The Paucity of Evidence for Mandated Covid-19 Vaccine Boosters
BY ANDREW BOSTOM | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE| DECEMBER 6, 2021
Federal legal challenges have temporarily enjoined the Biden Administration’s sweeping large business, health care worker, and federal contractor covid-19 vaccine mandates. Notwithstanding these injunctions staying primary covid-19 vaccine mandates, “amendments” mandating booster covid-19 vaccinations have already been issued, as examples, for New Mexico healthcare workers, and University of Massachusetts-Amherst students.
Dr. Allon Friedman’s recent Brownstone essay, citing randomized, controlled trial data on primary covid-19 vaccination, demonstrated, “The Pfizer and Moderna trials show that in lower risk populations (which account for most of society) COVID-19 vaccines do not reduce mortality.” Friedman concluded, “Therefore, [covid-19] vaccine mandates, which are enormously costly and terribly divisive, are a cure worse than the disease.”
Why did Dr. Friedman rely exclusively—and appositely—upon randomized, controlled trial data to justify his conclusion? Almost sixty years ago (in 1963) Campbell and Stanley published their seminal monograph on research methodology entitled “Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research.” This work, which shaped research designs ever since highlighted the major threats to validity that are avoided, uniquely, by the randomized controlled trial—a true experimental design.
Observational studies and all other non-randomized designs lacking parallel control groups, which they referred to as “quasi-experimental,” are fraught with known biases investigators attempt to control for, after the fact, with limited success. Worse still are intractable, unknown biases which the randomization process, alone, accounts for. Guyatt and colleagues, in their 2008 British Medical Journal paper “GRADE: an emerging consensus on rating quality of evidence and strength of recommendations”, updated and reinforced these ideas, appropriately assigning highest priority to randomized, controlled trial evidence.
On Friday, November 19, 2021, CDC Director Dr. Walensky endorsed the expanded recommendations of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) that booster (third dose) shots be provided to all adults 18 years of age, and older, who received their second Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccine second doses, at least 6-months earlier.
What randomized, controlled trial evidence were the basis for this “unanimous decision,” touted by Dr. Walensky?
Although two small, published, randomized, placebo-controlled trials—one in kidney transplant recipients, and another in a general population—revealed enhanced immune responses to boosters, CDC’s recommendation clearly hinged upon a large, unpublished Pfizer randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial.
A month before the CDC expanded booster recommendation was announced, Pfizer’s “randomized trial results by press release” were issued (10/21/21). The ~10,000 person, placebo-controlled randomized covid-19 vaccine booster trial, yielded a 95.6% reduction in symptomatic covid-19 infections (i.e., 109 in the placebo group; 9 in the boosted group), after a median 2.5 months of follow-up. The press release also included this important caveat:
“The observed relative vaccine efficacy of 95.6% (95% CI: 89.3, 98.6) reflects the reduction in disease occurrence in the boosted group versus the non-boosted group in those without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.”
The November 19, 2021, ACIP presentation of Pfizer’s Dr. John Perez included enough data about prior infection to conclude boosters did not reduce covid-19 infections relative to placebo in this clinically relevant, ever burgeoning subgroup. Simple calculations (based upon the slides from pages 16 and 17) indicate there were only 2 symptomatic covid-19 infections among the 524 trial participants with a history of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection, 1/275 who received boosters, and 1/249 given placebo injections (p=0.944 for incidence rate difference of 0.038%).
Moreover, CDC’s Dr. Oliver, in her ACIP review (p. 25) of Pfizer’s booster trial data, acknowledged that within the full cohort of ~10,000 there were no covid-19 hospitalizations or deaths, and no data to assess any impact on SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
These findings comprise a striking paucity of randomized trial evidence on the “efficacy” of boosters—literally none on the most clinically relevant outcomes of serious covid-19 morbidity and mortality. Even the potential effect of boosters on SARS-CoV-2 transmission remains unaddressed.
