CDC's tra-la-la initial MMWR report — about COVID-19 vaccine safety

19 February 2021

Today, we take a look at the CDC's latest COVID vaccine safety report

The 19 February 2021 report is understandably — given its circumstances — sloppily done and arguably deceptively delivered.

However, it is probably accurate enough. For now.

Let's go through the report — looking for the ways in which the report is misleading

Here are pertinent extracts:

CDC conducted descriptive analyses of safety data from the first month of vaccination (December 14, 2020–January 13, 2021).

During this period, 13,794,904 vaccine doses were administered, and VAERS received and processed 6,994 reports of adverse events after vaccination, including 6,354 (90.8%) that were classified as nonserious and 640 (9.2%) as serious.

V-safe is a safety monitoring system established by CDC specifically for the COVID-19 vaccination program. V-safe participants voluntarily self-enroll and receive smartphone text messages providing hyperlinks to web surveys.

During the first week after vaccination, enrollees complete daily surveys asking about local injection site and systemic reactions. Enrollees are asked if they missed work, were unable to perform normal daily activities, or received care from a medical professional because of reported symptoms or heath conditions.

Enrollees who report seeking medical care are contacted, and a VAERS report is completed if clinically indicated.

During December 14, 2020–January 13, 2021, v-safe enrolled 1,602,065 vaccine recipients who completed at least one survey; 814,648 (50.8%) received Pfizer-BioNTech, and 787,417 (49.2%) received Moderna vaccines.

The median recipient age was 46 years . . . 1,106,656 (69.1%) were women. There were 10,825 (0.68%) enrollees who reported that they were pregnant at the time of vaccination, and 262 (0.02%) reported a positive pregnancy test result after vaccination.

Solicited local and systemic reactions were similar between persons receiving first doses of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

Injection site pain, fatigue, headache, myalgia, and chills were most frequently reported.

Enrollees reported more reactions on the day after vaccination than on any other day.

For the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, reactions were more frequent after the second dose than the first; the reported rate of fever and chills was more than four times higher after the second dose than after the first.

© 2021 Julianne Gee, Paige Marquez, John Su, Geoffrey M. Calvert, Ruiling Liu, Tanya Myers, Narayan Nair, Stacey Martin, Thomas Clark, Lauri Markowitz, Nicole Lindsey, Bicheng Zhang, Charles Licata, Amelia Jazwa, Mark Sotir and Tom Shimabukuro, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) — First Month of COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Monitoring — United States, December 14, 2020–January 13, 2021, cdc.gov (19 February 2021)

Proper analysis requires that we understand both vaccine-effects reporting systems

Numbers have no value, unless one understands how they are gathered and what they purportedly represent.

What is VAERS?

The CDC describes it this way — in the same report:

VAERS is an existing national passive surveillance system for adverse events after vaccination that accepts reports from health care providers, vaccine manufacturers, and the public.

Reported signs and symptoms are coded using Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA) terminology.

Serious adverse events are followed up by the VAERS program to obtain additional information, including medical records, information from health care providers, and, in the case of death, death certificates and autopsy reports.

You can see VAERS' own generated self-description, here.

What is V-safe?

CDC says that:

V-safe is a smartphone-based tool that uses text messaging and web surveys to provide personalized health check-ins after you receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

Through v-safe, you can quickly tell CDC if you have any side effects after getting the COVID-19 vaccine.

Depending on your answers, someone from CDC may call to check on you and get more information. V-safe will also remind you to get your second COVID-19 vaccine dose if you need one.

With regard to representative data collection, what proportion of elderly people do we think own and regularly use smartphones?

And why is the V-safe reporting system not accessible from the lap or desktop computers that a significant number of old folks might own — simply because both types of computer devices came into technological prominence before affordable smart phones existed?

If we are scientifically and statistically minded . . .

. . . we will immediately recognize two things:

VAERS is the system that actually reports vaccine 'bad stuff' to Government.

V-safe users are redirected to their physicians, when something bad begins to happen. The physician then has to access VAERS from there.

Consequently, where "serious" vaccine effects are concerned, only VAERS matters.

Now — take into analytical account . . .

. . . that a self-reporting system, like VAERS, depends upon:

the affected patient contacting the medical provider

the medical provider contacting the Government

and

the Government properly classifying and recording the medical provider's report

in both retrievable and accurate fashions.

Furthermore — pertinent to specifically this February CDC report — all those intricacies had to happen almost immediately — during the first reported month of COVID vaccinations.

How likely is this, do you think?

Let's imagine a sample scenario — that may drive my tentative skepticism home

Visualize yourself toppling over dead, within a few days of receiving a COVID vaccine.

And then trusting the System to properly report your death as vaccine-related — rather than as being due to the complications of age, innate physical vulnerabilities or alleged comorbidities.

How much fodder for deceptive data manipulation do you think this imagined scenario leaves a propaganda-minded government?

What the CDC vaccine safety report essentially hides . . .

. . . is mildly concerning.

There is no genuine analysis regarding precisely what the 9.2 percent "serious" events were, nor precisely to whom they occurred.

Tale a systems-related, analytical step back

Evaluate where we are as a pandemic-accosted society.

Recall, in reading the following analysis, that generating population-controlling propaganda is the United States' foundational game.

With regard to COVID-19, government propaganda has been aimed at:

generating hysterical fear among the public

as well as their rejection of

the internationally demonstrated utility of cheap generic drugs

for SARS-CoV-2 prophylaxis and treatment —

both of the foregoing American propaganda ploys

being put into place, so as to boost

Big Pharma's vaccine profit-grabbing.

