Official confirmation of COVID shot dangers

On Wednesday of last week, the German Ministry of Health (Bundesgesundheitsministerium) published an announcement on its official Twitter account, asking for members of the general public who have experienced an adverse event following COVID vaccination to contact the Ministry's data and research department, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI).

One in five thousand people has experienced a serious adverse event following COVID vaccination. If you suspect that you are suffering from an adverse effect, seek medical assistance and report your symptoms to the Paul Ehrlich Institute.

The text within the graphic box added:

Do you suspect an adverse event following Coronavirus vaccination? Contact your doctor and report your symptoms to the PEI via their special form.

Within hours, the tweet had been widely reposted on social media and several truth-based media sites. Responses to the tweet itself showed that the Ministry’s admission reflected the experience of average Germans, and at least one German noted the irony that doctors reporting adverse events were liable to find themselves without a job.

Then the news got worse: The German Health Ministry added an amendment to its original tweet: 

[Translation:] “Correction: The reporting rate for severe adverse reactions according to data from PEI is 0.2 reports per 1000 doses.” That is to say, the Ministry was now admitting to one report of a serious adverse reaction per five thousand injections, not people, as was originally stated.

Truth-based media duly noted the amendment, and at that point, it appears, someone (either at Twitter or elsewhere) panicked and deleted the original tweet (somehow omitting to delete the correction). The string of events was documented by a writer at one news site who posted the original tweet only to find that it had disappeared.

Furthermore, at least one Twitter account was suspended for retweeting the now-deleted post, its owner informed that his post had “violat[ed] the policy on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.”

Around an hour later, Twitter (or perhaps German government officials) reinstated the original tweet, with the German Health Ministry noting immediately below that: “The risk of a severe adverse event following COVID vaccination is very slight,” and adding that an “incorrect calculation” had previously been posted, without specifying what had been wrong.

They also stressed that the adverse events reported to the PEI were only suspected of being linked to vaccination and that a causative link had not been proven.

“Very slight” or not, PEI’s data is alarming. According to reports received, around one percent of adverse event reports related to a death (2,810 people). Four percent of cases reported referred to permanent damage, and another 33 percent of reports related to people who had yet to recover.

Like VAERS, the data collection system run by the German Health Ministry uses passive reporting, meaning that the underreporting factor is likely to be extremely significant (and this is acknowledged by the CDC, which operates VAERS). However, just a month before the German Health Ministry published its tweet ostensibly begging people to report their adverse events, a different study came out with results that make the one in five thousand figure seem mild.

This was a study that was conducted by the EU Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacovigilance Research Network, together with the Vaccine Monitoring Collaboration for Europe network. It compiled findings from eleven European countries, including Germany.

The study’s stated objective was to “collect data on patient-reported adverse reactions of different COVID-19 vaccines, estimate the frequency, compare incidence rates … after first/second dose(s) … as well as booster doses…” Vaccine recipients whose data were collected were followed up for six months following their first dose (a significantly longer follow-up than pharma companies' trials). The aim was to include data from up to 60 thousand people, “which would exceed the numbers of vaccinated in clinical trials.”

Here's what they found:

“For the first vaccination cycle, in this report we included 30,108 participants in Belgium, Croatia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and 520,076 general population participants from Germany. Across the sites 0.2-0.3% reported at least one serious adverse reaction after receiving the first and/or the second dose.”

The number of people studied following a booster (or third vaccine) dose was smaller, just 11,100 participants. The authors noted that within this cohort, “Lactating women reported the highest numbers of adverse drug reactions.” The incidence of serious adverse events following a booster dose was found to be similar to that following the first or second dose.

A rate of 0.2 to 0.3 percent (corresponding to one in five hundred to one in three hundred and thirty-three) is not called “rare” or “very small,” in scientific parlance, but rather “uncommon.”

It is uncommon for a vaccine to have so many side effects. Or at least, it was until COVID came along.