Rapidly accumulating data strongly suggest prior covid-19 infection, “natural immunity,” is more robust, flexible, and enduring than exclusive covid-19 vaccine-acquired immunity. Pfizer’s covid-19 booster trial data confirm boosters afford no benefit in preventing covid-19 infections among those with natural immunity.
Given these overall randomized trial findings regarding covid-19 vaccine boosters—absence of even a short- term reduction in mild covid-19 infections in those with natural immunity, and no data establishing that boosters prevent covid-19 hospitalizations, deaths, or SARS-CoV-2 transmission—there is no rational, evidence-based justification for covid-19 vaccine “booster mandates.”
Andrew Bostom, M.D. MS, is an academic clinical trialist and epidemiologist, who is currently a Research Physician at the Brown University Center For Primary Care and Prevention of Kent-Memorial Hospital in Rhode Island.
Palestine Action Activists Found NOT GUILTY After Defacing Israeli Arms Company In UK
Palestine Action | December 6, 2021
Three Palestine Action activists, dubbed the ‘Elbit Three’, have today been found not guilty of criminal damage charges in a trial taking place at Newcastle-under-Lyme Magistrates Court. The trial, which commenced on Friday 3rd December, saw Elbit Systems and the Crown Prosecution Service attempt to criminalise individuals who took a stand against the manufacture of drones and drone parts. The products manufactured at the site of the protest, the UAV Engines factory in Shenstone, Staffordshire, are key components for a range of Elbit’s combat drones, used extensively by Israel for bombardments of Gazan civilians.
Elbit Systems are Israel’s largest private arms company, supplying 85% of Israel’s drone fleet. Their Hermes drones, manufactured with UK-made components, are regularly deployed in bombardments of Gaza, with Elbit also supplying a range of surveillance equipment, armaments, and specialist military technologies for the Israeli military and police. Palestine Action have undertaken a campaign of sustained direct action against Elbit Systems – across their 10 sites in the UK – with this action in Shenstone having occured in January 2021, six months since Palestine Action launched. Despite many dozens of actions taken, and over £15,000,000 in damages caused (according to police), this is the first time that activists had faced trial, with all previous charges having been dropped in the run-up to trial dates.
The presiding judge, Judge Waites, stated that the Crown had failed to prove that convicting the defendents would be proportionate with their freedom to protest. He stated further points which included: Palestine is an important issue, the arms trade is an important issue, the defendants believed in what they were doing, and the location was specifically chosen. These are the points that Palestine Action has long stated: through targetted and deliberate direct action, individuals can make a measured impact on the lives of civilians in Palestine by disrupting and undermining Israel’s arms trade.
This verdict represents a serious defeat for Elbit Systems, who have long maintained that their business is lawful and that they are therefore to be protected from such actions. This belief has been shared by the British state: the police have offered a round-the-clock rapid response and extensive protection to Elbit’s death factories, and the CPS have attempted to prosecute those who take a stand against Elbit’s business of bloodshed.
The defence, represented by Palestinian barrister Mira Hammad and Richard Brigden of Garden Court North (instructed by Kelly’s solicitors), presented their case that the action taken was to prevent a greater crime. An activist involved in the trial elaborated, stating that the action was taken to shut down the factory for one day in an attempt to stem the flow of drones and stop the bombings. They stated that Elbit provide 85% of Israel’s drones, with Elbit describing themselves as the ‘backbone’ of the Israeli airforce, adding that there is extensive documentation of the drones being used for attacks on the civil population of Gaza. They stated that this is not only during intensive military excursions, but also for extrajudicial killings and indescriminate bombings – with Elbit drones being linked directly to the killing of four children playing on a beach in Gaza in 2014.
