This is so so so disappointing Dr Offit. You were so correct last fall when you argued against bi valent boosters for the young and healthy. and now this dreck. Who got to you ?? there are so many mistruths and out right lies stated here. Just a couple examples : 1. "Children can die from COVID; by April 2023, more than 1,700 children had succumbed to the disease." the number is actually closer to 1300 and the vast vast majority of those were children with significant medical issues . any Childs death is sad but to not be honest about this - that the risk of death for a heathy child is literally statistically almost zero is at best disingenuous - at worst purposefully misleading 2. "Although COVID vaccines are a rare cause of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart), the problem appears to be short-lived and self-resolving. Myocarditis following COVID infection, on the other hand, is far more common and far more severe than that following vaccination." first , how about I give YOUR child some MILD AND SELF LIMITING myocarditis. You good with that ??? of course not because there is no such thing as MILD myocarditis - and you KNOW this. It puts anyone suffering from it in danger of future cardiac issues - again you KNOW this . secondly, MULTIPLE good studies have shown that myocarditis post covid infection is actually quite RARE - especially in children . 3. "Children, like adults, can suffer from COVID for months (long COVID)." The latest studies - including a recent one from Finland - show absolutely ZERO correlation between having covid and getting long covid ! think about that ??? in addition there are ZERO lab markers - a study from 2021 showed as only significant correlation for long covid - Middle aged women ! 4. "mRNA vaccines, which are highly effective at preventing severe disease, have now been given safely to more than 10 million young children." how many have been given UN safely ???? I mean most European nations do not even offer the mRNA vaccines to healthy children. esp under 12. but here you are shilling. As I stated. - I am so so disappointed in you.
Dr. Offit, as a pediatrician, who has followed your advice for years, I am greatly disappointed with this assessment. I think you are out of touch with what is happening in the primary care pediatricians office. The debate about Covid vaccines is a debate, and it is not settled science. Your comparison with Covid myocarditis versus myocarditis from the vaccine, is shortsighted. Myocarditis from Covid, included a much broader age group, and seriously ill patients who had a bump in their troponins levels, and not a true myocarditis. The myocarditis with the vaccine, on the other hand, showed a Signal in the young male ages 16 to 30. It also demonstrates a high propensity for scarring six months later. You know that this is a risk factor for sudden, cardiac death, and it dumbfounds me that you were comparing apples to oranges. The other destructive part of this discussion is the vaccine hesitancy that is happening in my patients with routine, tested vaccines. I have never seen this amount of vaccine hesitancy for a routine vaccines in my 23 years of practice. Another point that I’d like to bring up, is that the Covid vaccines were not tested for efficacy in those who already had Covid. You should know this. You should also know about the strength of natural immunity versus vaccine immunity. Omicron became the ultimate vaccine with the majority of children being infected. You also mentioned in MISC however, we only saw that with the first three strains and have not seen it since omicron came on the scene. Finally, your number for the number of Pediatric deaths is over a three year timeframe. It also is likely exaggerated considering the amount of testing that was done as well as studies that have shown hospitalizations for children were estimated to be 60% with Covid and not from Covid. Hospitalizations now are likely more attributable to “coinfections“ in conjunction with another illness like RSV or metapneumovirus. Hospitalizations use PCR. PCR can detect viruses present as far as six weeks prior. You know this. Please use critical thinking in evaluating patients that are testing positive in the hospital and happen to test positive for Covid. This article makes me sad for you and your future opinions that I previously valued so much.
We will and should REJECT ALL VACCINES. They are all based on the same garbage science approved by the same corrupted "regulator" criminals. Liability-free tells you everything you need to know about vaccine safety.
Sorry PCR can do what... PCR cannot detect viruses and it cannot tell when your sick either, furthermore I stumped that your MD and should know better, it goes to show that even with a PhD you can still be stupid.
I’m always impressed when someone with poor grammar, who doesn’t understand when to use “your” vs “you’re”, and doesn’t know that an MD and a PhD aren’t the same thing, chooses to disparage the intelligence of someone who has actually earned an advanced degree.
So, all you have is to attack my grammar, I know what MD means "doctor of medicine" and PhD means "doctor of philosophy", and even with a degree you can still stupid, as for PCR I suggest go research it from the source which would be Kary Mullis....
Given your lack of command of the English language, I’m not surprised you have trouble understanding a complex sentence. I’m sorry the educational system didn’t work well for you.
I am asking for the absolute risk reduction and risk of adverse events from the vaccine... a key part of informed consent and risk vs benefit for patients.
Didn't Pfizer get fined $4.6 billion in court for the exact same shit they've done in the last 3 yrs, like here in Australia they secretly removed the AstraZeneca vax, the TGA, ATAGI and APHRA receive funding (bribes) from Pfizer, they've bribed government's here in Australia to push the vaccine narrative, they bribed the TGA the equivalent in the USA would be the FDA to approve emergency use protocols.
Hello, regarding the claim that cardiac injury from the vaccines is mild and self-resolving: this does not seem to be settled. For example, this study published in The Lancet is suggestive that, even months later, there is cardiac damage and symptoms that are ongoing: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(22)00244-9/fulltext
In the study of 519 patients who had vaccine-induced myocarditis, 26% were prescribed medication for their condition. 90 days after onset of the condition, 32% of patients had not been cleared for physical activity. Only 81% of patients were considered ‘recovered’ by their healthcare providers, however this definition was misleading - in the ‘recovered’ group, 23% still experienced chest pain or discomfort while resting, 19% experienced shortness of breath, and 14% experienced heart palpitations while resting.
Additionally, in Australia the anecdotal evidence from injury support groups is that the cardiac conditions do not resolve quickly at all.
In Australia’s largest vaccine injured patient support group, COVERSE, group members report not seeing any improvement in symptoms for an average of seven months. “The figure includes other serious vaccine-induced conditions, and not just myocarditis and perdicarditis,” explains COVERSE co-founder, Dr Rado Faletic. “However, what is most alarming is that our members report no follow up or investigation from our national drug regulator, the TGA, leading us to conclude that the regulator is unaware of the true extent of damage caused by Covid vaccines.”
