Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Israeli data show a significant increase in Covid cases for two weeks immediately after first dose of Pfizer vaccine

The paper below reanalyzes data from an Israeli study on Covid case rates following Pfizer-BioNTech vaccination.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.01.21250957v1

What is important to note is that the data were obtained from an Israeli HMO in which 352,000 people were vaccinated, and 3,098 got Covid afterwards.  These are very big numbers and should be reliable.  I have seen a similar effect in two other papers, but the numbers affected were much smaller, so I was not willing to post about them until now.

Something is happening after vaccination that causes new Covid cases to rise steadily in recipients for 8 days post-vaccination, then start dropping.  At 2 weeks post-vaccination, recipients are back at the same risk of being diagnosed with Covid that they were before getting the vaccine.

After that, their risk steadily drops.  When Pfizer presented their data to the FDA, they were careful to avoid discussing the first two weeks post-vaccination, and noted how protection kept increasing from 14 days post vaccination for up to about 50 days (if I remember correctly).

I wondered then, and wonder again today, if spike protein is being made for weeks or longer, not hours or days, to account for this phenomenon.

I also wonder what the vaccine is doing to cause more than double the recipient's risk for Covid at a week post-vaccination. Are recipients at higher risk for other infections?  Is there immune suppression or is something else going on? 

4 comments:

  1. Isn't it amazing that these questions were not even considered before vaccine distribution to the masses. Skipping animal studies was a huge mistake.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I just skimmed the paper, but I couldn't find where/how they defined a "case": was it simply positive PCR or PCR + clinical signs of COVID?

    An important detail, as I would expect circulating spike protein for several weeks (and even longer) after vaccination, particularly if it's a protein the patient's own body has been induced to make.

    ReplyDelete
  3. In the US, a positive PCR alone is a confirmed case, and a positive rapid test alone is a probable case, which (depending on jurisdiction) is often recoded as a case. These are CDC definitions laundered through an organization called the CSTE.

    The WHO definitions are a little different. I don't know how they were defined in Israel for this study. Since it used an HMO database, it may have used lab results or provider diagnoses. Sorry I did not look and the original Israeli paper is buried in my email.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Found it (well, the preprint, at least). A "case" was defined as at least one positive PCR:

    "SARS-CoV-2 infection case definition was having at least one record of primary positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR test in the MHS databases."

    Medical history was also available in the database, but they don't appear to have used any of that information.

    Source: doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.27.21250612

    ReplyDelete