I'm an electrical engineer. I have a BS and MS in EE from Texas A&M. I spent most of my career owning my own engineering company before I sold it. We mainly wrote engineering software for engineers to use. When this pandemic first started I did research. The research was clear, a cloth mask will not stop a virus. An N100 mask will. When they came out with the experimental mRNA vaccine I said to my family, "no way in hell we are taking that". I calculated the risk, made educated guess where there as not enough information available. I came to the conclusion that I and my family would not take the vaccine, we would take our chances with the virus. All of us caught it, all of us weathered it with little trouble, and all of us only caught it the one time. There are 10 people in my household. Also, I have not had anyone drop dead in their prime for no reason. No one has had an unexpected stroke or heart attack, no Bells palsy, no 6 foot blood clots pulled from my son's leg. No, You lunatics pushing an experimental vaccine on a world-wide population are bat-shit crazy. Time will rat you out.
Well I disagree. As physicians we recommend interventions based on clinical benefit and we have no evidence-either with the BA.1 bivalent or the BA.4/5 bivalent. Antibody response is not enough-1.5-1.75 increase was not felt to be/give a clinical difference with the original vaccines so why lower the standard here? The study on BA.1 was so small re adverse events-the #1 concern being myocarditis. The Thai study was terrifying re the number of boys with symptomatic and asymptomatic elevation of troponin. It is so easy to say mild, self limiting but what are the long term consequences in young males re arrhythmias and exercise tolerance, e evidence of long term scarring etc? Also not tested was- a simple monovalent booster with BA.4/5 If so far the original 2/3 shots have given good coverage re sever disease why give more of that. These doses in the bivalent vaccines are pediatric-do we really expect clinical efficacy re severe/hospitalization/death? I also maintain we moved from an intial 2020 goal of please get us a vaccine that prevents severe disease and its sequellae to vaccines that are supposed to block infection and transmission, which was always an unrealistic goal. We know antibody mediated immunity will wane, so mild disease is here forever. Patients are angry because these shots were pushed as a way to avoid infection and transmission. The one size fits all is totally wrong-we need subgroups with risk benefit analysis. 80 year old with diabetes is easy, but healthy young male athlete s/p 2 shots and a natural infection why should we expose him to a risk of myocarditis ? As soon as we saw this safety signal, where are the prospective studies from the CDC with objective data re incidence symptomatic, asymptomatic, followup cardiac studies etc? WHat I expect here is low side effects and very low clinical benefit-to any group because of the pediatric dosing. Not studying monovalent omicron sub variant booster was a missed opportunity. This was rushed, standards were lowered and not calling the VRBPA was shameful.
I don't understand. The vaccine caused many more severe adverse events then it prevented severe covid cases. Why is this never discussed? It's in the supplementary appendices of the original large randomized trials.
I cannot bring myself to recommend these shots to anyone including my 80+ yo parents with multiple comorbidities (who both survived Delta w/early help of monoclonals), just too many adverse reactions and lack of trust now due to lies and censorship. Do you read the anonymous “Midwestern Doctor” Substack (he’s an MD)? His latest article is good: https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/why-does-every-vaccine-often-cause
Throwing toxic rubber-tipped darts at a child's graph on the wall and crossing ones fingers that somethin "sticks". Meanwhile...fast forward two years later! Doh! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=the81FQoAUI
Experimental Messenger RNA gene manipulation isn't a "vaccine" as vaccines are defined. Now, even if someone was not immunocompromised prior to becoming a human guinea pig...they sure are (again, by definition) immunocompromised now, boy howdy!
you go and be the first test subject. Only 8 mice and you forgot to mention that all 8 mice got COVID once they were exposed. So no benefit and lots of side effects some of them deadly. You need to reread the Hippocratic oath.
The boosters may be alright if you are old and/or in a high risk group. For a healthy 16 year old male (for example), I find it remarkable that the CDC or a physician, would recommend, or worse still mandate or coerce Covid vaccinations. In the US there have been a total of 1263 deaths from Covid among children from 0-17 years of age since the beginning of the pandemic (from the CDC's stats). Many of these were undoubtedly in high risk groups. It does not take many adverse effects to offset the positive effects of the vaccine. I am a healthy 60 year old, and I have been vaccinated and boosted, but I think the cost benefit of being boosted again is not at all clear for me at this point.
I enjoy your articles, and will keep reading, but I'm a little disappointed with your point #2. It isn't just it was to small to establish adverse affects, it limits someone's ability to do basic risk assessments.
If I'm a 30 year old male, and i'm on booster #3 with this new version, I'm not looking at a 1/3000 chance of a heart related adverse reaction(going off of UK's data from earlier this year, apologize if there has been updates to the numbers.) i'm actually looking at a 1/1000(1/3000+1/3000+1/3000) chance of heart related adverse reaction, as each shot is assumed the same risk factor as before. Now as a 30 year old male, might not be worth it, but might be depending on the factors going on in my medical life.
