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Daily Sceptic administers a kicking to Sp!ked

Myers clearly regards Bridgen’s claim that the mRNA vaccines may be doing more harm than good to be nonsense, but in fact it is well-supported by evidence. For instance, British Medical Journal Editor Dr. Peter Doshi along with Dr. Joseph Fraiman and colleagues examined the data from the vaccine clinical trials and found that, compared to controls, the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an increased risk of serious adverse events of 10.1 events per 10,000 vaccinated for Pfizer and 15.1 events per 10,000 vaccinated for Moderna. When combined, the mRNA vaccines were associated with an increased risk of serious adverse events of 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated, or 1 in 800. Note that the adverse events they looked at included those from COVID-19 itself, meaning the findings imply that among trial participants the vaccines were doing more harm than good.

Similarly, Dr. Kevin Bardosh and colleagues – hailing from the Universities of Harvard, Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Edinburgh and Washington, among others – found that for every COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented by boosters in previously uninfected young adults, 18 to 98 serious adverse events occurred, including 1.5 to 4.6 cases of booster-associated myocarditis in males. That’s more harm than good, at least for healthy young adults.

Will Jones

Nice fisking, read the whole thing.

22 comments to Daily Sceptic administers a kicking to Sp!ked

  • Thomas Fairfax

    Excellent take-down, factual & calm, which does indeed make it a serious kicking

  • Ferox

    COVID vaccines (and masks, for that matter) have long since stopped being about facts or science. They are now a shibboleth, to separate the obedient and right-thinking from those “problematic” souls who are lacking in Social Conscience.

  • Paul Marks

    The default state is to believe what one hears all day long – for example that NHS spending has been “cut”, when it has been massively increased. Hence all those people sneering about “Johnson never giving the money to the NHS from Brexit that he promised” – when many times MORE money than this was actually given to the NHS (for which the “Diversity Officers”, and so on, are grateful), it is the same with the Covid injections.

    For years everyone on television, including President Trump (let us not forget that he was fooled as well – although he never took the stuff himself or mandated other people to take it) said the Covid injections were wonderful.

    That the Covid injections, for most people, are likely to do more harm than good is too much for some people, such as Mr Myers of “Spiked” to take in.

    Did I take it? Yes I did – and knowing that it was more likely to do me harm rather than good.

    But then I have no particular reason to live, especially if I can not attend council meetings and so on, so it does not really matter in my case – the problem is the people who wanted to live and were killed, or injured, by the Covid injections.

    It is these people, the people who wanted to live healthy lives and were killed or injured by the Covid injections, who are the tragedy.

    I hope that Mr Myers of “Spiked” will be able to grasp this, and will stop dismissing the truth as “conspiracy theories”.

  • Snorri Godhi

    The default state is to believe what one hears all day long

    It is interesting how much this “default state” resembles the ChatGPT mode of operation.

    Which is why i am afraid that ChatGPT reveals more about human “intelligence” than we’d like to know.

    — Except that i do not believe that this “default state” is human nature: i believe that it is mostly a xxi century phenomenon.

    I could go on about the link to the xxi century western diet, but you get the drift.

  • Schrödinger's Dog

    Ferox, I nominate your comment for Samizdata Quote of the Day.

  • I’m sorry but anti-vaxxers look and sound like Remainers to me. You lost. History has moved on. Now you are jumping up and down on every stray discrepancy or chance statastic in exactly the same way that e.g. A.C. Grayling will rejoice in every bad bit of news about the British economy. But you can choose not to have the vaccine, in much the same way that most Remainers will be able to find an Irish passport somewhere in their family and flee to the south of France.

  • I’m sorry but anti-vaxxers look and sound like Remainers to me

    An interesting perspective and yet another example of “the enemy of my enemy is often my enemy”… it seems we are both Leavers, you & I, but you are very much on the other side on this. You remind me of a common strain of Green always conflating unrelated thing.

    But you can choose not to have the vaccine, in much the same way that most Remainers will be able to find an Irish passport somewhere in their family and flee to the south of France.