Unfortunately, as identified by scientist and COVERSE founder Dr Faletic, the regulator has dropped the ball on this one. There has also been difficulty in getting any Australian academic institutions to collect qualitative data to complement the quantitative data. In my experience as an interviewer of the jab injured, in many cases, people's test results come back clear, even when they are severely disabled by their condition.
Hence, I seriously question that vaccine induced cardiac injury is generally mild and self resolving.
My wife's a manager and personally knows thru her work of two people, one a staff member and the other the husband of a staff member who upon their 2nd dose were diagnosed vaccine-induced myocarditis, and warned not to get any further jabs they both carry around the portable heart monitors, the staff member is constantly sick with Covid since the 2nd dose has had covid 8 times and counting, in fact everyone at her work is always getting sick with covid, one staff member died at the wheel of his sports car with a fatal heart attack after his 3rd dose, all the staff have had between 2-4 doses and are getting sick all the time. My wife has had only two doses and was sick for a week last year, I'm not vaxxed and was sick for a couple of weeks last year.
I think that there is a disconnect between the academic class and working people - the academics appear to be completely unaware of the situation on the ground.
I think they are well aware of wants happening, it seems like this was planned to happen, I think what they didn't expect was the backlash from people waking up so quickly to their agenda, have you noticed the lack of new variants appearing?
I generally liken the argument made by antivaxxers that kids don't need to be vaccinated against COVID-19 because they are so "low risk" of dying from the disease to the very same arguments that antivaxxers used to make routinely about MMR and measles, in which they referred to measles as a "normal childhood disease" that almost never kills any kids. Of course, measles routinely killed between 400-500 children a year in the decade before the first measles vaccine was licensed, a number that, when adjusted for population growth since the early 1960s, is amazingly similar to the yearly death toll of children due to COVID-19 over the last three years.
I like to ask those who consider themselves so "provaccine" who state that children don't need to be vaccinated against COVID-19 because they are at such low risk of death: May I assume that you are also against vaccinating children against measles? The equation, in terms of the number of deaths per year without the vaccine, is pretty darned close to the same So, if you are against vaccinating children for COVID-19, why do you support MMR vaccination? Or do you? Or do you think that 500-600 deaths of children per year are an acceptable toll for a "childhood disease"? 60 years ago, doctors thought that such a death toll was more than reason enough to act by developing a vaccine and then vaccinating as many children as possible. Today? Apparently, too many think that children's lives are expendable.
I'll bite. I don't consider myself "provocative", but I am someone who has been "pro-vax" my whole life (43), used to troll ant-vaxxers with the Organic Food vs Autism chart, yet have not taken the Covid vaccines nor given to my children (My wife, a surgeon, got the first dose of Moderna, but had such a poor reaction her hospital waved her mandate).
I've also read and enjoyed Science Based Medicine for years but have generally disagreed with most of your positions on Covid the last 3 years.
To your specific question - How could I support MMR vaccination and not Covid vaccination?
Simply put, because the MMR vaccine works.
If the pediatrician told me that MMR would prevent illness from measles, mumps, and rubella, and then my child and nearly every child I knew got measles anyway, I wouldn't have shown up for the second dose a month later. I would probably have searched for a new pediatrician too.
If my child fell very ill the day after his first rotavirus vaccine, and roughly 30% of the kids I knew also felt very sick the next few days following the vaccine, I probably wouldn't have shown up for shots #2 and #3.
Easier to lose trust than gain it, and bewilderingly, so many experts (yourself included) may be sacrificing decades of trust all for a rapidly developed new vaccine, a vaccine that had incredibly long odds of working very well in the first place. Not to catastrophize, but the promotion of the Covid vaccine may have eroded more trust in vaccines than Wakefield.
Entering 2020 we had spent close to 90 years trying and largely failing to make effective flu and coronavirus vaccines. It wasn't a secret that they weren't very good. As recent as 2018 you can find Michael Osterholm saying about flu vaccines "It's much more complicated than we thought," Osterholm says. "I know less about influenza today than I did 10 years ago." in Science Magazine in an article titled "Why Flu Vaccines so Often Fail" [1]
It seemed reasonable therefore to assume that as much as we would love to have a vaccine for ILI like Covid or Flu, after decades and decades with little to show we shouldn't have expected magic.
But Fauci, Bourla, Bancel, Wallensky, etc, said this was a miracle, and for a few months I believed it. I wrote off my wife's severe reaction to the Moderna vaccine as a one-off.
But then, many of her colleagues at her hospital started calling off after getting their shots. Then a local school closed - not from Covid - but from the teachers getting the Covid vaccine giving them negative reactions - and when I googled which school here in Cleveland, I saw it was a recurring issue across the country. [2]
As my age group became eligible, my Faceook timeline became inundated with the responsorial hymn "I got my Covid vaccine, I feel so sick, but I know I would have been even sicker from Covid" (They would soon flip this a few months later when they inevitably got Covid - "I feel so terrible but without the vaccine I know it would be worse")
So I chickened out on taking it - but in my defense, our family hadn't participated in Covid Theater 2020 anyway - our kids returned to school fall 2020, we dined out, attended parties, vacationed, etc anyway so by the time the vaccines were out I assumed we had it already. If Covid was a fraction of contagious as they said, we should have all caught it from my wife, who's hospital for months had the highest patient count in Cleveland. Or from the kids wearing cloth masks under their chins at my kids school. Or at the restaurants, bowling alleys, movie theaters, bars, ball games, etc, etc.
By the time my daughter (then, 11) became eligible in the fall of 2021 she got Covid anyway, and it resulted in a 99 degree fever for 24 hours. On a scale of the colds she has had in her decade+ of life, this ranked near the bottom. I cared for her but none of us caught covid from her anyway.