Another activist, Sarah, later stated that:
“Throwing this paint may not protect Gaza. What protects Gaza is stopping the bombing. Elbit produce weapons, tanks and drones used to commit crimes against humanity, and this is what is unlawful. Export licenses should not be granted while Elbit continue to violate human rights. In the face of these crimes, you have to do something. If you do nothing, then Elbit continues to make its smart weaponry which enables Israel to kill efficiently. Elbit has no business being allowed to be in the UK. It has no values that are shared with humanity”. Following this, a standing ovation was given from the public gallery.
What’s Left? How Greenwald, Covid and Rittenhouse Exposed a Plague Among Progressives
By Riva Enteen | MintPress News | December 1, 2021
Caitlin Johnstone asserts that “[t]he most significant political moment in the U.S. since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election wasn’t a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control.” Since Trump’s election, information control contributes to why those critical of Democrats are called Trump sympathizers. Journalist Paul Street epitomizes this tendency, seeming to speak for many who equate any criticism of Democrats with support for Trump and his policies. To the extent that this attitude serves to obstruct political dialogue and struggle, it does not serve us well — especially in these dark times, when we must pull our forces together to overcome the challenges we face.
Street’s CounterPunch article, “Glenn Greenwald is Not Your Misunderstood Left Comrade,” obstructs political dialogue and struggle. He gives no substantive rebuttal to a Greenwald article that declares “grotesque” the sight of “masked servants and unmasked elite at the New York Met Gala.” In a classic ad hominem attack, since Street couldn’t summon up an intelligent response, he just hurled insults. Sadly, this is what currently passes for political debate.
Compasses, nautical and political, are known to stop working in the vicinity of a strong electro-magnet. What has happened to our political compass? Street declares, “Glenn Greenwald is not a man of ‘the Left’ (or whatever’s left of ‘the Left’).” What does “Left” mean, post-Trump? The once-reliable compass seems now to be spinning wildly, as the political magnetic field does a headstand.
Street asserts that “Greenwald broke on through to the wrong side during the Trump years, so clouded by his understandable contempt for liberal and Democratic hypocrisy, corporatism, and imperialism as to become a willing accomplice of the white nationalist right.” Greenwald’s tireless and meticulous debunking of Russiagate has cast him as a Trump sympathizer to people like Street. Remarkably, many on “the Left,” still believe Russia did it, though the recent indictment of Hilary Clinton’s lawyer and arrest of the principal source of the bogus Steele dossier should put any such notion to rest.
Street snidely discounts Greenwald’s stated reason for leaving The Intercept — that “The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New York-based [Intercept] editors involved in this effort at suppression.” Instead he claims that Greenwald, having submitted “a piece that tried to advance Trump campaign propaganda against Joe Biden on the eve of the 2020 presidential election,” regarded himself as “too good to be edited.” He lambasts Greenwald for being, as he put it, “all over the Hunter Biden-New York Post-deep state laptop story, even after CNN published an article titled “New Proof Emerges of the Biden Family Emails: a Definitive Account of the CIA/Media/BigTech Fraud.” Yet, even CNN recognized the bombshell.
Smelling (and finding) the rat
The World Socialist Website, in sync with Street’s “analysis,” calls Greenwald a “sly fascism-denier” who, Street says, “has creepily thrown in with the white nationalist right.” Why? Because in his impeccably documented piece, “FBI Using the Same Fear Tactic From the First War on Terror: Orchestrating its Own Terrorism Plots,” Greenwald discussed the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer. He concludes:
There was no way to avoid suspicions about the FBI’s crucial role in a plot like this absent extreme ignorance about the bureau’s behavior over the last two decades, or an intentional desire to sow fear about right-wing extremists attacking Democratic Party officials one month before the 2020 presidential election.
Greenwald was one of the few who smelled a rat in the Michigan kidnapping story and, after serious investigative journalism, he found the rat.
In sum, the FBI devised this plot, was the primary organizer of it, funded it, purposely directed their targets to pose for incriminating pictures that they then released to the press, and then heaped praise on themselves for stopping what they themselves had created. The Wall Street Journal’s headline declares “In Michigan Plot to Kidnap Governor, Informants Were Key,” yet Jan 6 is declared an attempted coup.
