‘Disloyal’ Palestinians can be stripped of citizenship and made stateless, rules Israel Supreme Court
MEMO | July 22, 2022
Palestinians can be stripped of their citizenship and made stateless; the Israeli Supreme Court ruled yesterday in a judgement that further reinforces the apartheid status of the occupation state.
Israeli citizens that are found to be in “breach of loyalty” can have their citizenship revoked, but rights groups insist that the policy will only be applied to non-Jews even if it makes them stateless.
Many countries have laws that allow revocation of citizenship, a trend that has grown over the past two decades following the start of the so called “war on terror.” Though such a policy is highly controversial because it is primarily directed at non-white populations, no government has exercised such draconian powers if it makes individuals stateless.
Under international law no government is allowed to strip citizens of their citizenship if it leads to statelessness.
Yesterday’s ruling addressed a 2008 Citizenship Law in Israel that gives the state authority the ability to revoke citizenship based on actions that constitute a “breach of loyalty”. It came following separate appeals in the cases of two Palestinian citizens of Israel who were convicted of carrying out attacks that killed Israeli citizens. The two were handed long sentences but the state sought to strip them of citizenship.
The Supreme Court denied the removal of citizenship in these two cases based on what has been described as “serious procedural flaws” but ruled that the practice itself was constitutional, even if a person became stateless as a result.
A joint statement in response to the ruling by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Adalah, an Arab rights group, reported in Reuters, called the law discriminatory and said it “will likely be used exclusively against Palestinian citizens of Israel”. Some 20 per cent of Israeli citizens are Palestinians. Nearly all are descendants of Israel’s ethnic cleansing in 1947/48 which drove the indigenous non-Jewish population out.
“There are many cases of Jews in Israel who took part in terror and not even once has the interior ministry thought to appeal to revoke their citizenship,” the ACRI’s Oded Feller told Reuters. “The only cases that were submitted to the court were of Arab citizens.”
Press TV correspondent in Ukraine ‘placed on kill list’
Press TV – July 22, 2022
Press TV’s correspondent in Ukraine Johnny Miller says he has been placed on a “kill list” by Ukrainian ultranationalists following his revelations about Ukrainian atrocities against pro-Russian children and other civilians in the Donbas region.
Reporting from the war-torn country on Friday, Miller said that the neo-Nazi group wants him dead following his repeated reports about Ukrainian forces’ violence in the east of the country.
In an interview with Press TV, Miller said that he was placed on the kill list after he sent a journalistic inquiry to the website that had published a kill list of hundreds of people.
“Actually I contacted the website for a statement, which is normal in journalistic standards, but they didn’t reply to my statement… rather, they put me on the list,” the correspondent said.
“It’s clear that some parts of Ukrainian society [are] witnessing some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare, when a journalist does a legitimate story about a kill list and they put him on the same list,” he added.
He warned that most of the people on the list, including a 13-year-old teenager who was interviewed by Miller, “have already been receiving threats of physical violence.”
“There is no doubt that this list does promote violence, and the killing of anybody on that list,” he noted, adding that there are “over 300 children” on that kill list right now.
Miller called on international organizations such as the UN to take down this list and said that it’s so shocking that there is no pressure from such organizations.
“There should be more pressure from western countries to take down this list, [which is] promoting violence against children and journalists through an extremist behavior and ideology.”
“The Ukrainian government has the power to take down this list; NATO countries have a huge influence over Ukraine, but there doesn’t seem to be any pressure to take down this list at the moment,” Miller said.
He said that in spite of Western media’s supposition, there is a considerable degree of “extremism” in Ukraine, which he has been trying to highlight through the years.
The development comes as a number of journalists have been killed in Ukraine after being put on the list.
Miller is famous for his revealing reports in the east of Ukraine since the Russian offensive started on Feb. 26.
In a damning report last month, Miller revealed that the Ukrainian army has been shelling civilians in the areas surrounding the Donetsk region, while accusing the Russian army of atrocities.
“The uncomfortable truth is that Ukraine is killing civilians, indeed its own civilians, as it has been doing so for the last eight years,” said Miller, who traveled to the Petrovsky district near the frontline in Donetsk to investigate the incidents.
