Live blogging the ACIP meeting

Matt Daley provides the initial summary.  On slide 4 he shows hospitalizations in the vaccinated and unvaccinated, making the claim that hospitalizations occur 16 times more commonly in the unvaccinated.

Now look closely at his slide 4.  In the center there is a peak.  The tip of the peak centers on May 1, 2021.  What he notably omits telling the ACIP members is that on May 1, in an attempt to lower the breakthrough infections, new guidelines went into effect to only report on breakthrough, vaccinated cases if they met 2 criteria:  they had to have died or been hospitalized, AND they also had to have had a positive test with PCR cycle threshold of 28 and below.  This effectively cut the reports of breakthrough cases way down, explaining the peak at May 1.

Next, the Pfizer rep speaks.  Only data collected through March 13 are provided--5.5 months ago.  He admits that the placebo group was unblinded at 2 months.

40% of the subjects had dropped out by 4 months--why? No comment of course.

As before, the safety issues are obscured by failing to provide diagnoses and instead listing the adverse events by organ systems.  Only the acute side effects are listed by symptoms.  But who actually cares about acute side effects that invariably resolve? Yet that is what Pfizer chooses to emphasize. 2 optic neuritis cases in vaccinees are finally acknowledged.

Slide 11 has more meat, but the side effects are lumped by organ system, effectively obscuring what they were and how severe they were.  It is claimed the adverse events are similar between the placebo group and vaccinated group.

15 deaths in vaccine group and 14 in placebo group--we have seen all this information months ago, and I have no idea why it is being presented again, except to make it appear that ACIP is being brought up to date.  Remember, the placebo group was vaccinated last December--8 months ago--so these data are at least 8 months old.  And they are uninterpretable.

For serious AEs they claim to have collected them through March.

What about the AEs of special interest?  We are presented a handful of anaphylactic or anaphylactoid reactions.  Somehow Pfizer has managed to add 2 Bell's palsy victims to its placebo recipients, but maybe after they got vaccinated?  Hard to make sense of his chart.

Pfizer magically had a placebo group that has almost identical AEs as its vaccinated group, for example for allergic angioedema. One case of GBS occurred in the placebo group.  This is also remarkable, since GBS only occurs about once /100,000/year.  In this case it occurred in 1 in 22,000/2 months.

PEs 8 each, thromboembolism cases equal in both groups, strokes were equal, heart attacks occurred more in placebo group.  More miscarriages in the placebo group.  Pfizer is extremely fortunate that apart from anaphylaxis, its vaccine seems to be protective against every other potential adverse effect.

Over 2500 myo and pericarditis cases have been reported, CDC manages to reduce the number they are studying, such as 765 cases reported within 7 days of a dose--where are the other 1800?  Even losing most reported cases, teen males are at least 25x expected--strangely the Pfizer vaccine myocarditis peaks in the  youngest (12-15 y/o) while the Moderna induced most cases in young adults. 742 met the CDC case definition (which I earlier pointed out is too restrictive) and the vast majority of these required hospitalization, over 700. 253 of these are 90 days out and are "eligible for interview." 

Now a study is being planned to see what happens to all these unfortunate people with cardiac inflammation--I'd say it is about time, since the problem was identified in April, 4 months ago. The new FDA documents filed last Monday with the license admit they have NO information on the myocarditis outcomes.  Guess they were too scared to look.

I have had to miss bits of this--sorry.

Grace Lee, new ACIP chair, just presented on rates of myocarditis, which are quite high, but then compares them to rates of myocarditis after Covid.  She neglected to include several important items:

1.  Many people are already immune so not susceptible to Covid and will only face risk without benefit--this is totally ignored.

2.  Furthermore, the claims of high rates of myocarditis after Covid were NOT age stratified.  Very few kids, who are at highest risk of myocarditis, have such complications of Covid.

3.  Early treatment means you don't get myocarditis or any other late sequelae

4.  Not everyone who isn't vaccinated will get Covid!

Dr. Rosenblum tries to scare us re young peoples' hospitalizations--but never gives the totals hospitalized with a bizarre chart that lacks a Y axis.

She cherrypicks good outcomes in myocarditis patients.  No one mentions the college student who needed a heart transplant, then died a month later.

And she uses the VAERS reporting rate of myocarditis as if VAERS collects every case.  This is criminal negligence, since CDC knows there is massive underreporting, and says so on its website.

In the 16-17 year age group for males, 73 cases of myocarditis are expected per million doses--or 146 cases for those full vaccinated per million people.

That is 1 case of myocarditis per 7,000 vaccinated young males, assuming the VAERS reporting rate is the actual rate.  Prior analyses of VAERS suggest the VAERS reporting rate is 0.01-0.1.  Using these estimates, you would see one case of myocarditis per 70-700 males vaccinated, aged 16-17.