In spite of such headlines from the Wall Street Journal, Street says Greenwald “downplays the seriousness of the fascist-putschist Capitol Riot of January 6, 2021.” This doesn’t sound like downplaying to me: “Of course the FBI was infiltrating the groups they claim were behind these attacks,” Greenwald reported, concluding, “yet the suggestion that FBI informants may have played some role in the planning of the January 6 riot was instantly depicted as something akin to, say, 9/11 truth theories or questions about the CIA’s role in JFK’s assassination.”
Street claims Greenwald has a “curious alignment with the white-nationalist neofascist Donald Trump and the January 6 marauders in their purported struggle with ‘the deep state.’” Marauders or the FBI? Does Street not believe that a “Deep State” exists? Greenwald’s article “Questions About the FBI’s Role in 1/6 Are Mocked Because the FBI Shapes Liberal Corporate Media” is subtitled “The FBI has been manufacturing and directing terror plots and criminal rings for decades. But now, reverence for security state agencies reigns.”
In a widely praised TED Talk, Trevor Aaronson states: “There’s an organization responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and ISIS combined: The FBI.” So why are Street, the World Socialist Website, Counterpunch, and many others well-versed in COINTELPRO tactics, now swallowing FBI words whole and calling people Trump fascists for raising the issue of possible FBI involvement in the January 6 riot?
Street claims that Greenwald “defends Trump and other Amerikaner neofascists against the ‘censorship’ of their supposed free speech right to spew sexist, nativist, and white power hatred on Twitter and Facebook.” An article I wrote about the new reality police revealed that Media Alliance, a San Francisco organization founded in 1976 to be mainstream media watchdogs, circulated a petition after Jan. 6 that says: “Facebook should create a circuit breaker to help prevent dangerous disinformation and incitements to violence from ever reaching a mass audience…”
That good minds sincerely believe Silicon Valley executives should be the gods of truth in today’s world makes Orwell look cheerily optimistic. Yet shockingly, many people agree with the unprecedented censorship of a former president. Nixon, even after his impeachment and resignation, was never gagged as Trump is. As a former constitutional lawyer, Greenwald addressed concerns of Silicon Valley censorship in his article “Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment.” Greenwald believes House Democrats are getting closer to the constitutional line, if they have not already crossed it.
Visceral hatred and rational discourse
Greenwald recently wrote several pieces on COVID as well, one announcing that he was eagerly vaccinated. However, his questions about the cost-benefit analysis missing from the COVID debate and his support of the position taken by NBA star Jonathan Isaac have Street condemning him for “failing to mention the horrific, anti-science, COVID-fueling and pandemo-fascist anti-masking and anti-vax practices, policies, and politics of the Amerikaner Party of Trump (the Republicans).”
An article titled “Forced Vaccination Was Always the End Game” — from the non-profit National Vaccine Information Center, which advocates for informed consent protections in medical policies and public health laws — reports that breakthrough COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in fully vaccinated people are on the rise; individuals who have recovered from the infection have stronger natural immunity than those who have been vaccinated; and officials at the World Health Organization now say that the SARS-COV-2 virus is mutating like influenza and is likely to become prevalent in every country, no matter how high the vaccination rate. Yet, in spite of such growing perspective, Greenwald’s piece supporting the NBA’s Isaac is subtitled, “It is virtually a religious belief in the dominant liberal culture that people who do not want the COVID vaccine are stupid, ignorant, immoral and dangerous.”
