Did public health officials tell you that COVID-19 shots were sixteen times more dangerous than flu shots?
This breaking news needs to be shared far and wide.
Placing the Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines into a Readily Understandable Context
When it comes to evaluating the safety of a vaccine, isolated numbers taken from a passive adverse event monitoring system are difficult to interpret because they lack an appropriate context. Among other issues, passive safety monitoring systems that rely on voluntary submission of reports substantially underestimate the true number of adverse events that occur following receipt of a vaccine. So, they yield artificially low numbers. Therefore, I have long advocated for placing the safety data for COVID-19 vaccines into a readily understandable context. Specifically, I have argued in favour of conducting head-to-head comparisons of adverse events following immunization (AEFIs) for COVID-19 vaccines with another ‘popular’ vaccine. The flu vaccine would be an ideal comparator because there are robust, long-term data sets available for this, it is an optional vaccine, and people have decades of familiarity with both the vaccine and the disease it targets.
People have a lot of experience making their own risk-benefit assessments in the context of influenza. Further, the peer-reviewed scientific literature has made it clear that for the vast majority of people outside of the high risk demographics (which are the frail elderly and those with multiple chronic illnesses), COVID-19 was, on average, of similar risk as the flu. For children, COVID-19 represented less of a risk than the flu. So, letting people know how the safety of COVID-19 vaccines compared to flu vaccines would have been extremely helpful for people to properly assess their personal risk from COVID-19 versus the COVID-19 shots. However, finding publicly available data sets amenable to an accurate direct comparison of the safety of these two types of vaccines has proven to be a challenge.
So, I was thrilled when I was granted an opportunity to review a report earlier today that was obtained by a lawyer in British Columbia, Canada, following a freedom of information request. It is a 1,315-page report documenting information shared among staff of British Columbia’s Centre for Disease Control and Dr. Bonnie Henry, who is the province’s Chief Medical Officer of Health. These experts of public health pulled data about AEFIs for both COVID-19 vaccines and flu vaccines from the same safety data base. One could not ask for a better-controlled public health data set. These experts used these comparative data for months to help them place the information about COVID-19 shots into a readily understandable context prior to releasing information to the public. But, the data and how they were handled and hidden in the public release are downright shocking.
The Public Deserves to Know How the BC Centre for Disease Control Mishandled and Hid Important Vaccine Safety Data
In a world where many physicians claim to promote the concept of informed consent, the BC Centre for Disease Control must be called out for failing miserably in this regard. I will show you why by highlighting some of the most egregious aspects of the report…
British Columbia Centre for Disease Control Discovered COVID-19 Shots Were More Than Sixteen Times More Dangerous Than Flu Shots But Never Disclosed this Publicly
For months, public health officials in British Columbia accumulated data about AEFIs for COVID-19 vaccines and placed them into the context of flu vaccines. Here are the data from their final weekly update meeting just prior to when they went public with it…
…this represents data about AEFIs that accumulated from December 20, 2020, until March 25, 2021. The first two rows represent the total # of AEFIs and serious AEFIs. I highlighted these in blue. I have also highlighted a very important column for comparative purposes. The #s in this column show the relative risk of the COVID-19 shots compared to historic flu vaccines. Note that there was a 15.7-fold higher incidence of serious AEFIs than what historically occurred for flu shots! This massive difference in the safety profile of the two sets of vaccines is of substantial concern when one understands that the risk associated with the two diseases is approximately equal for most people.
COVID-19 Shots Caused 13.6-Fold More Hospitalizations and 24-Fold More Deaths Than Flu Shots
See for yourself…
Although the data set is small, an apparent 24-fold higher rate of deaths following administration of COVID-19 shots should not have been trivialized. Instead, it should have triggered intensive active safety monitoring; something that was not done.
A Short Time Later The Public Data Set Was Released With Critical Information Removed and Numbers Manipulated
Here is the communication following discussion of the March 25, 2021 AEFIs dataset…
And here is a portion of what was released publicly. I am showing just two pages to highlight major concerns. This is from page 1 of the public release…
…it boldly states that “Serious events have not been reported at rates higher than expected compared to background rates”. Yet I just showed you the internal data that they looked at, which demonstrated that serious adverse events were occurring at a 16-fold higher rate for COVID-19 shots when compared to the historical gold standard flu shots. In short, this appears to be a bald-faced lie!
And they also released this table to the public, which covered data from December 13, 2020 to April 3, 2021; so, one week of additional data compared to the internal data set reviewed above…
…note that all comparisons to the flu shots were removed so the public could not place the numbers into an appropriate context. Worse, numbers were manipulated in what appear to be nefarious ways! Go back and review the internal data from March 25, 2021, to conduct your own analysis.
One week prior to this public data release there were 523 total AEFIs. This suggests that an additional 70 reports of AEFIs were received between March 25 and April 3, 2021. So, with 70 new AEFIs added to the data set, how did the total number of serious reports plummet from 144 in the internal data set on March 25th to a mere 26 in the public data on April 3rd?!? 118 serious AEFIs are unaccounted for!
On March 25th, 27.5% of the total AEFIs were serious. How did this drop to a mere 4.4% on April 3rd?!? Even if all 70 new reports represented non-serious side-effects, the lowest this could have dropped to was 24.3%
And the rate of serious AEFIs listed in the table is a mere 3.0 per 100,000 doses. But it was 23.23 per 100,000 doses one week earlier!
Summary
The report obtained by a freedom of information request is damning. It demonstrates the withholding of comparative data that would have dramatically facilitated informed consent with respect to COVID-19 shots. It also shows that numbers of adverse events were manipulated in the public report in a way that substantially downplayed safety concerns. I did not find explanations for this in the report.
These manipulations of data should be cause for concern for everyone and require an explanation.
Dr. Bonnie Henry and the BC Centre for Disease Control need to be held accountable and should be compelled to explain, under oath, why there are major discrepancies in the data between the internal and public documents. Why did they not provide the public with the same contextual data that they were privy to on a weekly basis?
Transparency and integrity should be the hallmarks of public heath. Otherwise, trust will be eroded.
Consider the following two statements:
- Public statement: COVID-19 shots are safe.
- Based on hidden data: COVID-19 shots appear to be sixteen times more dangerous than flu shots.
Tell me, do you think the difference between these could have impacted people’s decision-making with respect to COVID-19 shots?