According to the pharma industry, governments, and the mainstream media, the mRNA vaccines used against COVID-19 are proven to be safe and effective. Over the past couple of years, anyone daring to suggest otherwise is dismissed as being anti-science, with bans from social media enforced to prevent information from dissenters reaching a wider audience. Increasingly, however, studies are beginning to challenge this narrative. As a paper published in the Industrial Psychiatry Journal outlined in 2021, not only do mRNA vaccines have dangers, but reports on their supposed efficacy have seemingly been subject to statistical bias.
The Industrial Psychiatry Journal paper points out that mRNA vaccines can cause a host of multi-systemic side effects. It states that the most serious of these are anaphylaxis (severe, potentially life-threatening allergic reactions), antibody-dependent enhancement (a phenomenon in which the antibodies generated by vaccination cause the immune system to overreact), and death. Other reported adverse effects include severe liver damage, very low platelet counts (thrombocytopenia), inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis), and blood clots (thrombosis).
Worryingly, therefore, the way in which the efficacy of mRNA vaccines has been reported may have deliberately misled many people into choosing to receive them.
The efficacy of the mRNA vaccines used against COVID-19 has been reported in the mainstream media using what are known as relative risk reduction statistics. As we shall see, however, this misleadingly makes their efficacy seem impressively high. If the vaccines’ far less impressive absolute risk reduction statistics had been used instead, there seems little doubt that the numbers of people consenting to be vaccinated would have been significantly lower.
To understand this, let’s take a moment to look at the difference between relative and absolute risk reduction. Imagine a disease where the general population has a 15 percent risk of dying from it. If a new treatment reduces that risk to 10 percent, then the absolute risk reduction resulting from the treatment would be 5 percent.
To make things sound more impressive, however, we could instead choose to describe the efficacy of the treatment in terms of its relative risk reduction. Using this approach, the treatment could be said to have reduced the risk of death by one third (i.e. from 15 percent to 10 percent). As such, we could claim the treatment has an efficacy of 33.3 percent – clearly a far more impressive-sounding result than the 5 percent described using its relative risk reduction.
Significantly, therefore, in its reporting on mRNA vaccines, the mainstream media has almost exclusively used the more impressive-sounding relative risk reduction numbers. As a result, we are told that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is 95 percent effective in preventing infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while the Moderna vaccine is said to be 94.5 percent effective. What we are not being told is that the absolute risk reduction for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is a mere 0.7 percent, and that for the Moderna vaccine it is just 1.1 percent.
To be clear, relative risk reduction statistics and absolute risk reduction statistics both have a place in medical science reporting. But for vaccines based on new technology given accelerated approval via so-called ‘Emergency Use Authorization,’ it is difficult to argue that using relative risk reduction statistics hasn’t resulted in people being misled. This is especially concerning given that in some cases mRNA vaccines have been administered mandatorily.
The fact is that alternative approaches to inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 infection are available. Unlike mRNA vaccine technology – for which the long-term health risks remain unknown – they are based on the use of effective, safe combinations of micronutrients and plant extracts. Towards achieving global control of the pandemic, it is time for governments and public health policy makers to start using them.