U.S. Should Follow Denmark in Suspending COVID vaccination campaign
Denmark announced recently they were suspending their Covid vaccination campaign and conducting a "thorough professional assessment." The U.S. should do the same.
*Title is corrected to reflect that the Danes haven't de-authorized the jabs, but suspended invitations to get vaccinated.*
While corporate media hype the imminent approval of Covid shots for babies and toddlers, the group least threatened by the virus, health authorities in Denmark have gone completely the other direction by suspending their Covid-19 vaccination campaign. They plan to conduct a “thorough professional assessment of who and when to vaccinate and with which vaccines,” MedicalXpress reports. Vaccinations are intended to be resumed in the fall, according to director of the Danish Health Authority’s department of infectious diseases Bolette Soborg.
About 82% of Danes have received the jab, but looking at this chart from Our World in Data, you likely wouldn’t induce that mass injections had any positive effect. Since Denmark began a booster campaign in September, more than 62% have received booster doses. Despite insistence from Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen in December that “every jab counts” in combating the virus, Covid-associated mortality in Denmark continued to rise during the booster campaign. Denmark’s winter Covid wave, which peaked in March of this year, produced more Covid-associated deaths than any previous wave despite the Omicron variant’s lower fatality rate.
Here are “share of the population receiving a COVID-19 dose” and Biweekly Confirmed Covid-19 Deaths in Denmark from Our World in Data:
The booster campaign began in early October and deaths rose sharply beginning in mid-November. While you can argue it’s not what it looks like (evidence of vaccine-induced Covid mortality—that the vaccines are “backfiring”), you definitely cannot argue that it is evidence of boosters “working.”
Denmark has been relying on Pfizer and Moderna’s novel mRNA shots for the past year, having halted use of the AstraZeneca jab last March. The Danes’ suspension of their Covid shot campaign comes seven months after Denmark, Germany, and several other countries suspended use of Moderna’s product for those under age 30, citing concerns about heart inflammation.
Danish authorities say they see no need to continue the mass jabs now that cases are “under control” and hospitalization numbers have “stabilized,” which is exactly what government officials would be expected to say when extricating themselves from a scandal while trying to save face. Wait for a lull. Claim victory. Sweep the biggest public health scandal in history under the rug. My instinct as a cynical political writer tells me they will not return to mass-administer mRNA shots in the fall. If I were them, I’d find a new, non-mRNA vaccine to push that can be marketed as “better” or “proven technology.”
In the U.S., however, regulators amazingly still believe Covid is an emergency for even young children who face less risk from Covid than seasonal influenza, with indications they will approve the shots for little ones five and under in mid-June.
Where is the population-level efficacy?
Just as in Denmark, however, the overall Covid situation in the U.S. doesn’t appear to be much improved after mass injections. Our World in Data [CB1] shows a record peak number of Covid-19 patients in hospital in the U.S. this January and the third highest peak in September, remaining at over 40,000 hospitalizations per day since July. The United State’s largest Covid wave since 2020 began just a few weeks after our booster campaign. While the steep rise seen in December and January is mostly attributed to Omicron, the new variant did not appear to have taken off in the States until mid-December, while the number of Covid patients in the hospital began rising weeks before that.
Once again, you’re free to argue until you’re blue in the face that it’s not what it looks like. But you cannot argue that, 18 months out from the initial vaccine rollout, that mass jabs have kept people out of of the hospital or kept them from dying to any degree that we can see on a nation-wide scale.
Covid-associated deaths reported to the CDC last year, the year of mass injections, rose from 385,670 to 462,690, an increase of 20%. As I just mentioned, Denmark likewise had a higher wave of Covid-associated deaths after mass injections compared to before.