Back in May, the Russian army also confirmed that Ukraine’s shelling killed and injured its civilians in the southern region of Kherson, pounding southern and eastern areas with missile strikes.
According to Russia’s RIA news agency, Ukrainian missile strikes hit a school, kindergarten, and cemetery in the villages of Kyselivka and Shyroka Balka in the Kherson region in early May.
Brits could lose passports for using drugs
Samizdat | July 19, 2022
Recreational drug users in the UK could soon be stripped of their passports or driving licenses under a series of new laws proposed by the Home Office on Monday.
In the document titled ‘SWIFT, CERTAIN, TOUGH New consequences for drug possession,’ the Home Office proposes introducing three tiers of punishments for possession of illegal drugs such as cocaine and cannabis.
The penalties vary from being forced to pay for a drug awareness course to being issued with a hefty fine, and could even result in the loss of an offender’s passport and driving license.
“Tier 1: A person should be issued with a fixed penalty notice as an alternative to prosecution, which requires them to attend and pay for a drugs awareness course,” the white paper suggests, adding that if the individual does not attend the course, they will be forced to pay an increased fine.
The second tier suggests that persons caught with illegal drugs could be offered a caution which could include “a period of mandatory drug testing alongside attendance at a further stage drugs awareness course.”
Under the third tier, the person would “likely” be charged for their offense, and, on conviction, could be faced with an exclusion order, drug tagging, passport confiscation, and driving license disqualification.
Home Secretary Priti Patel explained the need for harsher punishments for drug-related offenses by insisting that “illicit drugs are at the root of untold harm and misery across our society.”
She added that more people die every year as a result of drug misuse than from “all knife crime and traffic accidents combined.”
“Drugs also cause enormous harm to children and young people, impacting on their health and their ability to work and learn. The total cost to society and taxpayers is huge too, running close to £22 billion ($26.4 billion) a year in England alone,” she wrote in the document.
Patel stated that the purpose of this newly proposed legislation is to ensure that drug users are “more likely to be caught” and face “tougher and more meaningful consequences.”
“We want to see swift and certain interventions delivered which can deter drug use and, alongside other measures, reduce demand for drugs,” she concluded.
The document sets out a goal of clamping down on the “cohorts of so-called recreational users” and driving down demand for illicit substances. However, it does not seek to address illicit drug use among children or adults with drug addiction.
It also notes the dangers of the drug trade, stating that “too often, individuals who choose to use drugs casually are sheltered from or wilfully ignore the human cost of the drugs trade which is immediately around them. They are putting money into the pockets of dangerous drug gangs and fueling violence, both in the UK and across the globe. We want this to change.“
According to the document, in 2019/20, over three million people in England and Wales reported using drugs in the last year. The Home Office argues that these people were putting themselves at risk, making communities less safe and handing lucrative profits to criminals driving a violent and exploitative supply chain.
What You Don’t Know Could Hurt You: Novavax’s ‘Loud-and-Clear’ Nanoparticle Adjuvant
The Defender | July 20, 2022
In recent months, COVID-19 vaccination in the U.S. has “slowed to a crawl” as an increasingly distrustful public says “no thanks” to primary shots and boosters.
Still, U.S. public health agencies continue to authorize, approve and recommend COVID-19 vaccines — even for infants.
On Tuesday, advisors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — perhaps believing they can reverse the slowdown in “vaccine uptake” and without admitting to the ravages caused by the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) shots — unanimously recommended the “Novavax COVID-19 Vaccine, Adjuvanted.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week granted Novavax Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for its COVID-19 vaccine, for adults age 18 and up.
Back in 2020, Operation Warp Speed awarded Novavax — another company that like Moderna, never brought a product to market before COVID-19 — a secret contract worth $1.6 billion (now being reported as $1.8 billion).
It was one of the largest taxpayer handouts channeled through Operation Warp Speed.
The media’s obliging sales pitch is that the Novavax injection is a “game changer” in comparison to the mRNA and adenovirus-vectored gene therapy shots, and should be “reassuring to those who are hesitant.”