CDC's Dr. Gargano now comes in for the kill:  getting ACIP to vote to put Covid-19 vaccine on the childhood schedule, which will effectively give it a liability shield for all recipients, all ages, moving the vaccine into the NVICP.

She states that all sorts of methods were used to make various estimates, none of which she provides any details for.  She then wastes everyone's time going over the GRADE scale for evaluating reliability of evidence--in other words, a method to take subjectivity and try to convert it to objectivity. Which is widely used in medicine and requires no explanation.

Note that the speakers, especially the women, have a tone of voice and rhythm that suggests they are speaking to primary schoolchildren, apart from the medical buzzwords. I think they are chosen for this manner of speech, which tends to hypnotize the listener. Putting you to sleep seems to be the goal.  Could this be more bland?  Does CDC's PR division write the talks for them?

Now we are told the efficacy is 90%.  Even though we know it is about 40% or less now, and no one mentions that Pres. Biden has already announced boosters will start in 3 weeks due to poor efficacy.

But we must believe that in 8 studies efficacy was 92%.  And for severe disease efficacy has climbed to 95-100%.  Maybe true (I doubt it) but for how long?  For a month or two after vaccination?  Once you add in the negative efficacy of the first 2-3 weeks post vaccination, these numbers are a lot less impressive.  When you add in the brief period during which efficacy is high (if true) the benefits fall further.

Furthermore, the analysis assumes the vaccine protects, assumes the vaccine does not ever make disease worse (ADE) and assumes everyone unvaccinated is going to get a symptomatic case of Covid, even though in kids most develop asymptomatic cases and many will probably never get Covid, since it is likely there is some cross protection from coronavirus-caused colds.

Myocarditis post-vaccination is minimized by choosing an age group of 18-39 to study rather than the 16-17 year olds, who have a higher rate. Glad one of the ACIP members asked for clarification.  The speaker gave no real explanation why they did not use teens.

Then when the issue of risk due to anaphylaxis arises, the VAERS reporting rate for anaphylaxis (4.7/million doses) is chosen, to drastically minimize that serious side effect.  This is the most important trick:  using the VAERS rates as the real world rates of adverse events. When we know from the MGH-Brigham study the real world rate of anaphylaxis was 50-100x higher.  We don't have data this reliable to estimate a real world myocarditis rate.

The CDC knows that if it puts the vaccine on the childhood schedule, it will be mandated for 16-17 year olds.

Based on ethics and the law, you cannot vaccinate children to lower the overall costs of healthcare, which is part of CDC's equation.  Further, Dr. Dooling pretends that racial and ethnic minorities might be discriminated against, or suffer other impediments in their attempts ot access vaccine.  She never says that minorities have CHOSEN to be vaccinated at the lowest voluntary rate in the US.  She never admits what everyone on this call knows--that the goal is to force minorities to take the vaccine, as they are the biggest holdouts.  She keep repeating the word equitable. Like 5 or 10 times.  Then she comes up with bogus reasons for minorities to remain unvaccinated, instead of saying that 75% refused because they do not trust government public health programs.

She never used the word choice. Nor that 16-17 year olds have had access to the vaccine for 8 months, and the only unvaccinated persons are those who chose not to vaccinate.

So what is the ACIP actually recommending? In the real world, they are recommending a vaccine mandate for 16-17 year olds that will disproportionately fall on the very minorities they claimed to champion.  And they are giving Pfizer a way to avoid all liability for a licensed vaccine.  Neither of these actual reasons for this vote have been spoken.

Here is another lie that CDC keeps repeating, while it has been proven wrong in Israel:  vaccination prevents severe disease.  And another lie:  the dread deadliness of Delta.

OMG, someone actually asked about the liability.  Someone tries to talk around this. Then she decides she better "turns it over to Amanda" "bobble-head" Cohn to do the verbal spaghetti. I was unable to decipher what Amanda said.  All I can say is that she dodged the question.

Someone points out that we don't know how the vaccine deals with Delta. All the data presented is pre-Delta.  Why won't someone say the vaccine has clearly been shown to have less efficacy against Delta and may have no efficacy against future strains?

Amanda is back talking about "challenges to equity" and leveraging things "in the service of equity." You just want to slap her upside the head.  They all know they are voting to force minorities to be jabbed, but no one admitted it.  The word mandate has not been used.  The liability issue has not been discussed.  But those are the only two reasons this meeting is being held.

Finally someone is telling about the CICP and NVICP, but naturally does not inform the public that only 3% of applicants have prevailed at the CICP so far.  As soon as a notice is published in the Federal Register the liability shield will go up.