Add a corollary consideration

American Government tries to persuade people that the two most predominantly used US vaccines — one from Pfizer-BioNTech and the other, Moderna — are both:

effective

and

safer than your grandmother's loving touch.

With these government-sponsored propaganda traits mind . . .

. . . let's return to the above-cited CDC report.

In aid of government's 'grandmother's loving touch' brainwashing goal — in my words:

The CDC apparently decided not to dwell on the "9.2 percent" of post-vaccine "adverse events" that it considers to be "serious".

Effectively hidden in the MMWR's equivalent of fine print — here meaning footnotes — is the following description of "serious":

Based on the Code of Federal Regulations, classification of a serious adverse event includes a report of one of the following:

death, life-threatening illness, hospitalization or prolongation of hospitalization, permanent disability, congenital anomaly, or birth defect.

Thus, 9.2 percent of 6,994 self-reported, "serious" side-effect-suffering folks are now either:

dead

nearly dead

hospitalized

permanently disabled.

Hmmm . . .

One would think that this understandably potentially disturbing fact might deserve some genuinely investigative attention from the report.

But no, not so.

CDC brushes all those people under its government agency carpet — via what I consider to be educated, but nevertheless imprecise, speculation:

VAERS received 113 reports of death after COVID-19 vaccinations; two thirds of these deaths occurred among LTCF [long term care facility] residents.

All-cause mortality is high in LTCF populations because underlying medical conditions are common.

Based on expected rates of background mortality, among the approximately 1 million LTCF residents vaccinated in the first month of the U.S. COVID-19 vaccination program, approximately 7,000 coincidental, temporally associated deaths from all causes would be expected during the analytic period.

In contrast, VAERS received 78 reports of death after COVID-19 vaccination in LTCF residents, and approximately one half were in residents who were in hospice or who had a do-not-resuscitate status.

Reported causes of death in LTCF residents after COVID-19 vaccination are consistent with expected all-cause mortality in this population.

Among deaths in persons with available death certificate and autopsy information who were not LTCF residents, causes of death were consistent with background all-cause mortality and did not indicate any unexpected pattern that might suggest a causal relationship with vaccination.

Regarding this CDC hand-waving

First and admittedly irrelevantly — but certainly societally irritating — why would anyone be giving a do-not-resuscitate patient a vaccine that is already in exceedingly short supply?

And why would we vaccinate someone already in hospice care?

I am having trouble coming up with a dumber way of immediately killing two people:

Initially, the one in terminal care.

And secondarily, the presumably younger and healthier one, who never received those doses of wasted vaccine.

Second and more relevantly — just because CDC expects a set portion of people to die — during a set period of time — does not mean that we can or should sweep their actual causes of death under the rug.

This is a problem that has plagued the United States' entire response to the COVID pandemic:

We ain't researching nothin'.

The knowledge void occurs exactly because there is no corporatist profit to be had in finding out what is really true about SARS-CoV-2 prevention and control.

Wrapping today's 'lesson' up . . .

. . . the Lamestream then stuck its babbly foot in the Great American Propaganda Game.

Representatively, YahooLife had this to say about the CDC report:

The 9 percent of serious outcomes, [Dr. Gregory] Poland [co-director of the Mayo Clinic's Vaccine Research Group] says, aren't cause for concern.

One of the most discussed was anaphylaxis, a life-threatening but treatable allergic reaction that occurred at a rate of 4.5 people per million.

The number is smaller than the CDC's previous prediction, which was a rate of 11 individuals per million.

Despite earlier suggestions that the vaccines may cause increased allergic reactions, the organization says that it is "within the range reported after receipt of inactivated influenza vaccine."

Why are we tacitly assuming that . . .

. . . the only potentially bad reactions to a vaccine — especially a messenger RNA one — are "allergic" in nature?

In doing this, we are either mischaracterizing allergy's scope, or ignoring reactions that do not appear to originate as being "allergic".

Neither assumption is medically defensible.

And both could easily lead practitioners to overlook unusual — and potentially bewildering — post-vaccine effects.

In short — the 9 percent of "serious" reactions effectively disappeared . . .

. . . for Dr. Poland and the CDC — because quantitatively more 'bad shit' had been initially predicted.

That expectation being the result of calculations — made via some (very probably scientifically questionable, given the unknowns) model that was not presented in either the CDC report or the Yahoo blurb.

One would not get into medical school, while exhibiting similarly unexplained — and very possibly scientifically irrelevant — medical logic like this.

A related aside — about the CDC's persistent inability to speak in comprehensible fashion

For years, I have observed that the CDC is apparently too incompetent to write in comprehensible lay English. This deficiency is so glaring, that it has to be deliberate.

The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report is always densely and illogically written. Even for people accustomed to reading discipline-specific science and medical journals.

It is as if the crew at CDC go out of their way to produce something that no right-minded and busy people will ever read. None of the MMWR reports would (in my estimation) make it into a respected medical or science journal — without first receiving severe slashing, reorganization and rewording.

Yet here we are, having to suffer the Agency's impenetrable — frequently 'hide the ball' — verbosity every week.

The moral? — Should we run from American COVID vaccines?

No.

I am reasonably persuaded — mainly from other sources or logic — that the generally optimistic direction of the CDC 19 February 2021 report is accurate enough.

I just object to the sloppy and often (arguably) misleading ways in which it is formulated and delivered.

So, our take-away today is that we still cannot trust American Government to tell us anything true.

We consistently have to read between its — usually lying and brainwashing — lines to dissect out what might be accurate.

Protect yourself with a combination of diligent information research and analytical insight.

Unfortunately, with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, some basis in medicine and statistics is probably required.

PeteFree.com

CDC's tra-la-la initial MMWR report — about COVID-19 vaccine safety