In a separate article, titled “The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics,” Greenwald writes that the “ACLU prior to its Trump-era transformation” had one primary purpose: to denounce as dangerous and unnecessary attempts by the state to mandate, coerce, and control in the name of protecting the public from pandemics. The ACLU report cites important lessons from American history:
… vivid reminders that grafting the values of law enforcement and national security onto public health is both ineffective and dangerous. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have justified abuses of state power. Highly discriminatory and forcible vaccination and quarantine measures adopted in response to outbreaks of the plague and smallpox over the past century have consistently accelerated, rather than slowed, the spread of disease, while fomenting public distrust and, in some cases, riots.
Greenwald legitimately questioned the ACLU’s about-face from the pre-Trump era to its current position, pointing out how the ACLU tweeted that “[f]ar from compromising them, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties.” Yet Street lauds the ACLU’s current position.
Many ask, as one article puts it, “Why Does Glenn Greenwald Keep Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Show?” The question I keep asking, but get no answer to, is why Greenwald, Tulsi Gabbard, Aaron Maté, Matt Taibbi, Max Blumenthal, and Jimmy Dore can appear only on Fox. Why are they not invited onto “liberal” MSNBC or CNN, let alone Democracy Now? The apparent answer is that the dominant, ubiquitous paradigm, which cannot be challenged, is “don’t go after the Democrats.”
Much like Julian Assange, Greenwald began to be condemned by liberals only post-Trump. The liberal visceral hatred of Donald Trump has trumped rational discourse. If there were true rational discourse, Julian Assange would not be suffering in Belmarsh Prison as a consequence of his cardinal sin — publishing emails harmful to Democrats.
Facts and the distorting ideological lens
Following the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, Greenwald again went out on a limb in what a revolutionary comrade called a “rant,” but Greenwald’s message was essentially the same as that conveyed by Caitlin Johnstone:
If your opinion about a legal case would be different if the political ideologies of those involved were reversed and all other facts and evidence remained the same, then it’s probably best not to pretend your position on the case has anything to do with facts or evidence.
Yet Greenwald, once again, has found himself in the crosshairs of “progressives.”
I agree with Street that he and Greenwald are not “on the same side.” If Street, and countless others like him, engaged in true political debate and struggle rather than calling people “facetious,” “stupid,” and “snotty,” we might be closer to the revolution that Street claims to hunger for.
Riva Enteen, former Program Director of the San Francisco National Lawyers Guild, is a lifelong peace and justice activist, retired social worker, lawyer, and editor of “Follow the Money,” a collection of Pacifica Radio’s Flashpoints interviews. She can be reached at rivaenteen@gmail.com
Democrats receive pushback over social media censorship bill proposals
The bill would make social platforms liable for user “harm”
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | December 4, 2021
House Democrats called for the introduction of legislation that would allow users to sue platforms for “emotional injury.” Critics warned that such a law would result in more censorship.
On Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee discussed several pieces of legislation that would result in amendments to Section 230 (the law that protects online platforms from liability for content posted by users).
One of the proposals was the “Justice Against Malicious Algorithm Act.” The law would enable social media users to sue companies for causing “severe emotional injury.” However, the law does not define so-called emotional injury.
Rashad Robinson, the head of an advocacy group, was one of the people who testified in the hearing. He said free speech should be restricted to fight “misinformation.”
Robinson said that Congress should put legislative limits on the First Amendment rights, arguing that: “I understand that we have these conversations about the First Amendment, but there are limitations to what you can and cannot say.”
Democratic representatives agreed with the idea of limiting free speech to fight misinformation. Most of them said that online platforms should be forced to “deamplify” objectionable content.
One Democratic panelist said that free speech does not translate to “freedom of reach.” Another said that “lies are not free speech.”
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers warned that the “Justice Against Malicious Algorithm Act” was a “a thinly veiled attempt to pressure companies to censor more speech.”
She added that if “companies will have to decide between leaving up content that may offend someone and fight it in court, or censor content that reaches a user—which do you think they’ll choose?”
UK surgeon remains suspended a year after saying governments are using Covid to control people

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | December 4, 2021
Last year, the UK medical register suspended a consultant surgeon for 12 months pending an investigation by the General Medical Council (GMC) for posting on social media that Covid-19 was being used by elites to control the world.
