CDC data, mRNA science, and covid-19 vaccines

Over 7 years ago, I went into a premature blogging retirement because my views on many contemporary issues are not politically correct and I felt my job could become jeopardized, and I just couldn't keep up with all the new bioethical fads. And then Pope Francis came out with Amoris Laetitia and started getting rid of Pope St. John Paul II's institutes on the theology of the marriage and family - and he basically undermined all the graduate work I had done. I could spend a lot of time on that guy but I won't.

This is about covid-19 vaccines and science. 

CDC VAERS data

So a prominent member of congress got permanently booted from Twitter for sharing the chart you will see below. Twitter called it misleading. Let's not take Twitter's word for it - but again let's not assume that Twitter is wrong either.

I want to find out the truth.

So first off, the chart purports to represent data from the CDC. The title describes what it is attempting to show. The data are apparently obtained by using the CDC data search tool found here: https://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html

A few notes:

• This is all deaths reported by health professionals in relation to each of the vaccines listed. There may be a small number of health professionals reporting things like "accidental death" in relation to the use of a vaccine, but that is not common. These data also do not include unreported deaths even if they were caused or related to these vaccines, because they weren't reported, which would mean the "real" numbers are somewhat higher
• We do not know if people lately are being more diligent in reporting because covid-19 is so much on everyone's mind, and so more are being reported for covid-19 vaccines than others
• And we do not know how many total people received each vaccine in that time period. Could be only a handful - or hundreds of millions. Considering the routine pediatric vaccination schedule in the US and the time frame, it is most likely that more people have received other vaccines than covid-19 vaccines
• The period is 1990-present. "Present" is ostensibly sometime in late 2021. Still, these data show that, for instance, measles vaccines in the past 31 years were associated with a small fraction of deaths compared to the covid-19 vaccines in the past 1 year. Let's keep in mind this proportionality as we try to duplicate the numbers

Using the VAERS tool, I cannot duplicate these numbers. I searched with results sorted by symptom and then by vaccine type, location US, vaccine administration dates 1990-present (1/4/2022), and symptom chosen was "death." 

I am not saying that the graph is wrong - it's just I cannot verify the actual numbers, and maybe I am doing it wrong.

So here are my numbers in a screen grab from the VAERs tool. 

The proportionality of deaths illustrated in the bar graph seems consistent with these numbers. In other words, although I find only 8,339 US deaths reported for covid-19 vaccines, not over 21k (even for "all locations" it is still only 10k-ish), I also find only 67 deaths reported for the MMR and MMRV vaccines (the first M being measles), whereas the graph has 519. If my numbers are lower, they're lower across the board.

From a proportionality standpoint, however, this is actually worse for covid-19 vaccines. Instead of being 40x higher than measles per the bar chart, the numbers I get for covid-19 vaccines are 125x higher.

One confounding factor was that the top right column says there were 8,376 events, but the Totals row at the bottom shows 11,156. So there must be a significant number of individual deaths reported for more than one vaccine - but if so, the covid-19 vaccine would be implicated in almost every case. So I don't know what to make of the 8,376. 

Still - ignoring the right column for the sake of discussion, of the 11,156 total deaths reported for vaccines over the last 31 years, 75% (8,339) have been reported in the last year or so in relation to covid-19 vaccines. Deaths reported for covid-19 vaccines in 1 year are 3x higher than all other vaccines combined in over 30 years.

This deserves to be discussed. On the other hand, maybe I'm doing it wrong. Or interpreting it wrong.

mRNA technology

This technology kind of creeps me out. What the mRNA vaccines do is commandeer the body's cells to make the dangerous spike protein found on the covid-19 virus, so that the immune system can respond to it, and thereby defeat the virus itself should you get infected. 

I don't know why anyone thinks this is a good idea. It's like a community recruiting and indoctrinating terrorists so that law enforcement learns how to recognize and deal with them.

With traditional vaccines, someone is simply exposed to a dead virus (or bacteria for that matter) or to key components of dead viruses - so that all your body does is learn to recognize and neutralize the virus. It doesn't get programmed to make virus parts.

The inventor of the technology, Dr. Robert Malone, is part of this movement: https://doctorsandscientistsdeclaration.org/

And he is leery about the mRNA vaccines especially in children: https://fml.lol/joe-rogan-podcast-episode/

And there is at least one traditional covid-19 vaccine in the works by these guys. https://www.novavax.com/ Hopefully they'll have theirs out in a few months. 

Final thoughts

So the available covid-19 vaccines are good at reducing the average severity of symptoms and the likelihood of death.

They do not prevent people from getting infected.

They do not stop people who get infected from getting sick (even if they make the experience milder).

Some people who get sick end up in the hospital. A few still die.

They do not stop infected/sick people from spreading the virus. In fact, because they don't feel so bad are are unmasked, they may be spreading it more than the unvaccinated. Just logical.

They are not very good with respect to new emerging variants, and may even push the evolution of new strains that are resistant to the vaccine.

Their long-term safety is not well characterized. In fact, their short-term adverse event profile is not well characterized either. There is something going on with the reported deaths data in the CDC VAERS system.

All things considered, vaccine-related policy - the bioethics of issue - and especially the use of these vaccines in children, does not seem to make sense to me. Happy to discuss it.