At this time *nearly everyone* I knew who got vaccinated was getting Covid. Sure, that's anecdotal, but every pundit/social media scientist/expert I followed claiming "but look how great the vaccines are working in highly vaccinated countries" had their claims falsified nearly immediately - and they never seemed to admit error. [3]
One week Vermont was praised for it's high vaccination rate which is credited for having so few cases[4], the next week when cases are exploding, the experts were now pivot saying "this isn't surprising" because "they didn't have natural infections yet".[5]
Can you start to see why I wasn't buying this bullshit? These experts sound like astrologers. Making shit up post hoc like Long Island Medium.
As for the "500 or 600" deaths of Children from Covid? Why are there zero excess deaths under age 15? Why are there zero excess deaths under 65 in Sweden where kids never stopped going to school and didn't wear masks? Why when I would look into every story of a child who died of Covid it was almost always the case the child had something terribly wrong? The 8th grader in Oklahoma who weighed 300 pounds. The 6 year old girl in Texas who clearly had sepsis but only saw a NP instead of a physician who dismissed her condition (this was very tragic). The 11 year old in Virgina, also morbidly obese, who when had Covid was locked in her room with a gallon of milk. Horrible, tragic, but I'm not seeing evidence that a Covid vaccine would have altered their fate. Perhaps if my child weighed 300 lbs before they hit puberty I would give them the Covid vaccine.
Why did so many countries see excess deaths *increase* after Covid vaccination campaigns? (Israel, Denmark, South Korea, United States, Germany, New Zealand for example)
I'm not arguing excess deaths were caused by the vaccine, but when South Korea averages 5500 deaths per week with a variation of +/-600 and all the sudden skyrockets to 10,000 deaths a week Spring of 2022, it's hard for me to feel confident that their vaccination campaign achieved anything. Especially when the countries that didn't participate don't seem to have paid a price - Bulgaria for example had excess mortality significantly drop in 2022.
Sometimes we try really hard to make a vaccine and despite our best efforts it doesn't work out. There's no need to become attached to this. It's ok if it didn't work. Lots of drugs never meet endpoints. Lots of drugs meet endpoints and later are found to have side effects. It happens.
This looks like one of those instances where we tried really hard, and it didn't work out. The difference between this and say, RotaShield, is that for some reason this got politicized and turned into a test of faith in scientism. Imagine if we made RotaShield an article of faith in the 90's. Would we have mocked anyone daring to suggest intussusception side effects?
Hopefully the next ones work better. I'm patient.
(PS I did eventually get Covid June 2022. I had a splitting headache for 24 hours)
[3] Example, YLE cites Der Spiegel article on 11/15 claiming highly vaccinated countries like Denmark are doing well, but that would be invalidated in 2 weeks
I have never read such an excellent response. You should be writing your own substack. I'd subscribe!
You said EVERYTHING I have thought but I couldn't have said it so well. I ricochet between anger, disbelief and hysteria about turning an experimental vaccine into a new religion. Well said, Mr DAmbrosio.
Mike, I really love your essay in answer to the butcher. He claims science as his support when really it's scientism. Your references certainly leave no option for him to argue.
I started my journey over 17yrs ago when my youngest daughter had a bad reaction to a vaccine. Initially I questioned the "Safe" statement and over the years I began to question the "Effective" statement. When I started to look at data on the UK health website about disease prevalence over the years and compare the introduction date of the vaccine. In each disease, the rates were falling well before the vaccine was introduced. See vaccines work.... Do they really?
I personally believe our healthcare has improved so much that we should again allow natural immunity to be the dominant method of dealing with disease. Yes there will be some initial years where it will look like the diseases will be out of control until natural immunity is able to be passed from mother to child again. For children of mothers who cannot breastfeed, maybe vaccines could be necessary but who knows.
I caught covid (unvaxed) and I was expecting it to slam me because I was recovering from lung cancer. It was in our home for four days before I tested positive but all I got was aching shoulder blades.
Health versus Disorder, Disease, and Death: Unvaccinated Persons Are Incommensurably Healthier than Vaccinated | International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/40
A couple of comments: my wife and I (elderly) had boosters just before delta peaked. From my point of view, the vaccines saved us from that. Then everyone got omicron, except my wife, who had recently been boosted. No one was seriously ill.
I know many people who had side major effects from Moderna, no one with from Pfizer. Side effects like losing a day or two of work.
It’s difficult to tell what’s going on now, because no one is testing.
With breast feeding, no child will die of measles or any other infectious disease. If "400-500 children a year" died of measles, thank doctors' ignorance and the baby formula industry.
No one, adult or child, needs ANY vaccine. Severe COVID itself is due to injury from traditional vaccines.
Love this comment. Totally agree. Big fan of yours from back in the day, didn’t know you were on substack now! Going to subscribe. I used to write for Scienceblogs, too. Catch up soon 😊
A vaccine that has successfully gone through a phase 3 randomized controlled clinical trial with over 30K subjects and shown to be safe and effective is NO LONGER "experimental." Moreover, both mRNA vaccines have had full FDA approval for a while now. This whole "experimental vaccine" shtick that antivaxxers trot out was always BS, even in late 2020, but two and a half years later it's just plain intellectually dishonest BS.
Just to restate what has been said here; it is simply untrue that myocarditis related to vaccination with SARS-COV-2 vaccine is "short lived and self resolving".
80% of these patients demonstrate persistent changes of late gadolinium enhancement on MRI. This is generally accepted as being indicative of fibrosis and the long term risk of this in terms of arrhythmia and mechanical dysfunction is unknown, but it is a true statement that no LGE is better than LGE. As a pediatrician one cannot tell a parent that this is "self resolving".
I study this area for a living and am NIH funded. When there was a potential that human disease could cause LGE we didn't ignore it. How can we just ignore this? I find this viewpoint to be lacking the nuance and seriousness that parents and children deserve.
Hi and welcome to Substack! I’m excited to have another well-respected, evidence-based, scientifically-fluent voice to listen to. Substack has its share of profitable pandemic quackery.
