COVID vaccine side effects thousands of times worse than reported

Israel’s newly released tracking data on recipients of a booster (third dose) of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine show a far grimmer reality for the health of those people than previously reported.

CDC’s passive surveillance not good enough

In a powerpoint presentation dated December 2021, the CDC COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force’s Vaccine Safety Team openly describes a drawback in its vaccine tracking system :

“Limitations … 

VAERS is passive surveillance system

Therefore, case and death reporting rates might be underestimates.”

FDA to the rescue

The FDA boasts on its COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Surveillance page, also posted in December 2021, 

“The Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the FDA is monitoring the safety of authorized COVID-19 vaccines through both passive and active safety surveillance systems ... 

“Passive surveillance is defined as unsolicited reports of adverse events that are sent to a central database or health authority. In the United States, these are received and entered into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) that is co-managed by FDA and CDC. In the current pandemic, these reports are being used to monitor the occurrence of both known adverse events, as providers of COVID-19 vaccines are required to report serious adverse events to VAERS …

“Active surveillance involves proactively obtaining and rapidly analyzing information occurring in millions of individuals recorded in large healthcare data systems to verify safety signals identified through passive surveillance or to detect additional safety signals that may not have been reported as adverse events to passive surveillance systems. FDA is conducting active surveillance using the Sentinel BEST (Biologics Effectiveness and Safety) System and the CMS system.”

So when will we see the results of the FDA’s active surveillance? 

“Using BEST, CBER plans to monitor about 15 adverse events…”[Emphasis added].

That is, as of February 20, 2022, more than a year after the rollout of the new mRNA vaccines, the FDA website states that it still “plans to monitor” adverse events actively. That’s more time than it took to develop and test the vaccines themselves, which were brought to market in less than one year. 

Proper active surveillance

Even when the FDA releases its active surveillance data, it will simply be an analysis of existing data from healthcare systems, which means that it will miss unreported side effects that could be picked up by proactively contacting recipients of the vaccine. 

Israel’s Ministry of Health (MoH), on the other hand, already carried out active surveillance of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine that involved calling all 2,049 subjects 21-30 days after they received a third dose (booster shot) of the vaccine. 

Israel’s data release

The MoH study, released on February 10, 2022, did in fact uncover many side effects that were not reported to any health care system and were therefore overlooked in passive surveillance. The results, released on the MoH’s Telegram channel, are nothing less than shocking, prompting a group of volunteers to post an English translation of the entire document.

Vulnerable people are highest priority?

Perhaps the most devastating finding of the active surveillance study is that the very population group that has been targeted as first priority to receive the shots is the one which suffered the most from the vaccination - vulnerable people. This group, including immunocompromised, elderly and obese individuals, are the focus of vaccination campaigns, which, according to Politico, are “run much like yearly flu drives, aimed at those vulnerable groups.” 

This anomaly was picked up by analyst Josh Guetzkow, PhD, a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who did his post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University and receives no financial support for his work on vaccine safety and has no conflicts of interest to declare.

In addition to suffering adverse events like the rest of the study’s subjects, people with pre-existing chronic illnesses also experienced a worsening of symptoms after the booster dose, as noted in this tweet by Dr. Guetzkow:

As can be seen, autoimmune disease worsened in more than 24% of those already suffering from the ailment, while diabetes, hypertension, and heart and lung diseases all worsened significantly as well.

Difficult to believe level of underreporting 

Dr. Guetzkow, in his substack, provides an in-depth analysis of the Israeli data entitled, The Israeli Ministry of Health Actually Did a Survey of Adverse Events after The Booster Dose, beginning with an answer to a question he himself poses: 

“How badly did the Israeli vaccine adverse event reporting system undercount adverse events?

“We can calculate an approximation by comparing the MoH’s Sept. 25 report on adverse events from this system to the survey results to calculate an ‘underreporting factor' (URF). If the URF is 100, this means you have to multiply the number of reported events by 100 to approximate the true number of adverse events.”

Not mincing words, Dr. Guetzkow explains,

“It’s especially important to know the URF when public health officials disingenuously play down the risks of a medical product by saying that there have been very few reports of adverse events, while knowing full well that the true number must be much larger. The only question is — how much larger?”

The answer to this question is a cause for pause that warranted the author’s own bold emphasis:

“The URF varies from a low of 1,700 for loss of consciousness to 48,800 for difficulty breathing. Some other highlights: a URF of 6,500 for seizures, nearly 6,000 for Bell’s Palsy, and over 4,000 for blurry or disturbed vision. Actually the URF was even higher for some milder, general AE’s and for local site reactions: 54,000 for chest pains, 230,000 for limited arm movement…”

Dr. Guetzkow provided charts demonstrating the enormity of the URFs, including this one for neurological AEs:

What really happened to Americans' health?

While Dr. Guetzkow concedes that these URFs cannot generally be applied to VAERS due to a difference in the underreporting rate in Israel and because Israel does not conform to the international classification standard for adverse event (AE) reporting, he is confident that at least some AEs may be accurately estimated in the US:

“Still we can use the survey results to estimate VAERS underreporting for three specific adverse reactions: Seizures, Bell’s Palsy, and shingles (herpes zoster).” 

His sobering estimates are reported on his twitter, showing almost half a million estimated cases of Bell's Palsy:

Not transient

The MoH investigators followed up their research with a second interview of the women who reported menstrual changes. Speaking with these women 7-12 weeks after the first interview revealed that “about half of them were still experiencing problems at the time of the follow-up.” Dr. Guetzkow summarized these continuing AEs here:

How do they sleep?

Dr. Guetzkow created the below chart demonstrating that the side effects generally showed up shortly after the booster shot, but demonstrated his lack of confidence that that temporal relationship would not be discarded by public health officials: 

“A sizeable percentage of events began on the same day as the vaccination. But as we saw at the top, even if you have a stroke the moment the shot goes into you, it may still be ruled a “coincidence” by the wise sages in the Ministry of Health. To them I say: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. They’re engaged in an exercise of ghoulish gaslighting, and I honestly wonder how they sleep at night.” [Emphasis added].