In fact, according to the CDC’s advisors, the unvaccinated represent the “primary target population for Novavax.”
To further entice the unvaccinated, headlines feature the misleading claim that Novavax’s EUA jab — featuring recombinant moth-cell-based nanoparticle technology, the problematic surfactant polysorbate 80 and a never-before-approved nanoparticulate adjuvant called Matrix-M — is “free of side effects.”
However, the day after the FDA issued its Novavax authorization, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) made its own announcement, stating it was updating its product information for the Novavax COVID-19 shot to disclose “new” side effects.
The EMA’s list of side effects included “severe allergic reaction [anaphylaxis] and unusual or decreased feeling in the skin” (called paresthesia and hypoesthesia, respectively).
In addition, the EMA said it is assessing myocarditis and pericarditis as Novavax side effects — safety signals that also were on display in the FDA’s briefing document.
And in clinical trials, older adults who received the Novavax vaccine experienced an increased incidence of hypertension compared to those in the placebo group.
In short, as reported last week and last month by The Defender, the evidence contradicts Novavax’s downplaying of its vaccine’s association with heart problems and other side effects.
Apparently unaware of any potential cardiac risks, die-hards who have swallowed the slanted Novavax messaging blithely suggested in online comments that they would take bizarre skin problems over the heart problems they associate with other COVID-19 vaccines any day.
Adjuvants — ‘leave them out if you can’
Adjuvants, sometimes referred to as “the immunologist’s dirty little secret,” are components of at least 80% of all vaccines. They are supposed to “stimulate and enhance the magnitude and durability of the immune response.”
Additional adjuvant actions include modifying or broadening the immune response in certain age groups (such as infants and older adults) who tend not to respond to vaccines as strongly as vaccine makers would like, and increasing the body’s uptake of the vaccine antigen and protecting the antigen “from degradation and elimination.”
Less often admitted is the sordid association between adjuvants’ tenacious and “immunostimulatory” properties and systemic adverse events — such as neurotoxicity, “enigmatic” autoimmune issues (dubbed “autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants” or “ASIA” by Israeli autoimmunity expert Yehuda Shoenfeld), narcolepsy, infertility and other wild-card effects.
For these reasons, Dr. Martin Friede — lead scientist at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Initiative for Vaccine Research — candidly remarked to other global vaccine insiders in late 2019, “We do not add adjuvants to vaccines because we want to do so” but out of perceived necessity.
Friede added:
“The first lesson is, while you’re making your vaccine, if you can avoid using an adjuvant, please do so. Lesson two is, if you’re going to use an adjuvant, use one that has a history of safety. And lesson three is, if you’re not going to do that, think very carefully.”
Undermining these seeming appeals to safety, Friede has since gone on to shill for Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot and for mRNA vaccine technology more broadly.
Nanoparticles times two
For many decades, aluminum-based adjuvants were the only game in town.
However, with the burgeoning of nanotechnology and encouragement from sponsors like the National Institutes of Health, manufacturers shifted gears toward a new generation of “novel” nanotech adjuvants designed to not only amplify vaccine responses but also to serve as carrier systems that distribute the vaccine’s payload to “key cells of the immune system.”
Generally left unmentioned in the hype surrounding these next-generation, nanoparticle-based adjuvants is the abundant evidence of nanoparticle toxicity.
Well before COVID-19 vaccines came along, researchers warned about nanomaterials’ ability to “cross biological membranes and access cells, tissues and organs” — such as the brain, heart, liver, kidneys, spleen, bone marrow and nervous system — “that larger-sized particles normally cannot.”
They also cautioned that in the cells, “nanomaterials may be taken up by cell mitochondria and the cell nucleus,” with the potential for DNA mutation, structural damage to mitochondria and cell death.
Moreover, researchers identified extensive biotoxic impacts of nanoparticles on the cardiovascular system, including “cardiac damage and dysfunction, vascular dysfunction, EC [epithelial cell] abnormities [sic], atherosclerosis, abnormal angiogenesis, platelet activation, blood coagulation and thrombosis.”