I’m a family doc and live in Philly, trained at Jefferson (we’ve actually met!), and while I don’t see a lot of peds anymore, I’ll add some anecdotes that I have seen in my unvaccinated pediatric patients:
New onset type 1 diabetes (severe presentation with DKA) 6 weeks after Covid
Pulmonary embolus 3 months after Covid
The world “smelling like garbage” going on 1+ years after infection
Exercise intolerance, dyspnea
Spreading Covid to grandparents and parents from school infections, leading to a range of chronic problems that might have been prevented
Insomnia, depression, suicidality within 2 months after infection (not during lockdown at all)
I could go on, and you’ve obviously seen much more in this population than I have… but I’ve seen enough to aggressively vaccinate my own child, try to persuade and educate my patients, and not abandon a multi-tiered approach to risk reduction that still includes high quality masking in situations like airplanes, crowded museums, etc.
I wrote about how conflicted parents should conceptualize vaccination as the lesser of two risks, and published it through KevinMD.com all the way back in 11/021.
And the original antigenic sin concern does not seem to be playing out in any clinically significant way, and the risk of this seems dwarfed by the benefits of vaccination we’ve seen in real life.
Anyway, excited to listen, and see you around Philly perhaps! We’re in Bella Vista. Go Sixers 🏀
COVID is harmless if you treated early with appropriate medications. You denied early treatment. So all the problems you list are iatrogenic.
You should first understand the root cause of severe COVID. It is an allergic reaction to the virus.
"Some cytokines not associated with antiviral responses, such as IL-5, which aids defence against parasitic worms and is released during allergic reactions, were, surprisingly, upregulated as people developed severe disease"
Basic immunology dictates that the vaccine will damage multiple organs including the heart. mRNA/LNP are systemically distributed and taken up in numerous organs. Cells in these organs thus express spike. Activated CD8+ T cells that recognize spike epitopes will KILL ALL THESE CELLS. So all organs including the heart are damaged in EVERYONE.
The FDA estimated a million children need vaccination to prevent one death. The vaccine will maim a million and certainly kill more than one child as a result. There is no way you can claim the benefits outweigh risks.
My kids are vaxxed (and CHOP patients) but after catching it naturally I won't boost them. Thankfully my practitioners at CHOP agree. Kids who are unvaxxed now are unlikely to get it, nothing we can do there. I'm concerned about people boosting kids when it's not necessarily in their best interest, and there is where I'd worry about the risk of myocarditis. I'm sure it is best for some kids but our T Cells "memory" should be all we need for most vaxxed kids IMHO, and I'm a ZDogg follower and have appreciated your nuanced approach in this.
absolute great question. Yes dr offit- will a healthy under 12 Childs risk of severe covid outcomes move from 0.001% to 0.0001% ???? if they take your shot ???
You are a monster for recommending this junk to kids. how many heart attacks do you think the lies you repeat have caused? Even fda's own disclosures (https://www.fda.gov/media/154869/download) suggest no benefit and great, life long, permanent harm. 1 in 50 children & young men, on the low end, that took this garbage on your bad advice will have heart problems and may die early due to your arrogance.
You and all the people at the 3 letter "public health" agencies defending this crap make me sick. What happened to "first, do no harm."
This is so so so disappointing Dr Offit. You were so correct last fall when you argued against bi valent boosters for the young and healthy. and now this dreck. Who got to you ?? there are so many mistruths and out right lies stated here. Just a couple examples : 1. "Children can die from COVID; by April 2023, more than 1,700 children had succumbed to the disease." the number is actually closer to 1300 and the vast vast majority of those were children with significant medical issues . any Childs death is sad but to not be honest about this - that the risk of death for a heathy child is literally statistically almost zero is at best disingenuous - at worst purposefully misleading 2. "Although COVID vaccines are a rare cause of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart), the problem appears to be short-lived and self-resolving. Myocarditis following COVID infection, on the other hand, is far more common and far more severe than that following vaccination." first , how about I give YOUR child some MILD AND SELF LIMITING myocarditis. You good with that ??? of course not because there is no such thing as MILD myocarditis - and you KNOW this. It puts anyone suffering from it in danger of future cardiac issues - again you KNOW this . secondly, MULTIPLE good studies have shown that myocarditis post covid infection is actually quite RARE - especially in children . 3. "Children, like adults, can suffer from COVID for months (long COVID)." The latest studies - including a recent one from Finland - show absolutely ZERO correlation between having covid and getting long covid ! think about that ??? in addition there are ZERO lab markers - a study from 2021 showed as only significant correlation for long covid - Middle aged women ! 4. "mRNA vaccines, which are highly effective at preventing severe disease, have now been given safely to more than 10 million young children." how many have been given UN safely ???? I mean most European nations do not even offer the mRNA vaccines to healthy children. esp under 12. but here you are shilling. As I stated. - I am so so disappointed in you.
Dr. Offit, as a pediatrician, who has followed your advice for years, I am greatly disappointed with this assessment. I think you are out of touch with what is happening in the primary care pediatricians office. The debate about Covid vaccines is a debate, and it is not settled science. Your comparison with Covid myocarditis versus myocarditis from the vaccine, is shortsighted. Myocarditis from Covid, included a much broader age group, and seriously ill patients who had a bump in their troponins levels, and not a true myocarditis. The myocarditis with the vaccine, on the other hand, showed a Signal in the young male ages 16 to 30. It also demonstrates a high propensity for scarring six months later. You know that this is a risk factor for sudden, cardiac death, and it dumbfounds me that you were comparing apples to oranges. The other destructive part of this discussion is the vaccine hesitancy that is happening in my patients with routine, tested vaccines. I have never seen this amount of vaccine hesitancy for a routine vaccines in my 23 years of practice. Another point that I’d like to bring up, is that the Covid vaccines were not tested for efficacy in those who already had Covid. You should know this. You should also know about the strength of natural immunity versus vaccine immunity. Omicron became the ultimate vaccine with the majority of children being infected. You also mentioned in MISC however, we only saw that with the first three strains and have not seen it since omicron came on the scene. Finally, your number for the number of Pediatric deaths is over a three year timeframe. It also is likely exaggerated considering the amount of testing that was done as well as studies that have shown hospitalizations for children were estimated to be 60% with Covid and not from Covid. Hospitalizations now are likely more attributable to “coinfections“ in conjunction with another illness like RSV or metapneumovirus. Hospitalizations use PCR. PCR can detect viruses present as far as six weeks prior. You know this. Please use critical thinking in evaluating patients that are testing positive in the hospital and happen to test positive for Covid. This article makes me sad for you and your future opinions that I previously valued so much.
