How much confidence do you have in a new product that has been tested for only a few months?
People are clamoring to get the new COVID products, including those who might have been in the placebo group in the Pfizer and Moderna trials. Now, they can get their shots because trials that were supposed to continue for two years are being terminated prematurely.
As Shannon Brownlee, a lecturer at George Washington University School of Public Health, and Jeanne Lenzer, author of The Danger Within Us: America’s Untested, Unregulated Medical Device Industry and One Man’s Battle to Survive It, point out, “Many vaccines, along with drugs and medical devices, look ‘miraculous’ at first—only to turn out to be less so as more data comes in.”
The possibility that the FDA might fail to insist on further testing once vaccines were marketed was pointed out in September by Howard Bauchner, M.D., editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). “Prematurely approving a vaccine could undermine Covid-19 vaccine efforts and erode confidence in vaccines more generally.”
Vaccine adverse effects are tracked by the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), but reporting is voluntary and incomplete. And without a controlled trial, it is hard to determine whether the vaccine caused the effect.
More than a dozen countries, mostly in Europe, temporarily halted the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine because of reports of serious or deadly bleeding or blood clotting problems, but then restarted them after the European regulatory agency declared the product safe. It was not clear that the rate of post-vaccine problems was greater than the background rate.
But on Mar 31, Germany suspended the product in persons under the age of 60 due to renewed concerns. The regulatory agency found 31 cases of rare blood clots in veins draining the brain (cerebral venous sinus thrombosis).
While the demand for vaccines is high overall, there is also considerable resistance, especially in health workers. In Switzerland, at most half of health workers were willing to get inoculated. In Germany, a survey by a care home operator found that only 30% wanted to get vaccinated. Half of French workers say they will resist.
French hospitals had to slow the rollout because 25 percent of workers were too sick to work for a time after the injections.
As trust diminishes, more coercive measures are being used to get people to take the jabs.
For information on prevention and early treatment protocols, see c19protocols.com.