Nevertheless, in pre-COVID-19 studies of experimental vaccines containing Novavax’s Matrix-M, researchers waxed enthusiastic about the nanoparticle-based adjuvant’s “significant” and “potent” action — including its strong “immunostimulatory properties” even without any accompanying antigen.
And, where nanoparticles are concerned, the Novavax COVID-19 shot actually delivers a double whammy, combining Matrix-M with genetically engineered spike protein nanoparticles.
As Novavax explains it (for some reason putting the word “adjuvant” in quotes), “The spike protein is the ‘signal,’ but … we want your immune system to hear that signal loud and clear [and] that signal boost comes from our Matrix-M ‘adjuvant.’”
Phospholipids and autoimmunity
Not unlike the lipid nanoparticle “carrier systems” in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 injections, the “immunostimulant” Matrix-M adjuvant includes two types of fat molecules — cholesterol and phospholipids — bundled with detergent-like saponins.
In human biology, phospholipids are essential for properly functioning cell membranes. But in the vaccine laboratory, synthetic versions are viewed as “essential components of advanced vaccines.”
Unheeded by the pharmaceutical industry is the fact that up to 5% of healthy individuals are estimated to harbor antiphospholipid antibodies, produced in a “mistaken” autoimmune response.
Researchers have linked the autoantibodies to the risk of antiphospholipid syndrome (APS), an autoimmune disorder characterized by recurring blood clots as well as fetal loss, fetal growth retardation and other obstetric complications.
Although researchers claim to be baffled as to why some people develop APS, studies have noted the emergence of APS and other autoimmune conditions following receipt of numerous vaccines, including those against tetanus, influenza, human papillomavirus (HPV) — and now COVID-19.
In a study published in August 2021, the authors suggested that in people with preexisting antiphospholipid antibodies, both the mRNA and adenovirus-vectored COVID jabs — and presumably other types such as the Novavax injection — could plausibly function as “the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” triggering “aberrant activation of the coagulation pathway.”
Rheumatologists are also reporting surges in blood clotting disorders, including APS.
Will the unvaccinated public take the bait?
In 2005, the EMA mused that while new adjuvants often had trouble gaining approval due to safety concerns such as “acute toxicity and the possibility of delayed side effects … an increased level of toxicity may be acceptable if the benefit of the vaccine is substantial.”
In a 2017 study, investigators studying Matrix-M approvingly noted that “rapid activation” of the immune system “is highly desirable in adjuvants used for emergency vaccination.”
With its authorization of Novavax’s souped-up COVID-19 jab, the FDA appears to have endorsed both of these views.
Outside the U.S., Novavax’s potent adjuvant also is being test-driven in children in the African nation of Burkina Faso, where almost 1 in 10 of the unfortunate toddlers who received an experimental Matrix-M-containing malaria vaccine withdrew or were “lost to follow-up” before or just after the third dose.
Acknowledging only seven serious adverse events, the researchers concluded, “None … were attributed to the vaccine.”
Does Novavax even take its product seriously?
In a comment posted at Yahoo!Finance, a person who signed up for the Novavax clinical trials and then, after researching the untried company, decided to withdraw, noted the doctor running the trial responded, “Oh sure, that’s fine. You want to wait and get one of the real vaccines.”
In another sign of Novavax’s lackadaisical corporate attitude, the labels on the COVID-19 vaccine vials will contain no information about expiration dates, forcing healthcare providers into using an “online expiry date checker tool,” which CDC advisors acknowledge could be both burdensome and a source of “confusion.”
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a “nova” as “a star that suddenly increases its light output tremendously and then fades away to its former obscurity in a few months or years.”
Will we say the same for “Nova”-vax’s shot in a few months’ or years’ time?
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
Watershed Moment for Sceptics as PM Candidate Rishi Sunak Makes Election Pitch Saying “I Stopped Lockdown”
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 21, 2022
In a watershed moment for lockdown sceptics, Prime Minister candidate Rishi Sunak has said his opposition to lockdown is a reason that Conservative members should vote for him to lead the country.
In an interview with Andrew Marr on LBC, the former Chancellor said that last December he cut short an overseas trip and flew back to London to intervene and “stop us sleepwalking into a national lockdown”.