We will and should REJECT ALL VACCINES. They are all based on the same garbage science approved by the same corrupted "regulator" criminals. Liability-free tells you everything you need to know about vaccine safety.
https://twitter.com/SynthIge/status/1623506137873264640?s=20
Fyi.Fyi. 5 min vid.
Peer-Reviewed, Ten-Year Study on childhood vaccines and children's health.
https://rumble.com/v10m6zb-peer-reviewed-ten-year-study-are-vaccinated-kids-healthier-than-the-unvacci.html
The CDC refuses to do a vaccinated vs unvaccinated study.
Read Edward Dowd's book, "Cause Unknown," the epidemic of sudden deaths in 2021 and 2022.
And fyi. "The study found that someone who’s had 4 or 5 shots and is 30 years old today can now expect to live to 55 at the oldest."
-Josh Stirling, founder of Insurance Collaboration to Save Lives and former #1 ranked Insurance Analyst.
https://slaynews.com/news/fully-vaxxed-lose-25-years-life-expectancy-study-shows/
They lied about Iraqi WMDs.
They lied about the lab leak.
They lied about COVID vaccine safety, effectiveness.
They lied about masks.
They lied about Nordstream2.
They lied about Hunter's laptop.
They lied about the Russia hoax.
They lied about natural immunity.
They lied about vaccines not causing autism.
Cow's milk protein contaminated vaccines cause 75% of autism cases
https://vinuarumugham.substack.com/p/cows-milk-protein-contaminated-vaccines
... and the Kakhovka dam...
You forget... The germ theory is a lie.
Sorry PCR can do what... PCR cannot detect viruses and it cannot tell when your sick either, furthermore I stumped that your MD and should know better, it goes to show that even with a PhD you can still be stupid.
I’m always impressed when someone with poor grammar, who doesn’t understand when to use “your” vs “you’re”, and doesn’t know that an MD and a PhD aren’t the same thing, chooses to disparage the intelligence of someone who has actually earned an advanced degree.
So, all you have is to attack my grammar, I know what MD means "doctor of medicine" and PhD means "doctor of philosophy", and even with a degree you can still stupid, as for PCR I suggest go research it from the source which would be Kary Mullis....
I’m always fascinated with self proclaimed experts who don’t know how to use a full stop in their communication. Take a breather!
I never said I am an expert in this area.
Given your lack of command of the English language, I’m not surprised you have trouble understanding a complex sentence. I’m sorry the educational system didn’t work well for you.
An attacker with nothing to attack with... This says it all, you're just another woke wombat... get back down in your burrow...
He’s always said yes to Covid vaccines for kids but no boosters necessary.
Yep.
I am asking for the absolute risk reduction and risk of adverse events from the vaccine... a key part of informed consent and risk vs benefit for patients.
Didn't Pfizer get fined $4.6 billion in court for the exact same shit they've done in the last 3 yrs, like here in Australia they secretly removed the AstraZeneca vax, the TGA, ATAGI and APHRA receive funding (bribes) from Pfizer, they've bribed government's here in Australia to push the vaccine narrative, they bribed the TGA the equivalent in the USA would be the FDA to approve emergency use protocols.
Hello, regarding the claim that cardiac injury from the vaccines is mild and self-resolving: this does not seem to be settled. For example, this study published in The Lancet is suggestive that, even months later, there is cardiac damage and symptoms that are ongoing: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(22)00244-9/fulltext
In the study of 519 patients who had vaccine-induced myocarditis, 26% were prescribed medication for their condition. 90 days after onset of the condition, 32% of patients had not been cleared for physical activity. Only 81% of patients were considered ‘recovered’ by their healthcare providers, however this definition was misleading - in the ‘recovered’ group, 23% still experienced chest pain or discomfort while resting, 19% experienced shortness of breath, and 14% experienced heart palpitations while resting.
Additionally, in Australia the anecdotal evidence from injury support groups is that the cardiac conditions do not resolve quickly at all.
In Australia’s largest vaccine injured patient support group, COVERSE, group members report not seeing any improvement in symptoms for an average of seven months. “The figure includes other serious vaccine-induced conditions, and not just myocarditis and perdicarditis,” explains COVERSE co-founder, Dr Rado Faletic. “However, what is most alarming is that our members report no follow up or investigation from our national drug regulator, the TGA, leading us to conclude that the regulator is unaware of the true extent of damage caused by Covid vaccines.”
Unfortunately, as identified by scientist and COVERSE founder Dr Faletic, the regulator has dropped the ball on this one. There has also been difficulty in getting any Australian academic institutions to collect qualitative data to complement the quantitative data. In my experience as an interviewer of the jab injured, in many cases, people's test results come back clear, even when they are severely disabled by their condition.
Hence, I seriously question that vaccine induced cardiac injury is generally mild and self resolving.
"Regulators" are organized crime.
My wife's a manager and personally knows thru her work of two people, one a staff member and the other the husband of a staff member who upon their 2nd dose were diagnosed vaccine-induced myocarditis, and warned not to get any further jabs they both carry around the portable heart monitors, the staff member is constantly sick with Covid since the 2nd dose has had covid 8 times and counting, in fact everyone at her work is always getting sick with covid, one staff member died at the wheel of his sports car with a fatal heart attack after his 3rd dose, all the staff have had between 2-4 doses and are getting sick all the time. My wife has had only two doses and was sick for a week last year, I'm not vaxxed and was sick for a couple of weeks last year.