If more than three quarters of U.S. adults are “fully vaccinated” and two thirds of seniors are boosted, and these shots were touted as highly effective in mitigating severe disease, why does the CDC tally show higher Covid deaths in 2021 than in 2020, and why was there a higher rate of Covid-associated hospitalization? Obviously, testing for Covid didn’t ramp up until spring of 2020. However, I downloaded the Our World in Data data set for hospitalizations and matched hospitalization days between the second half of 2020 and 2021. Hospitalizations were 13% higher in 2021. Moreover, the number of people susceptible to severe Covid should have been depleted in 2020 as many died and others gained immunity. What do proponents of the Covid shot have left to argue? That “it would have been worse without the vaccines”?
Dr. Fauci and a multitude of vaccine promoters have maintained the shots are good for preventing death and mitigating severe disease, but the hospitalization and death data on a national level don’t show that indiscriminately injecting the public no matter their personal risk level to “save lives” and “keep people out of the hospital” has fulfilled that claim. If you doubt this, go peruse Our World in Data and see if you can find any consistent pattern around the world of mass vaccination resulting in lower levels of cases, hospitalizations and/or deaths.
Official government documents also admit that most Covid-hospitalized patients and Covid-deaths are among the vaccinated. The UK Health Security Agency published data for week 13, 2022 indicated 82% of hospitalizations and 92% of deaths were among the vaccinated. Data from Scotland’s health authority also has shown that about 9 in 10 of Covid deaths are vaccinated.
That these shots continue to be aggressively promoted and administered for free, without corporate liability, when they aren’t even effective enough to show any system-wide effects —not in spread, not in hospital capacity, not in deaths — is a scandal of historic proportions. It is reason enough to pull their emergency use authorization and the FDA’s approval of Comirnaty.
That these shots continue to be aggressively promoted and administered for free and without corporate liability when they don’t show population-level efficacy is a scandal of historic proportions. That’s not even including the harms inflicted by the shots themselves.
VAERS data signal massive safety issues
If the shots simply didn’t work but didn’t show any signs of harming people, Denmark health authorities probably wouldn’t be suspending their campaign to evaluate “which people” to vaccinate and with “which vaccines.” Governments the world over have maintained the shots are “safe,” but this, too, is not borne out by the evidence.
Denmark government reports 33,352 “reports of suspected side effects” to the Pfizer/BioNtech and 124 reports of death. As previously mentioned, mRNA shots for those under 30 were suspended last year due to an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis following injection.
We find more detailed data from the United States’ Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, which has been maligned this last year and a half by proponents of mass vaccination. While some of those criticisms aren’t without merit, VAERS is meant to provide a way for regulators to see safety patterns and to alert them to problems, and it is doing that to a very significant degree with the mRNA shots.
A search of VAERS reveals more than 71,000 hospitalization records for adverse events from the Pfizer shot, 10,754 deaths and 28,901 records of permanent disability within 30 days of administration. Out of doses administered, that is a 0.02% rate of VAERS hospitalization records per dose. Anybody can check this by clicking on the links and using a normal calculator or an online percent calculator.
The same search for serious adverse events from the Moderna Covid shots reveals 24,000 hospitalization records, 4,221 deaths, and 9,854 records of permanent disability.
Out of doses administered, that is 0.01% rate of VAERS hospitalization records per dose. Most people have had two or three doses of vaccine, meaning the denominator is far smaller than total doses administered would indicate. The “true” hospitalization rate from vaccine injury could be far greater. For further context, a top-published ICU doctor in Australia recently stated that 2-3% of Covid vaccine recipients experience injury.
Instead of pushing for “emergency” authorization of Covid shots for babies and preschoolers, the least vulnerable and most of whom likely already have naturally acquired immunity, we should do one-better than Denmark and stop not just formal efforts to get people vaccinated, but pull the authorizations altogether. If rigorous examination untainted by political bias then reveals that the shots provide a net benefit to any group at all, then they can resume in a targeted fashion. But no pharmaceutical intervention reaping billions in profit deserves the benefit of the doubt, least of which those that have already failed on a society level to lower hospitalizations and deaths.
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Yes ma'am! Excellent article -