Colleagues wrote to the organization arguing he should not have been suspended for his personal opinion.
Mohammad Iqbal Adil, a Pakistan-born British doctor, has worked in the NHS for almost three decades. An interim orders tribunal suspended him for a year because of videos he posted on social media.
The doctor expressed “his point of view on the Covid-19 pandemic and the far-reaching effects of the lockdown on the economy, public health and wellbeing,” his campaign page states.
A spokesperson for the GMC at the time said: “The interim orders tribunal imposed an interim suspension on Dr Adil’s registration, following our referral, to protect patients and public confidence. This interim suspension remains in place while we consider concerns about Dr Adil’s fitness to practice.”
Some of his colleagues launched a petition on Change.org calling on the GMC to reinstate Dr. Adil. The petition argues that the GMC should have given him a chance to reflect on the videos “when the entire world is confused about the novel virus.”
The petition also noted that he had a family to support, adding, “UK needs doctors to work. It would not be in the best interest of the public and health system to lose [an] experienced and highly qualified surgeon like him.
“We, the doctors community within [the] UK and across the world, feel that it’s injustice to suspend Mr Adil on his personal point of view on the covid-19 without giving him [a] chance to reflect upon his video before enforcing suspension.
“We request to the GMC to revoke his unfair 12 months suspension . . . and allow him fair chance to work in this country [for the benefit of] the health system, communities, and medical graduates.”
“Dr Adil has been making a stand for freedom of speech for all doctors and nurses to speak their truth without fear of recrimination or persecution,” his campaign page states.
World Health Organization agrees to negotiate a ‘pandemic treaty’ to prevent next outbreak
WaPo : Less than a week after the new omicron variant of the coronavirus was reported to the World Health Organization, global leaders on Wednesday agreed to start negotiations to create an international agreement to prevent and deal with future pandemics — which some have dubbed a “pandemic treaty.” The special session of the World Health Assembly, only the second ever held by the WHO’s governing body, pledged by consensus to begin work on an agreement, amid a round of applause, after three days of talks. “I welcome the decision you have adopted today, to establish an intergovernmental negotiating body to draft and negotiate a WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. The commitment by countries to negotiate a “global accord” would “help to keep future generations safer from the impacts of pandemics,” he added.
The assembly’s decision will see the creation of an “intergovernmental negotiating body” to draft and negotiate the final convention, which would then need to be adopted by member states. … Tedros said omicron “demonstrates just why the world needs a new accord on pandemics,” and called for a “legally binding” agreement.
#
Marc Morano’s comment: “This will be a virus version of the UN IPCC & Paris climate style pacts. The pandemic ‘crisis’ will become permanent just like the ‘climate crisis.’ Attempts to impose lockdowns for future COVID variants or new viruses may be internationally imposed instead of national, state or local. If you don’t like your governor, mayor or school board, you can vote them out, but if a ‘radical’ WHO ‘pandemic treaty’ that is ‘legally binding’ becomes reality, global mandates may be coming your way and local elections will cease to matter as unelected bureaucrats will be yielding the real power over your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. This must be stopped now. Even the Washington Post is calling a ‘pandemic treaty’ a ‘radical’ idea.
Once a ‘pandemic treaty’ is set in place, COVID mandates will become permanent as elite officials fly around the world to discuss how to further crush freedom to wage war on viruses. Just like the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the architects of a ‘pandemic treaty’ will seek more and more power and control and become a self-interested lobbying organization all while doing squat to prevent or mitigate future viruses. A ‘radical’ WHO ‘pandemic treaty’ may be just the ticket for the administrative state to reign in rogue anti-lockdown governors like Ron DeSantis.”