Now lets say the risk factor drops in the new shot to 1/20000, now my risk factor isn't 1/1000, it is instead 11/20000, which is much lower, and might better fight the risk factors in my medical life.
What about if it drops to 1/1000, then the math becomes way worse, at 3/2000 risk vs 1/1000 implied.
Again as a doctor, who under the informed consent model(Nuremburg), can say, its ok they didn't try to get this information, it was to hard to so we didn't do it...
If you wonder why more and more people are pushing back on experts, this is a perfect example of an expert using their expertise fallacy not to do the work that should be done.(I'd contend that if we looked into alot of areas in our society, we'd find this more than we should.)
Again, Love your writing, but really disappointed that you took the fallacy bait.
To clarify, without saftey information, I don't know how you can say its ok to take a medicine. I see you say you can fault that, but still allow the 'medicine' to go forward.
I hear your point - and I agree that it is *very* helpful to know semi-exact numbers in making cost: benefit calculations - but in the real world, we rarely have that luxury. Almost any medical product approved within the past few years will have very little information about "rare" adverse effects; that's what post-marketing data is for, so we are not paralyzed by awaiting more and more safety data on every possible intervention and never seeing them make it to market. From diet changes to car choices to alcohol consumption to medication regimens, many seemingly critical choices to our health have only the crudest statistics available.
I detest uncertainty in medicine, but have learned to get used to it. It's never going away. Could we have asked Pfizer/Moderna to expedite human trials, at least for safety and immunogenicity, before approval? Probably, at a modest cost in time. Could they have recruited tens of thousands of young men in timely fashion for a trial to really show myocarditis rates? No (unless they could get all the Ivy Leagues to "volunteer" their returning male students, but I THINK I am joking when I say that).
Thanks for the nuanced take on this complicated issue, Buzz. I wish I had you as a doctor!
Ross - I tricked you! These comments have convinced me I am a shill for Big Pharma. Dang! I’ve been exposed. (Thanks for the nice comment, though :)
You wish you had a doctor who says "I don't like the science or the data, but I'm going to do it anyway because people tell me to"?
This is one of the most insane articles I've ever read
I'm an electrical engineer. I have a BS and MS in EE from Texas A&M. I spent most of my career owning my own engineering company before I sold it. We mainly wrote engineering software for engineers to use. When this pandemic first started I did research. The research was clear, a cloth mask will not stop a virus. An N100 mask will. When they came out with the experimental mRNA vaccine I said to my family, "no way in hell we are taking that". I calculated the risk, made educated guess where there as not enough information available. I came to the conclusion that I and my family would not take the vaccine, we would take our chances with the virus. All of us caught it, all of us weathered it with little trouble, and all of us only caught it the one time. There are 10 people in my household. Also, I have not had anyone drop dead in their prime for no reason. No one has had an unexpected stroke or heart attack, no Bells palsy, no 6 foot blood clots pulled from my son's leg. No, You lunatics pushing an experimental vaccine on a world-wide population are bat-shit crazy. Time will rat you out.
Well I disagree. As physicians we recommend interventions based on clinical benefit and we have no evidence-either with the BA.1 bivalent or the BA.4/5 bivalent. Antibody response is not enough-1.5-1.75 increase was not felt to be/give a clinical difference with the original vaccines so why lower the standard here? The study on BA.1 was so small re adverse events-the #1 concern being myocarditis. The Thai study was terrifying re the number of boys with symptomatic and asymptomatic elevation of troponin. It is so easy to say mild, self limiting but what are the long term consequences in young males re arrhythmias and exercise tolerance, e evidence of long term scarring etc? Also not tested was- a simple monovalent booster with BA.4/5 If so far the original 2/3 shots have given good coverage re sever disease why give more of that. These doses in the bivalent vaccines are pediatric-do we really expect clinical efficacy re severe/hospitalization/death? I also maintain we moved from an intial 2020 goal of please get us a vaccine that prevents severe disease and its sequellae to vaccines that are supposed to block infection and transmission, which was always an unrealistic goal. We know antibody mediated immunity will wane, so mild disease is here forever. Patients are angry because these shots were pushed as a way to avoid infection and transmission. The one size fits all is totally wrong-we need subgroups with risk benefit analysis. 80 year old with diabetes is easy, but healthy young male athlete s/p 2 shots and a natural infection why should we expose him to a risk of myocarditis ? As soon as we saw this safety signal, where are the prospective studies from the CDC with objective data re incidence symptomatic, asymptomatic, followup cardiac studies etc? WHat I expect here is low side effects and very low clinical benefit-to any group because of the pediatric dosing. Not studying monovalent omicron sub variant booster was a missed opportunity. This was rushed, standards were lowered and not calling the VRBPA was shameful.