I think that there is a disconnect between the academic class and working people - the academics appear to be completely unaware of the situation on the ground.
I think they are well aware of wants happening, it seems like this was planned to happen, I think what they didn't expect was the backlash from people waking up so quickly to their agenda, have you noticed the lack of new variants appearing?
I generally liken the argument made by antivaxxers that kids don't need to be vaccinated against COVID-19 because they are so "low risk" of dying from the disease to the very same arguments that antivaxxers used to make routinely about MMR and measles, in which they referred to measles as a "normal childhood disease" that almost never kills any kids. Of course, measles routinely killed between 400-500 children a year in the decade before the first measles vaccine was licensed, a number that, when adjusted for population growth since the early 1960s, is amazingly similar to the yearly death toll of children due to COVID-19 over the last three years.
I like to ask those who consider themselves so "provaccine" who state that children don't need to be vaccinated against COVID-19 because they are at such low risk of death: May I assume that you are also against vaccinating children against measles? The equation, in terms of the number of deaths per year without the vaccine, is pretty darned close to the same So, if you are against vaccinating children for COVID-19, why do you support MMR vaccination? Or do you? Or do you think that 500-600 deaths of children per year are an acceptable toll for a "childhood disease"? 60 years ago, doctors thought that such a death toll was more than reason enough to act by developing a vaccine and then vaccinating as many children as possible. Today? Apparently, too many think that children's lives are expendable.
I'll bite. I don't consider myself "provocative", but I am someone who has been "pro-vax" my whole life (43), used to troll ant-vaxxers with the Organic Food vs Autism chart, yet have not taken the Covid vaccines nor given to my children (My wife, a surgeon, got the first dose of Moderna, but had such a poor reaction her hospital waved her mandate).
I've also read and enjoyed Science Based Medicine for years but have generally disagreed with most of your positions on Covid the last 3 years.
To your specific question - How could I support MMR vaccination and not Covid vaccination?
Simply put, because the MMR vaccine works.
If the pediatrician told me that MMR would prevent illness from measles, mumps, and rubella, and then my child and nearly every child I knew got measles anyway, I wouldn't have shown up for the second dose a month later. I would probably have searched for a new pediatrician too.
If my child fell very ill the day after his first rotavirus vaccine, and roughly 30% of the kids I knew also felt very sick the next few days following the vaccine, I probably wouldn't have shown up for shots #2 and #3.
Easier to lose trust than gain it, and bewilderingly, so many experts (yourself included) may be sacrificing decades of trust all for a rapidly developed new vaccine, a vaccine that had incredibly long odds of working very well in the first place. Not to catastrophize, but the promotion of the Covid vaccine may have eroded more trust in vaccines than Wakefield.
Entering 2020 we had spent close to 90 years trying and largely failing to make effective flu and coronavirus vaccines. It wasn't a secret that they weren't very good. As recent as 2018 you can find Michael Osterholm saying about flu vaccines "It's much more complicated than we thought," Osterholm says. "I know less about influenza today than I did 10 years ago." in Science Magazine in an article titled "Why Flu Vaccines so Often Fail" [1]
It seemed reasonable therefore to assume that as much as we would love to have a vaccine for ILI like Covid or Flu, after decades and decades with little to show we shouldn't have expected magic.
But Fauci, Bourla, Bancel, Wallensky, etc, said this was a miracle, and for a few months I believed it. I wrote off my wife's severe reaction to the Moderna vaccine as a one-off.
But then, many of her colleagues at her hospital started calling off after getting their shots. Then a local school closed - not from Covid - but from the teachers getting the Covid vaccine giving them negative reactions - and when I googled which school here in Cleveland, I saw it was a recurring issue across the country. [2]
As my age group became eligible, my Faceook timeline became inundated with the responsorial hymn "I got my Covid vaccine, I feel so sick, but I know I would have been even sicker from Covid" (They would soon flip this a few months later when they inevitably got Covid - "I feel so terrible but without the vaccine I know it would be worse")
So I chickened out on taking it - but in my defense, our family hadn't participated in Covid Theater 2020 anyway - our kids returned to school fall 2020, we dined out, attended parties, vacationed, etc anyway so by the time the vaccines were out I assumed we had it already. If Covid was a fraction of contagious as they said, we should have all caught it from my wife, who's hospital for months had the highest patient count in Cleveland. Or from the kids wearing cloth masks under their chins at my kids school. Or at the restaurants, bowling alleys, movie theaters, bars, ball games, etc, etc.
By the time my daughter (then, 11) became eligible in the fall of 2021 she got Covid anyway, and it resulted in a 99 degree fever for 24 hours. On a scale of the colds she has had in her decade+ of life, this ranked near the bottom. I cared for her but none of us caught covid from her anyway.
At this time *nearly everyone* I knew who got vaccinated was getting Covid. Sure, that's anecdotal, but every pundit/social media scientist/expert I followed claiming "but look how great the vaccines are working in highly vaccinated countries" had their claims falsified nearly immediately - and they never seemed to admit error. [3]
One week Vermont was praised for it's high vaccination rate which is credited for having so few cases[4], the next week when cases are exploding, the experts were now pivot saying "this isn't surprising" because "they didn't have natural infections yet".[5]
Can you start to see why I wasn't buying this bullshit? These experts sound like astrologers. Making shit up post hoc like Long Island Medium.
As for the "500 or 600" deaths of Children from Covid? Why are there zero excess deaths under age 15? Why are there zero excess deaths under 65 in Sweden where kids never stopped going to school and didn't wear masks? Why when I would look into every story of a child who died of Covid it was almost always the case the child had something terribly wrong? The 8th grader in Oklahoma who weighed 300 pounds. The 6 year old girl in Texas who clearly had sepsis but only saw a NP instead of a physician who dismissed her condition (this was very tragic). The 11 year old in Virgina, also morbidly obese, who when had Covid was locked in her room with a gallon of milk. Horrible, tragic, but I'm not seeing evidence that a Covid vaccine would have altered their fate. Perhaps if my child weighed 300 lbs before they hit puberty I would give them the Covid vaccine.