    Yes, and I didn’t have the vaccine, but then I am a wealthy chap who doesn’t have to worry about losing my job if I disdainfully say “feck orf”. Easy for me, not so easy a choice for many others.

    But a disgruntled Remainer moving to France on their new Irish passport can return to UK at some point when the sky doesn’t fall, but you can’t get unvaccinated. And Brexit doesn’t bring an elevated risk of heart disease etc., probably for the rest of your life. You ignored the blandishments of your wise establishment betters & supported Brexit. Well done. But when the same establishment betters told you to get vaccinated for all manner of reasons (you can’t get the disease, you can’t spread it, keeps you out of hospital etc.), you believed them & did as they demanded. Well, that’s your prerogative and hey, no one lives forever anyway. I’ve holidayed in active war zones, so who am I to give lectures about risk assessment?

    But when I had a doctor tell me to get the jab even after I had Covid & was anti-body positive, it was clear the psychology of “expert medical opinion” hasn’t improved much since 1847 when stating the bleedin’ obvious could mean the end of your career.

    You can choose to ignore all that if you wish, just as I ignored the blandishments to get vaccinated. Hopefully you will not manifest any of the unfortunate side effects, but it’s not something I will have to worry about. Whatever ends up killing me, it won’t be that.

  • rhoda klapp

    If it’s a conspiracy isn’t it easy to investigate and prove/disprove the allegations? Ask who doesn’t want the investigation, the autopsies, the histology needed to see whether the vaccine is a problem. I have learned that when my concerns are dismissed without support and when the argument against proceeds directly to labelling and ad homs, that is a clue.

  • John

    To repeat my comment from 3 days ago.

    Spiked is often better than this. Fraser Myers dropped the ball with his ill-conceived piece.

  • Stonyground

    Conflating people who have doubts about the Covid jab with anti-vaxers generally doesn’t show you in a very good light. Whatever the truth about the safety and effectiveness of the Covid jab, it was promoted based on falsehoods. It was claimed to prevent people from contracting and spreading the disease by those who would have forced people to have it if they could. In fact it only alledgedly reduced the severity of the symptoms.

  • Rob Fisher

    “the adverse events they looked at included those from COVID-19 itself, meaning the findings imply that among trial participants the vaccines were doing more harm than good”

    This assumes that all adverse events were equal. It’s worth looking at the paper referred to above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283

    If you have a disease that can land you on a ventilator with 50% survival rate you might put up with quite a lot of “Other rash”, “Diarrhea” and “Hyperglycemia” (from tables 3 and 4 of the paper). It’s interesting to look down those tables. You can see, for example, that there was 1 case of accute kidney injury in one vaccine group compared to 3 in the placebo group. For coagulation disorder the vaccine does worse: it’s 16 vs 10 and 20 vs 13.

    The paper itself makes this kind of point:

    The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. These analyses will require public release of participant level datasets.

    there can be great variability in the degree of severity within both benefit and harm endpoints. For example, intubation and short hospital stay are not equivalent but both are counted in “hospitalization”; similarly, serious diarrhea and serious stroke are not equivalent but both are counted in “SAE.”

    It also counts among its limitations: “First, Pfizer’s trial did not report SAEs occurring past 1 month after dose 2. This reporting threshold may have led to an undercounting of serious AESIs in the Pfizer trial. Second, for both studies, the limited follow up time prevented an analysis of harm-benefit over a longer period”. So there’s that.

    I think there was a time early on when the vaccine was a good idea: large populations with unprepared immune systems and more virulent strains. I wouldn’t have one *now*, mainly because natural exposure seems to grant better immunity. But anyway there was never a good time to mandate it for everyone. It’s always a good idea to take individual risks and benefits into account.

  • Conflating people who have doubts about the Covid jab with anti-vaxers generally doesn’t show you in a very good light.

    Quite so. I am vaccinated against all manner of other things.

  • Spiked is often better than this. Fraser Myers dropped the ball with his ill-conceived piece.

    Agreed.