“We were hours away from a press conference that was going to lock this country down again because of Omicron,” he said. “And I came back and fought very hard against the system, because I believe that would be the wrong thing for this country, with all the damage it would have done to businesses, to children’s education, to people’s lives.”
It is the first time a leading politician, whether from the Government or opposition, has suggested that being opposed to lockdown is a reason to vote for him or favour him for office. It is indicative of a significant shift in public opinion about Covid restrictions, particularly that Sunak felt able to be so bold in trumpeting his opposition to lockdown and his role in defeating it without a need to couch it in careful language about taking the virus seriously and being cautious. That his interviewer, Andrew Marr, didn’t challenge him on it is further indication of how opinion has changed. This is despite a number of recent high profile calls for restrictions to be reintroduced, most recently by the editors of the BMJ and HSJ.
It offers hope that the future lies with politicians willing to turn their back on the ruinous and illiberal restrictions of 2020 and 2021.
Here is what Rishi said in full.
I’ll tell you what I was doing in December, though, because I still remember it quite vividly. You know what I did in December was fly back from a Government trip I was on overseas and I flew back to this country to stop us sleepwalking into a national lockdown. Because we were hours away from a press conference that was going to lock this country down again because of Omicron. And I came back and fought very hard against the system, because I believe that would be the wrong thing for this country, with all the damage it would have done to businesses, to children’s education, to people’s lives.
That’s really important in December Andrew because we were hours away, we were hours away from a national lockdown, but I came back and challenged the system, and said this is not right and we don’t need to do this and I’m glad I won the argument. But it should give people some confidence that in the same way I stood up for Brexit, in the same way I did that, I am prepared to push hard and fight for the things that I believe in even when that’s difficult.
Watch it here (from 28:45).
Court Strikes Down “Quarantine Camp” Regulation in New York State
By Bobbie Anne Flower Cox | American Thinker | July 19, 2022
We have had a tremendous victory here in New York: a Supreme Court Judge has struck down Governor Kathy Hochul’s forced quarantine regulation! On July 8, 2022, Judge Ronald Ploetz ruled that the “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures” regulation is unconstitutional and “violative of New York State law as promulgated and enacted, and therefore null, void and unenforceable as a matter of law.”
Shockingly, New York’s Governor, Kathy Hochul, and Attorney General, Letitia James, plan to appeal the decision. Yes, that’s right… the Governor and AG, both unabashedly support quarantine camps! One would think that this fact, in and of itself, would be disturbing enough but add to it the fact that they’re both running for election this November, and you can see just how unconstitutionally brazen and wholly out-of-touch with New Yorkers each of these “leaders” is.
For anyone who missed my prior article on this horrific forced quarantine regime, the regulation truly shocks the conscience. Without exaggeration, it’s something out of a dystopian horror movie. It gives the unelected bureaucrats in the Department of Health the power to pick and choose who they want to “detain,” if they believe it’s even possible you might have a communicable disease. They don’t have to prove you’re actually sick.
And when I say “detain,” I mean lock you in your home or force you from your home into a facility. The government chooses which “detention center” and the length of your stay there is purely at the government’s discretion. That’s right: No time limit so it could be for days, months, or years…. Furthermore, there is no age restriction so that the government could force you, your child, your grandchild, or your elderly parent into detention.
This illegal quarantine regulation allowed for endless possibilities of abuse because there were no due process protections built in to safeguard against government abuse. Once targeted by the DOH, you would have no recourse whatsoever: No chance to prove that you aren’t actually infected with a disease. No chance to confront your jailers, see their supposed evidence against you or challenge their quarantine order in a court of law before getting locked up. Judge Ploetz stated in his decision that the regulation “merely gives ‘lip service’ to Constitutional due process.”
It gets worse. In the true fashion of a dictatorship, the government could tell you what you could and couldn’t do while in quarantine. For example, bureaucrats and politicians could decide to deprive you of your cell phone or internet access, thereby totally cutting off your communications with the outside world. They might also decide to restrict your food intake or force you to take certain medicines or “treatments” that the government deems appropriate. They could even choose to discriminate against those with certain views or beliefs, creating political prisoners, all in the name of supposed “health and safety”.