Huge new study shows ZERO Covid deaths of healthy German kids over 4 or adolescents
By Alex Berenson | December 2, 2021
German physician-scientists reported Monday that not a single healthy child between the ages of 5 and 18 died of Covid in Germany in the first 15 months of the epidemic.
Not one.
Even including children and adolescents with preexisting conditions, only six in that age range died, the researchers found. Germany is Europe’s largest country, with more than 80 million people, including about 10 million school-age children and adolescents.
Serious illness was also extremely rare. The odds that a healthy child aged 5-11 would require intensive care for Covid were about 1 in 50,000, the researchers found. For older and younger children, the odds were somewhat higher, about 1 in 8,000.
Another eight infants and toddlers died, including five with preexisting conditions. In all, 14 Germans under 18 died of Covid, about one per month. About 1.5 million German children or adolescents were infected with Sars-Cov-2 between March 2020 and May 2021, the researchers found.
“Overall, the SARS-CoV-2-associated burden of a severe disease course or death in children and adolescents is low,” the researchers reported. “This seems particularly the case for 5-11-year-old children without comorbidities.”
The researchers reported their findings in an 18-page paper published to the medrxiv preprint server on Monday.
The data came from a registry Germany established in March 2020 intended to capture all hospitalizations of people under 18 with Covid. All German children’s hospitals, pediatric infectious disease specialists, and pediatric societies were invited to participate.
(SOURCE: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.30.21267048v1.full.pdf)
British researchers have posted similar findings, reporting that only six healthy children (including those under 18) out of 12 million died of Covid.
Given the known risks of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young men, the fact that Pfizer tested its mRNA vaccines on barely 3,000 children 5-11 and followed most of them for only weeks after the second dose, the German data again raises the question of how health authorities can possibly justify encouraging children or teenagers to be vaccinated.
But they have.
So parents will have to decide what’s best for their children (at least in those states that bar vaccine fanatics from trying to vaccinate teenagers without parental consent).
Vaccine Mandates: Unscientific, Divisive, and Enormously Costly
By Allon Friedman | Brownstone Institute | December 2, 2021
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s controversial plan to enforce COVID-19 vaccinations for large businesses—recently enjoined by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals— was ostensibly designed to minimize “deadly outbreaks of COVID-19.” The ability of COVID-19 vaccines to protect life is at the heart of the OSHA mandate and the fierce debate over similar mandates now embroiling much of the world.
Nearly 18,000 scientific papers have been published since last year on COVID-19 and vaccines, so the task of sifting through the evidence to help critically evaluate whether vaccines reduce risk of death seems daunting. It turns out, though, that two studies stand so far above the rest in terms of rigor and quality that they are uniquely suited to help us address the question of vaccine protection.
These two studies, published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, are fundamentally distinct from the other studies in that they are the only clinical trials yet reported to randomize adults to receive either a COVID-19 vaccine (Pfizer or Moderna) or a placebo injection and then follow them over time. Why is this important? Because the randomized controlled study design they used is the gold standard and most rigorous scientific tool available to examine cause and effect relationships between an intervention and outcome (vaccination and death, in this case).
This design also limits as much as possible the influence of other factors, whether known or unknown, that could affect the outcome. Many studies have used other designs to try and understand how well the COVID-19 vaccine protects against death, but no matter how well planned or executed, none of these studies approaches the level of scientific rigor that a well-conducted randomized controlled trial offers.
So did these two clinical trials find that vaccination reduced the risk of dying from COVID-19? The Moderna study reported one death from COVID-19 in the vaccinated group and three in the unvaccinated group, far too few to make any statistical conclusion. The Pfizer trial was even more inconclusive because the findings published in the New England Journal report (one COVID-19 death in the vaccinated group and two in the unvaccinated group) differed from what Pfizer later reported to the Food and Drug Administration, and the FDA update did not specify the number of COVID-19 deaths.