  • Kirk

    Tychy said:

    I’m sorry but anti-vaxxers look and sound like Remainers to me. You lost. History has moved on. Now you are jumping up and down on every stray discrepancy or chance statastic in exactly the same way that e.g. A.C. Grayling will rejoice in every bad bit of news about the British economy. But you can choose not to have the vaccine, in much the same way that most Remainers will be able to find an Irish passport somewhere in their family and flee to the south of France.

    I always find it amusing when someone conflates “winning” a political contest with, y’know… Being factually correct about a subject.

    Any damn fool can read the documentation, and see the inherent discrepancies and lies in the whole mRNA “vaccination” scheme. I’ve been following that issue since it was first described, back in the late 1990s. It’s always been the “nuclear fusion” of biology, the great solution that’s only a few more years of research away from solving all these huge problems. Thing is, like nuclear fusion, mRNA has never fulfilled its promise, mostly down to them never overcoming all the issues in testing. Which, oddly enough, present perfect congruence with the reported post-Covid syndromes…

    If you follow the finances of it all, it’s pretty apparent that the whole thing was and is at least partially attributable to “Big Pharma” opportunistically using the crisis to get their cash cow into widespread usage. Mandating the shots? LOL… How much did NIH get for their part in all this? How much money was accrued to “impartial government scientists tasked with overseeing the pharmaceutical industry”?

    Yeah. Tell me again, all about how consensus and political victory over any issue implies actually being correct

    I seem to remember an awful lot of people voting for things that won, and proved out to be very, very bad ideas. Then again, I do tend to read history.

    Which I suspect many don’t bother with.

  • Paul Marks

    Tychy – people died from the injections that you treat so lightly, and more people will die (due to heart damage and other damage) – and other people have been reduced to a dreadful condition.

    Tychy – you do not care about this and just talk about “moving on”, as if the dead and crippled can “move on”, you are no good Sir.

    Nor can the financial position be “moved on” from – “four hundred billion Pounds” (the money flung away on mad Covid policies) may indeed be a number too big for the human mind to fully grasp, but that does not mean that this level of spending has no effect. This level of spending has crippled the United Kingdom – an economy that was already a Credit Bubble (as some of us have been “banging on about” for years).

    There will no be no easy recovery – no “moving on”, the horror both in health and in the economy has only just begun.

  • Paul Marks

    If the opponents of a certain person spent less time talking about his skin colour and his religion and more time talking about his spend-spend-spend record as Chancellor and the record high taxation and (on top of that) a very large deficit – then I would have more respect for those opponents

    As for the monetary and financial system – it was horrible mess, all over the Western World, even before Covid. Now it is worse – much worse.

  • Fraser Orr

    @Rob I think your analysis is interesting. I scanned the paper to try to understand. The paper does make note of the definition of a serious adverse effect:

    an adverse event that results in any of the following conditions: death; life-threatening at the time of the event; inpatient hospitalization or prolongation of existing hospitalization; persistent or significant disability/incapacity; a congenital anomaly/birth defect; medically important event, based on medical judgment.

    So those are all pretty bad. Something else I think lost in the noise is that the sample size, while large (about 15,000-18,000 for each of the two vaccines, and for active and placebo), is small enough that it is hard to conclude much at the smaller numbers. For example, 1 out of 10,000 had hyperglycemia, which probably means two people out of each cohort. That is such a small number as to be meaningless. So I think it is wise really just to look at the larger numbers which really means coagulation disorder (16 vaccine, 10 placebo), other forms of acute cardiac injury (15 vaccine, 12 placebo.) These numbers don’t speak well of the vaccine. (Those are the Pfizer numbers, Moderna was similar.)

    But here is the money quote:

    In the Moderna trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs (15.1 per 10,000 participants) was higher than the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group (6.4 per 10,000 participants). [3] In the Pfizer trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs (10.1 per 10,000) was higher than the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group (2.3 per 10,000 participants).

    Which is fancy science talk for “the vaccines did more harm than good”.