Judge Ploetz noted in his decision that, “[i]nvoluntary detention is a severe deprivation of individual liberty, far more egregious than other health safety measures, such as requiring mask wearing at certain venues. Involuntary quarantine may have far-reaching consequences such as loss of income (or employment) and isolation from family.”
I fully concur and so, when I first read this regulation last year, I knew I had to strike it down. It was clear to me that this “regulation” violated the separation of powers that is so clearly laid out in our Constitution. It violated existing New York State laws that have been on the books for decades. It violated due process protections.
I knew that, if I didn’t strike it down, then “quarantine facilities” could become a new norm in New York State. And if that happened, I knew it would spread like a cancer to other states across the nation. At that point, there’d be no place left to run and hide. This was not a fight only for New Yorkers; it was a fight for all Americans.
An inspirational note: When I started this lawsuit, I had no support whatsoever. Because I’ve been handling the case pro bono, nobody else wanted to work with me for free and it was near impossible to find anyone who shared my vision and my strategy for success. You see, this was the very first lawsuit of its kind in the entire nation and, very possibly, in the world. So, it took a tremendous amount of my time, energy, and resources to execute.
The Governor and her co-defendants are represented by New York’s Attorney General, Letitia James. She has hundreds of lawyers working for her, all armed with unlimited resources. After all, it’s our tax dollars they use to pay all those attorneys. It’s truly a David v. Goliath story, especially because, while I once worked in a large, prominent, international Manhattan law firm, for the past 20+ years, I’ve had my own small law office in the suburbs of NYC. Since I’m handling this case pro bono, I don’t have the Attorney General’s team of attorneys or her unlimited resources.
Eventually, I found a few fabulous allies. Namely, my petitioners (Senator George Borrello, Assemblymen Chris Tague, and Mike Lawler) and, eventually, Assemblyman Andrew Goodell, Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay, and Assemblyman Joseph Giglio who filed an Amicus Brief to support my case. Plus, attorney Tom Marcelle, who is now running for New York State Supreme Court judge.
After months of battling against the AG, last week we won the case! I’ve successfully struck down a severely unconstitutional regulation that the Governor and her Department of Health brazenly issued without any care whatsoever for the rights of the people. Now, I hope that other attorneys in states across the nation can use my lawsuit as a roadmap to help them strike down unconstitutional regulations in their states. Even international attorneys are contacting me to learn the details about how I structured and won this case. I hope it will aid them, too.
During one of my recent interviews, the host posted a picture of President Kennedy with a quote, “One person can make a difference, and everyone should try.” She said that quote reminds her of me. Well, I hope that quote and this story inspire you to try!
Senator Borrello and Assemblymen Tague and Lawler are calling on the Governor to back off an appeal and to let this decision stand. If you’re a New Yorker, you can help with this effort. Call, email, or write to Governor Hochul (518- 474-8390 Twitter: @GovKathyHochul) and the Attorney General (800-771-7755 Twitter: @TishJames) to tell them that the voters do not want an appeal filed; that an appeal would be going against the will of the people; and that it would be a tremendous waste of taxpayer money.
To find out more about our monumental lawsuit, sign up for weekly updates, or support the lawsuit, go to www.UnitingNYS.com/lawsuit. You can find me on Substack at: https://attorneycox.substack.com/
German Government Admits Covid Vaccines Cause Serious Injury for One in 5,000 Doses – But its Own Data Show the Real Rate is One in 300 Doses
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 21, 2022
The German Government publicly acknowledged on Wednesday that the Covid vaccines cause serious side effects for one in every 5,000 doses.
A tweet from the Ministry of Health stated (via Google translate): “One in 5,000 people is affected by a serious side effect after a COVID19 #vaccination. If you suspect #sideeffects, get medical attention and report your symptoms to @PEI_Germany.” It later added a correction that the figure related to the reporting rate and to doses rather than individuals: “Correction: According to @PEI_Germany, the reporting rate for serious reactions is 0.2 reports per 1,000 vaccine doses.”
This is an unusual and welcome admission from a Government, and perhaps the beginning of governments properly acknowledging the scale of injuries caused by the novel Covid vaccines.