Why did so many countries see excess deaths *increase* after Covid vaccination campaigns? (Israel, Denmark, South Korea, United States, Germany, New Zealand for example)
I'm not arguing excess deaths were caused by the vaccine, but when South Korea averages 5500 deaths per week with a variation of +/-600 and all the sudden skyrockets to 10,000 deaths a week Spring of 2022, it's hard for me to feel confident that their vaccination campaign achieved anything. Especially when the countries that didn't participate don't seem to have paid a price - Bulgaria for example had excess mortality significantly drop in 2022.
Sometimes we try really hard to make a vaccine and despite our best efforts it doesn't work out. There's no need to become attached to this. It's ok if it didn't work. Lots of drugs never meet endpoints. Lots of drugs meet endpoints and later are found to have side effects. It happens.
This looks like one of those instances where we tried really hard, and it didn't work out. The difference between this and say, RotaShield, is that for some reason this got politicized and turned into a test of faith in scientism. Imagine if we made RotaShield an article of faith in the 90's. Would we have mocked anyone daring to suggest intussusception side effects?
Hopefully the next ones work better. I'm patient.
(PS I did eventually get Covid June 2022. I had a splitting headache for 24 hours)
___________________
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/why-flu-vaccines-so-often-fail
[2] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/michigan-township-closes-schools-due-to-staff-having-negative-reaction-to-covid-19-booster-shot
https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/suburban-school-district-cancels-classes-after-125-teachers-staff-called-off-for-vaccine-side-effects
https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/fairless-local-schools-cancels-class-over-covid-19-vaccine-reactions/
https://www.wfmz.com/news/area/southeastern-pa/upper-perk-sd-closed-friday-after-40-staff-call-out-sick-due-to-vaccine-reactions/article_6f9e2e7a-88a6-11eb-86c6-c3f748d1e8dd.html
https://www.unionleader.com/news/health/coronavirus/concord-schools-closed-after-large-number-of-staff-calls-in-sick-after-getting-vaccine/article_6f998f8f-7409-51f9-a937-9b90a33efa2f.html
https://www.localsyr.com/news/local-news/sandy-creek-schools-closed-thursday-due-to-staffer-side-effects-from-2nd-covid-19-vaccine-shot/
[3] Example, YLE cites Der Spiegel article on 11/15 claiming highly vaccinated countries like Denmark are doing well, but that would be invalidated in 2 weeks
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-update-nov-29/comment/3827583
[4] https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2021/09/12/massachusetts-vermont-connecticut-high-covid-19-vaccination-cdc/
[5] https://www.vpr.org/vpr-news/2021-12-01/why-vermonts-covid-surge-isnt-surprising
@David Gorski finally met his match.
Mike the Gorski Gorer …
Mike, traditional vaccines maim and kill as well. They may not be as efficient as mRNA.
https://substack.com/profile/55258118-vinu-arumugham-rfkjr2024/note/c-14514243
I have never read such an excellent response. You should be writing your own substack. I'd subscribe!
You said EVERYTHING I have thought but I couldn't have said it so well. I ricochet between anger, disbelief and hysteria about turning an experimental vaccine into a new religion. Well said, Mr DAmbrosio.
Mike, I really love your essay in answer to the butcher. He claims science as his support when really it's scientism. Your references certainly leave no option for him to argue.
I started my journey over 17yrs ago when my youngest daughter had a bad reaction to a vaccine. Initially I questioned the "Safe" statement and over the years I began to question the "Effective" statement. When I started to look at data on the UK health website about disease prevalence over the years and compare the introduction date of the vaccine. In each disease, the rates were falling well before the vaccine was introduced. See vaccines work.... Do they really?
I personally believe our healthcare has improved so much that we should again allow natural immunity to be the dominant method of dealing with disease. Yes there will be some initial years where it will look like the diseases will be out of control until natural immunity is able to be passed from mother to child again. For children of mothers who cannot breastfeed, maybe vaccines could be necessary but who knows.
I caught covid (unvaxed) and I was expecting it to slam me because I was recovering from lung cancer. It was in our home for four days before I tested positive but all I got was aching shoulder blades.
"natural immunity is able to be passed from mother to child again"
Yes, I came to the same conclusion. Baby formula created the problem.
Wow great comment, thank you.
"Simply put, because the MMR vaccine works."
Depends on what you mean by 'work'.
Health versus Disorder, Disease, and Death: Unvaccinated Persons Are Incommensurably Healthier than Vaccinated | International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/40
A couple of comments: my wife and I (elderly) had boosters just before delta peaked. From my point of view, the vaccines saved us from that. Then everyone got omicron, except my wife, who had recently been boosted. No one was seriously ill.
I know many people who had side major effects from Moderna, no one with from Pfizer. Side effects like losing a day or two of work.
It’s difficult to tell what’s going on now, because no one is testing.
With breast feeding, no child will die of measles or any other infectious disease. If "400-500 children a year" died of measles, thank doctors' ignorance and the baby formula industry.
No one, adult or child, needs ANY vaccine. Severe COVID itself is due to injury from traditional vaccines.
https://vinuarumugham.substack.com/p/covid-19-severity-is-a-result-of
Ironic considering Offit didn’t get vaccinated against measles since he’d already had it. I wonder if anyone tried to fire his parents?
(Yeah yeah it’s not the same… neither is Covid for 99.9% of people on reinfection)
Oh but sure, sure: who wouldn’t have wanted some protection before meeting the virus? Duh.
Love this comment. Totally agree. Big fan of yours from back in the day, didn’t know you were on substack now! Going to subscribe. I used to write for Scienceblogs, too. Catch up soon 😊
We are speaking about the rushed, experimental mRNA "vaccine" here. You cant compare the two.