    However, this in itself isn’t sufficient, because it concerns only the adverse effects of the vaccine, it does not consider the adverse effects of the whole Covid response. What I hear ALL THE TIME from doctors right now are the fall out consequences of the fact that we locked people up in their houses for two years. People who are dying of cancer because they were too scared to go to the hospital for early testing or treatment, an epidemic of loneliness and drug use, children whose learning is compromised beyond repair, little babies whose speech is serious delayed because they didn’t see their mother smile for the first two years of their lives. And on and on.

    It is necessary to have a witch hunt here. Not because I particularly want to punish the people who did terrible things to us, but because we need to ensure that this is NOT a precedent for the future. Of course we won’t. And the next the response to the next disease will be equally damaging because it empowers the people in charge. And, as someone said, it has become a shibboleth to distinguish between the “I believe in science” crowd (who believe in the science that they already happen to agree with, and demand that Facebook ban any science they don’t agree with) and the “come on, wtf? I gotta get to work” crowd.

  • It is necessary to have a witch hunt here. Not because I particularly want to punish the people who did terrible things to us, but because we need to ensure that this is NOT a precedent for the future.

    100% correct.

  • Paul Marks

    Yes Frasor Orr is correct. And it is a broad matter.

    The people behind such things as the research that created Covid 19 (whether or not it was accidently or deliberately released) need to be held to account – people such as Tony Fauci and Peter “Eco Health Alliance” and “World Health Alliance” Daszak.

    And much the same people were involved in the smearing (the systematic smearing) of Early Treatment which could have saved the lives of most of the people who died of Covid – these people were allowed to die in the interests of the international governance agenda, and the commercial agenda of a few companies and “foundations”. And it turns out that these drug companies and “charitable foundations” now fund the regulators – where is the left? Why are the left not denouncing this? Many people at “Spiked” used to be on the left – can they not see a Corporate State when it is in front of their eyes?

    And once they had got their “emergency authorisation” by pretending there was no Early Treatment for Covid (a blatant lie – because there were several generally effective Early Treatments) they pushed their toxic injections.

    So they let people die in order to get the excuse to kill other people – how can that be allowed to stand?

    And, yes, they will do it again – the World Health Organisation treaty is being pushed right-now.

    More tyranny – in the name of “public health” which we know, from American and international officials, includes “Climate Change” (hello Climate lockdowns) and “racism”.

    Neil Oliver is correct – all the pomp and circumstance of the Coronation is without meaning if the United Kingdom has no real independence. If the international “build back better” “great reset” people rule, then get rid of the flags and the music and all the rest of it – because all the pomp and circumstance would just be a vast lie.

    “tychy” talks about “Remoaners” as if the European Union was the only threat to British independence – at the very time when this accursed World Health Organisation treaty is being pushed through.

    It is not a question of “will they do it again?” – they are doing it again, because they were allowed to get away with what they, the international government officials and corporate managers, did.

  • Paul Marks

    As recently as the 1980s, under such people as President Reagan, the drug regulators were NOT funded by corporations and foundations.

    Nor was there any international governance (Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, “Sustainable Development Goals” or whatever you want to call it) agenda – and talk of “Climate and Racism being a Public Health Emergency” justifying totalitarian rule would have been laughed at as recently as the 1980s.

    What has happened since the start of the 1990s (as recently as that), this international governance agenda, is not eternal and it is not inevitable.

    With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 we “took our eyes off the ball” – thinking that tyranny was defeated and we could relax. But the forces of tyranny never stop their attacks – they just change their form, their tactics.

    Evil does not just go away – it must be actively opposed.

  • John

    https://youtu.be/GaXJlDvZcjs

    Andrew Bridgen and Fraser Myers of Spiked cross swords.

    https://powerbase.info/index.php/LM_network

    Article detailing (claiming) Spiked received funding from Pfizer albeit at some unspecified time in the past.

  • Jihn

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2006/08/29/what-inspired-you/

    What inspired you?
    An overview of the new spiked/Pfizer survey of scientists aged 19 to 93, ranging from new talent to Nobel laureates, on what made them take up science.

    This was in 2006 though. Maybe I’m getting a bit paranoid.