Regardless, the most relevant study endpoint is not death from COVID-19 but all-cause mortality, which counts every death that occurred during the study period. All-cause mortality is the key outcome of interest not simply because it circumvents the oftentimes subjective decision as to why someone died but also because it balances all the possible effects of a COVID-19 vaccine, both good and bad, that could influence risk of death. In other words, it allows us to quantify lives saved by the COVID-19 vaccine while taking into account potential lives lost from vaccine-related heart disease, blood clots, severe allergic reactions, and perhaps other causes.
Because results from the two trials were so similar regardless of the type of vaccine used it is helpful to merge the results. Following a combined total of 74,580 individuals, half given the COVID-19 vaccination and half given a placebo shot, over six to seven months, the two studies reported that thirty-seven people who were vaccinated died as compared to thirty-three people who received placebo.
Simply put, the very best scientific evidence currently available to mankind does not support the widely held contention that COVID-19 vaccination using the Pfizer or Moderna brands lowers risk of death, at least over the first half-year after vaccination. Interestingly, these striking findings were not reported in the main body of the papers but in supplemental sections.
There are several additional points to consider.
First, the studies’ findings were limited by the fact that their design did not take into consideration previous infection leading to subsequent immunity from COVID-19 infection, which could very well have lowered risk of death in one or both study groups.
Second, there are serious concerns over falsification of data and other data integrity issues in the Pfizer trial so this could also have influenced results. Importantly, because both trials mostly excluded groups at highest risk of dying from COVID-19 such as the frail elderly, the very obese, or those with serious chronic illnesses, we cannot assume that the vaccines do not protect against death in these populations.
Based on my clinical judgment and lesser quality supportive evidence, I generally assume when treating such patients that the vaccine’s benefits outweigh its risks and so advocate for their use, though I cannot be absolutely certain they offer protection against death because of the lack of randomized controlled evidence.
Finally, the very low rates of death from COVID-19 observed in both studies should serve to remind us of how minimal this risk is in the general population.
Perhaps the key takeaway message is that absolutist, rigid COVID-19 vaccine mandates such as that put forth by OSHA are not based on best science. Such mandates run counter to the universal medical dictum of risk stratification, whereby treatment is tailored to individuals based on individual risks and benefits to be accrued. They also violate the dominant philosophy of evidence-based medicine, which supports the use of current best evidence when making decisions about patient care.
The Pfizer and Moderna trials show that in lower risk populations (which account for most of society) COVID-19 vaccines do not reduce mortality. Therefore, vaccine mandates, which are enormously costly and terribly divisive, are a cure worse than the disease.
Allon Friedman is a Professor of Medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine and a medical researcher focusing on topics related to kidney disease. The ideas expressed in the article are entirely his own and not necessarily those of his employer.
Should employers require vaccination without any other option? Comments to OSHA close on Dec 6.
By Steve Kirsch | December 3, 2021
ICYMI, here’s the URL to file your comments before the comment period closes on December 6, 2021.
In a nutshell, OSHA believes that:
- Face coverings work and should be used.
- COVID recovered people who have not been fully vaccinated still face a grave danger from workplace exposure to SARS-CoV-2.
- They should impose a strict vaccination mandate ( i.e., all employers required to implement mandatory vaccination policies as defined in this ETS) with no alternative compliance option.
I believe:
- The scientific evidence (Danish mask study, Bangladesh mask study) shows that face coverings are completely ineffective.
- COVID recovered people should be exempt from all rules. If COVID recovered people are re-infected, they don’t get hospitalized, don’t die, and don’t spread the virus to others. The CDC has no counter-examples.
- The vaccines kill more people than they save for all age groups according to the VAERS data. And even in Pfizer’s own study, there were significantly more deaths in the vaccine group than then in the placebo group. There is ZERO scientific evidence the vaccines save lives when you are looking for a reduction in all cause mortality. Businesses should BE PROHIBITED from requiring vaccination.
One of us is wrong. If you agree with me, please consider taking a few minutes to file a comment.




