubious trick is that Doshi deleted all kinds of side effects from the list of Sturkenboom and her colleagues. For puzzling reasons: for example, Doshi counted high blood sugar, but not low blood sugar. That smacks of ‘p-hacking’, according to British doctor Susan Oliver, among others, in a harsh comment: statistical fine-tuning to make the research figures stand out better. Sturkenboom puts it dryly: ‘I wonder whether this research design has been laid down in advance in a publicly known protocol, or whether people are mainly trying to find support for the hypothesis.’
For example, the illusion of the Failing Corona Vaccine crumbles, as you remove more mirrors, to what it really is. A ramshackle investigation, in which everything squeaks and creaks and which even has a smell of peasant deceit.
Wonderful actually. People in corona skeptic circles are extremely suspicious of studies by the established order – scientists and universities are all in cahoots with the government and industry, it is soon called.
Until such a mainstream study suddenly claims something that does seem to confirm the Great Displeasure. Then the distrust immediately turns into gullibility and people nod meekly: you see, it has been proven!