A vaccine that has successfully gone through a phase 3 randomized controlled clinical trial with over 30K subjects and shown to be safe and effective is NO LONGER "experimental." Moreover, both mRNA vaccines have had full FDA approval for a while now. This whole "experimental vaccine" shtick that antivaxxers trot out was always BS, even in late 2020, but two and a half years later it's just plain intellectually dishonest BS.
This is the wording used by the FDA: It is authorized as an investigational product under the EUA, Emergency Use Authorization.
Investigational sounds similar to Experimental to me.
I see, placeholder, all good!
Just to restate what has been said here; it is simply untrue that myocarditis related to vaccination with SARS-COV-2 vaccine is "short lived and self resolving".
80% of these patients demonstrate persistent changes of late gadolinium enhancement on MRI. This is generally accepted as being indicative of fibrosis and the long term risk of this in terms of arrhythmia and mechanical dysfunction is unknown, but it is a true statement that no LGE is better than LGE. As a pediatrician one cannot tell a parent that this is "self resolving".
I study this area for a living and am NIH funded. When there was a potential that human disease could cause LGE we didn't ignore it. How can we just ignore this? I find this viewpoint to be lacking the nuance and seriousness that parents and children deserve.
Dr. Offit, are your children all covid vaccinated and boosted with at least 3 doses?
No.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10448853/Top-doctors-refuse-kids-shot-myocarditis-concerns.html
"Myocarditis following COVID infection, on the other hand, is far more common and far more severe than that following vaccination."
This is a CDC lie.
"Myocarditis post pfizer-moderna combo was 28x more common than post covid in 16-24 yo males in this massive Nordic study published in @JAMACardio"
https://twitter.com/DrAseemMalhotra/status/1614865099654676480
How many of the children who died were vaccinated?
Does "succumbed to the disease" mean it was the sole cause of death, or does it mean they died with a positive PCR test?
Hi and welcome to Substack! I’m excited to have another well-respected, evidence-based, scientifically-fluent voice to listen to. Substack has its share of profitable pandemic quackery.
I’m a family doc and live in Philly, trained at Jefferson (we’ve actually met!), and while I don’t see a lot of peds anymore, I’ll add some anecdotes that I have seen in my unvaccinated pediatric patients:
New onset type 1 diabetes (severe presentation with DKA) 6 weeks after Covid
Pulmonary embolus 3 months after Covid
The world “smelling like garbage” going on 1+ years after infection
Exercise intolerance, dyspnea
Spreading Covid to grandparents and parents from school infections, leading to a range of chronic problems that might have been prevented
Insomnia, depression, suicidality within 2 months after infection (not during lockdown at all)
And the ubiquity of measurable lung damage as seen in that study using MRI to study pediatric patients after covid still haunts me: https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.221250
I could go on, and you’ve obviously seen much more in this population than I have… but I’ve seen enough to aggressively vaccinate my own child, try to persuade and educate my patients, and not abandon a multi-tiered approach to risk reduction that still includes high quality masking in situations like airplanes, crowded museums, etc.
I wrote about how conflicted parents should conceptualize vaccination as the lesser of two risks, and published it through KevinMD.com all the way back in 11/021.
And the original antigenic sin concern does not seem to be playing out in any clinically significant way, and the risk of this seems dwarfed by the benefits of vaccination we’ve seen in real life.
Anyway, excited to listen, and see you around Philly perhaps! We’re in Bella Vista. Go Sixers 🏀
No "benefits of vaccination".
https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/do-children-really-need-a-covid-vaccine/comment/14242238
COVID is harmless if you treated early with appropriate medications. You denied early treatment. So all the problems you list are iatrogenic.
You should first understand the root cause of severe COVID. It is an allergic reaction to the virus.
"Some cytokines not associated with antiviral responses, such as IL-5, which aids defence against parasitic worms and is released during allergic reactions, were, surprisingly, upregulated as people developed severe disease"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02379-1
Not surprising to me. I predicted it in Feb 2020 and taught Fauci/Collins/Redfield/Offit how to treat this disease.
https://vinuarumugham.substack.com/p/mrna-vaccines-will-kill-3800-children
https://www.kevinmd.com/2021/11/why-you-should-vaccinate-your-kids.html
(First link broken)
14 year old, latest to be killed by the killer shot.
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1642884146203852801?s=20
Basic immunology dictates that the vaccine will damage multiple organs including the heart. mRNA/LNP are systemically distributed and taken up in numerous organs. Cells in these organs thus express spike. Activated CD8+ T cells that recognize spike epitopes will KILL ALL THESE CELLS. So all organs including the heart are damaged in EVERYONE.
The FDA estimated a million children need vaccination to prevent one death. The vaccine will maim a million and certainly kill more than one child as a result. There is no way you can claim the benefits outweigh risks.
https://vinuarumugham.substack.com/p/mrna-vaccines-will-kill-3800-children
My kids are vaxxed (and CHOP patients) but after catching it naturally I won't boost them. Thankfully my practitioners at CHOP agree. Kids who are unvaxxed now are unlikely to get it, nothing we can do there. I'm concerned about people boosting kids when it's not necessarily in their best interest, and there is where I'd worry about the risk of myocarditis. I'm sure it is best for some kids but our T Cells "memory" should be all we need for most vaxxed kids IMHO, and I'm a ZDogg follower and have appreciated your nuanced approach in this.
So then, if children under 12 get COVID vaccine will there be no more serious illnesses in that age group from COVID (as rare as they are)?
absolute great question. Yes dr offit- will a healthy under 12 Childs risk of severe covid outcomes move from 0.001% to 0.0001% ???? if they take your shot ???
You are a monster for recommending this junk to kids. how many heart attacks do you think the lies you repeat have caused? Even fda's own disclosures (https://www.fda.gov/media/154869/download) suggest no benefit and great, life long, permanent harm. 1 in 50 children & young men, on the low end, that took this garbage on your bad advice will have heart problems and may die early due to your arrogance.
You and all the people at the 3 letter "public health" agencies defending this crap make me sick. What happened to "first, do no harm."
It’s Turtles all the Way Down without good science.
Check this out!https://a.co/d/4xiZpKK