However, the one in 5,000 figure is certainly on the low side. The correction tweet clarified that it was a reporting rate of serious reactions, and it appears from the PEI website to refer to the rate of adverse event reports to the German equivalent of the Yellow Card and VAERS passive reporting systems. Assuming this is correct, then we might expect an under-reporting factor of around 10, meaning the true number of serious side-effects may be 10 times higher.
The Germans are actually very good at monitoring vaccine safety. In addition to their passive reporting system, the German medicines regulator, the PEI, runs an active vaccine safety monitoring app called SafeVac 2.0. The data from this monitoring tool were included in a Europe-wide report on vaccine safety published last month; they showed that 0.3% of vaccine recipients in Germany reported at least one serious adverse reaction to the first dose of the vaccine. The report states:
Of the 520,076 participants from Germany who had received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, 1,838 (0.3%) reported experiencing at least one serious adverse reaction. A total of 1,191 (0.2%) and 39 (0.2%) participants receiving BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna respectively reported experiencing a serious adverse reaction while 608 (0.7%) receiving AstraZeneca reported a serious reaction.
These German figures are in line with the overall rates across Europe, according to the report: “Across the sites 0.2-0.3% reported at least one serious adverse reaction after receiving the first and/or the second dose.”
However, note that a rate of 0.3% is 15 times higher than the rate of 0.2 per 1,000 (i.e., 0.02%) quoted in the tweet. If the figure in the tweet comes, as I suspect, from a passive reporting system (which seems likely as the tweet directs readers to the PEI’s passive reporting portal), this would be an under-reporting factor of 15, which is about what we expected.
But why, then, is the German Government using the 0.02% figure instead of the 0.3% figure from its state-of-the-art vaccine safety monitoring tool when drawing attention to vaccine side effects? I’d like to think that question didn’t answer itself.
In addition, it wasn’t easy to find the SafeVac 2.0 data. I searched in vain for them on the PEI website; if they’re there then they are nowhere obvious. In the end I could only find them, via a general web search, embedded in the Europe-wide study cited above.
Worries about high rates of serious vaccine side effects have been raised before in Germany. In May, Professor Harald Matthes, a scientist leading a separate study into the safety of the vaccines, said that according to his data around 0.8% of vaccinated people in Germany were struggling with serious side-effects. This was in line with international evidence, he said, and much more needs to be done to help them.
The number is not surprising. It corresponds to what is known from other countries such as Sweden, Israel or Canada. Incidentally, even the manufacturers of the vaccines had already determined similar values in their studies… Most side effects, including severe ones, subside after three to six months, 80% heal. But unfortunately there are also some that last much longer.
In view of around half a million cases with serious side effects after Covid vaccinations in Germany, we doctors have to take action. We have to come to therapy offers, discuss them openly at congresses and in public without being considered anti-vaccination.
A board member of a large German insurance company also spoke out in February, saying that his company’s data showed serious vaccine injuries running at around 10 times the rate reported by the German Government.
Elsewhere, an Israeli Government survey found that 0.3% of vaccinated people reported being hospitalised as a result of their Covid vaccination, while a U.S. CDC survey found 0.9% of vaccinated people reported seeking medical care as a result of their vaccination.
The evidence is consistent, then, that 0.3-0.9% of vaccinated people (the percentage partly depending on the number of doses) suffer a serious reaction to the vaccine that leads them to require medical care or hospitalisation.
These data should be much more widely publicised as part of obtaining informed consent. Everyone who receives a Covid vaccine should have been told in writing that the rate of serious side effects is around one in 300 doses (with variations for age and sex). Note that such a frequency is properly termed ‘uncommon’ rather than ‘rare’, as the serious side effects are currently labelled. This is an extremely high frequency for a vaccine of course, and raises serious questions about whether the vaccines should be approved at all, especially for younger age groups.
As it is, hardly anyone knows that these are the Government’s own data on serious vaccine reactions, and governments are making no obvious effort to tell them.
So, it’s one cheer for the German Government for actually doing something to raise awareness of serious vaccine side effects. But next time, maybe use the actual data, rather than a figure that’s 15 times smaller.

