Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire My concerns with the vaccine

Ralph, I've had a bit of time to do some reading, and have a couple thoughts for you to look at.



In the first place, I don't know "why". I can only guess, which is about all you can do, as well.

The swine flu vaccine debacle in 1976, looked back at through the retrospectoscope, was a huge political boondoggle. Frankly, I missed it at the time, and had to do some reading to find out what all the fuss was about. Turns out that one (1) U.S. serviceman died from swine flu, and a bunch of politically ambitious scientists convinced some critters in Congress that this was sufficient cause to initiate the greatest mass vaccination effort since ever. You likely know all about it, but for those who don't, here's a link with a short summary: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/long-shadow-1976-swine-flu-vaccine-fiasco-180961994/. There are some other links you can access through that article to get some more detailed articles if you care to.

The gist of it was that 1976 was an election year, and a whole bunch of politicians tried to use the swine flu scare and the vaccination program to gain votes. Then a bunch of other folks who were opposed to this first group made hay with some statistics about deaths from Guillain-Barre disease that they attributed to the swine flu vaccine, and raised a helluva ruckus about it that caused such a public relations backlash that Congress and the FDA and god knows who else decided to scrap the whole program.

The incidence of G-B in the general population was about 1 in 100,000 at that time (still is), and in the vaccinated population it appeared to be about 2 in 100,000. Pretty small numbers, and with such a rare disease, the statistical significance of the "jump" was, well, insignificant. But it was played up in the press, and by politicians in Washington, to the point that Americans were scared to death of the vaccine.

Sounds pretty much deja vu, all over again, huh?

The result of this debacle was twofold: 1) it created the "antivax" culture almost overnight, and that culture continues to spin and spin and spin; and 2) it created a much tougher approach in public health authorities to dealing with potential vaccine complications, which in part counterbalances the antivaxxers' paranoia. The general public, generally ignorant of science in all things more complex than being able to misquote Newton's first law of thermodynamics, has been caught between the two extremes ever since and the more or less general public mistrust of vaccine programs stems from this.

But let's look at the SARS-CoV2 vaccine associated problems, and see where it compares. First thing, I'm gonna call b u l l s h i t your "VAERS-reported 9000 deaths". The VAERS database is a list of ANYthing bad that happens to ANYone within a specified time period of getting a vaccine. There is no implication of causation in the VAERS database. It's just a pool of numbers to look at. And the CDC is currently reporting the number of deaths on the list at 6207, not 9000, as of July 21 (https://www.precisionvaccinations.com/covid-19-vaccine-related-fatalities-updated). Second thing, let's look at the VAERS pool of data and compare to the general population for some supposed "adverse effects" of the vaccine.

I've picked out a couple-three examples from the literature we can look at: 1) the risk of "blood clots", which everybody thinks they know about but don't, which the CDC specifies as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS); 2) Guillain-Barre Syndrome, previously mentioned; and 3) cardiomyopathy/pericarditis syndromes. You can look these up on the CDC website here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html

1)TTS There have been 39 confirmed cases of TTS in recipients of the J&J vaccine (13+ million doses given) and 2 cases of TTS in recipients of mRNA vaccines (324 million doses given). This translates into a risk ration of 0.3 per 100,000 population and 0.0062 per 100K. Now, it's tough to compare that to the risk of TTS in the general population at large, because TTS comprises several syndromes that come under other names; but the best estimate I've found comes from here: [ https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2021-04-23/06-COVID-Oliver-508.pdf ] and this author cites the incidence at about 0.7-1.6 per million, or 0.07-0.16 per 100,000. So this tells us that the rate of TTS in recipients of J&J vaccine appears to be about twice as high as in the general population, but with Pfizer/Moderna it's 1/10 the risk in the general population. But you have to concede that the risk is very small in any of these.

By way of comparison, the majority of intensive care deaths due to SARS-CoV2 have a blood-clotting failure problem to them (either hypercoagulability or hypcoagulability). Using Worldometer's estimate of US Crude Mortality Rate [ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/ ], which is 238 per 100,000 population, this means that your risk of death from TTS from taking the vaccine is about 1/800 the risk of you dying from COVID.

2) Guillain-Barre Syndrome We have covered this one to some degree in the previous discussion of swine flu. The risk in the general population is about 1-2 per 100,000, depending on which source you cite. What about the risk of GBS from one of the CoV2 vaxes?

Well, there have been "about 100" cases of GBS in folks who've received the J&J vaccine (risk of 0.77 per 100K), and I'm not finding a number for the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines, but it's supposed to be "much lower" than the J&J. Soooo... we see that your chances of developing GBS without vaccines of any kind is 1-2/100K, and with J&J is slightly less than that. [ https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html ]

Not exactly a ringing indictment of the vaccine, again.

3) Cardiomyopathy/Pericarditis Now this is a bit trickier, because these syndromes are not fatal very often, but they really do mess with you for a period of a few weeks to a few months. Now, the incidence of all VAERS-reported cases for ALL the vaccines is 674, and we're talking about 337 million doses of the vaccine. This puts the risk at 0.2 per 100K.

Compare this to a general population risk of 27.7 per 100K for pericarditis, and 10-22 per 100K for viral cardiomyopathy. Let's average that out to 20 per 100K, which is 100X higher than the identified risk with the vaccine.

So: in summary, while I can't definitively tell you why the swine flu vaccine was recalled, I have shown you here that the risks of dying from the vaccine are measurably much lower than the risks of dying from the fecking disease you are able to get vaccinated against.

Does that answer your question, Ralph?




I ain't a lawyer. Go ask a lawyer.

But I will point out that we have treatments for Herpes zoster (shingles) that work real well, as you know. You treated me for shingles about 8 years ago, remember? I'm pretty grateful for that, too. Your quick action saved my left eye, man.

But since then they came out with a vaccine against Zoster, and you can be damned sure I took it at the first opportunity, because it's proven to reduce my risk of getting shingles again. It wasn't illegal to develop the Zoster vaccine for the same reason it's not illegal to develop a vaccine against any other infectious disease.



Again, I ain't a lawyer. Go ask a lawyer.

But I am really leery about this one. I think there needs to be a lot more safety testing before we release this on kids. And the reasoning behind that is really complex, much more complex than the reasoning I've put up above.

To give a personal note, I am vaccinated, as is my wife, as are all 3 of my adult kids. My 2 granddaughters, however, aged 3 and 4, will NOT be vaccinated until I and their mothers are a helluva lot more convinced of the safety in peds population than we are now.

Have a great day, Ralph. I hope we can go dove hunting soon.