I don't understand. The vaccine caused many more severe adverse events then it prevented severe covid cases. Why is this never discussed? It's in the supplementary appendices of the original large randomized trials.
I cannot bring myself to recommend these shots to anyone including my 80+ yo parents with multiple comorbidities (who both survived Delta w/early help of monoclonals), just too many adverse reactions and lack of trust now due to lies and censorship. Do you read the anonymous “Midwestern Doctor” Substack (he’s an MD)? His latest article is good: https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/why-does-every-vaccine-often-cause
We do have a choice. Do not take them. Also will be unsubscribing from this stack.
Me too, this is absurd
Throwing toxic rubber-tipped darts at a child's graph on the wall and crossing ones fingers that somethin "sticks". Meanwhile...fast forward two years later! Doh! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=the81FQoAUI
Experimental Messenger RNA gene manipulation isn't a "vaccine" as vaccines are defined. Now, even if someone was not immunocompromised prior to becoming a human guinea pig...they sure are (again, by definition) immunocompromised now, boy howdy!
"Do I like the science? No. But I’ll recommend this booster, because as physicians we have to make choices with limited information."
...Huh?
you go and be the first test subject. Only 8 mice and you forgot to mention that all 8 mice got COVID once they were exposed. So no benefit and lots of side effects some of them deadly. You need to reread the Hippocratic oath.
The boosters may be alright if you are old and/or in a high risk group. For a healthy 16 year old male (for example), I find it remarkable that the CDC or a physician, would recommend, or worse still mandate or coerce Covid vaccinations. In the US there have been a total of 1263 deaths from Covid among children from 0-17 years of age since the beginning of the pandemic (from the CDC's stats). Many of these were undoubtedly in high risk groups. It does not take many adverse effects to offset the positive effects of the vaccine. I am a healthy 60 year old, and I have been vaccinated and boosted, but I think the cost benefit of being boosted again is not at all clear for me at this point.
Never got a jab.
Doin' fine.
Had a friend die of pulmonary embolism 3-4 months after Jab2.
Never had any pulmonary issues.
Shots are known to cause embolism.
Just saying.
How many of the mice contracted COVID?
all of them
I enjoy your articles, and will keep reading, but I'm a little disappointed with your point #2. It isn't just it was to small to establish adverse affects, it limits someone's ability to do basic risk assessments.
If I'm a 30 year old male, and i'm on booster #3 with this new version, I'm not looking at a 1/3000 chance of a heart related adverse reaction(going off of UK's data from earlier this year, apologize if there has been updates to the numbers.) i'm actually looking at a 1/1000(1/3000+1/3000+1/3000) chance of heart related adverse reaction, as each shot is assumed the same risk factor as before. Now as a 30 year old male, might not be worth it, but might be depending on the factors going on in my medical life.
Now lets say the risk factor drops in the new shot to 1/20000, now my risk factor isn't 1/1000, it is instead 11/20000, which is much lower, and might better fight the risk factors in my medical life.
What about if it drops to 1/1000, then the math becomes way worse, at 3/2000 risk vs 1/1000 implied.
Again as a doctor, who under the informed consent model(Nuremburg), can say, its ok they didn't try to get this information, it was to hard to so we didn't do it...
If you wonder why more and more people are pushing back on experts, this is a perfect example of an expert using their expertise fallacy not to do the work that should be done.(I'd contend that if we looked into alot of areas in our society, we'd find this more than we should.)
Again, Love your writing, but really disappointed that you took the fallacy bait.
To clarify, without saftey information, I don't know how you can say its ok to take a medicine. I see you say you can fault that, but still allow the 'medicine' to go forward.
I hear your point - and I agree that it is *very* helpful to know semi-exact numbers in making cost: benefit calculations - but in the real world, we rarely have that luxury. Almost any medical product approved within the past few years will have very little information about "rare" adverse effects; that's what post-marketing data is for, so we are not paralyzed by awaiting more and more safety data on every possible intervention and never seeing them make it to market. From diet changes to car choices to alcohol consumption to medication regimens, many seemingly critical choices to our health have only the crudest statistics available.
I detest uncertainty in medicine, but have learned to get used to it. It's never going away. Could we have asked Pfizer/Moderna to expedite human trials, at least for safety and immunogenicity, before approval? Probably, at a modest cost in time. Could they have recruited tens of thousands of young men in timely fashion for a trial to really show myocarditis rates? No (unless they could get all the Ivy Leagues to "volunteer" their returning male students, but I THINK I am joking when I say that).