A gonorrhea vaccine fails - and reveals a much bigger problem with the studies health bureaucrats use to push flu and Covid jabs

And, of course, the legacy media ignores the story. For vaccines, failure is a four-letter word.

Last year, England began offering gay and bisexual (aka gay) men a vaccine for gonorrhea, the sexually transmitted bacterial infection often called “the clap.”

Though not fatal, gonorrhea is unpleasant and increases risk for HIV. Like other sexually transmitted diseases, it is far more common in gay men. English authorities offered the vaccine, originally designed for meningitis, after studies showed it cut infections by about 40 percent. The shot could have a “huge impact,” England’s top vaccine regulator told the BBC.

Or not.

Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine published results from a trial of the vaccine in gay men in Australia. It failed to prevent gonorrhea — and some men who received it reported serious side effects.

The media has buried the trial’s results. Not one mainstream American news outlet reported the vaccine’s failure. And, after giving over 30,000 men the jab, English authorities are so far still recommending it despite the new results.

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(Unearthing the results the media buries. For pennies a day. With your help.)

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But the failure of what is called the 4CMenB vaccine (the “Men” in the shot’s name stands for meningitis) is not just about one vaccine.

It offers much larger lessons — ones health bureaucrats and the media are almost certain not to heed.

The gap between the earlier reports showing the vaccine worked and last week’s findings it didn’t are not a coincidence or an accident.

The earlier studies were based on observational real-world data, like the studies the Centers for Disease Control now uses to justify flu and Covid jabs.

The new study was much smaller, covering only about 600 men, but it was not observational. It was a randomized controlled trial that split subjects into two groups. One received two shots of the actual vaccine. The other received placebo injections.

The two groups were matched by age, reported sexual activity in the previous six months, and other factors. And the trial was blinded, meaning no one receiving the shots knew whether they were getting the vaccine or the placebo.

Blinded randomized trials control for hidden biases that observational data cannot. And the trial’s results were unequivocal. Men in it had a better than even chance of getting gonorrhea whether the received the vaccine or not. (The sex recession does not seem to have reached gay men in Australia. About 60 percent of the trialists reported having 11 or more partners in the six months before it began, including almost 10 percent who reported more than 50. Roughly 70 percent said they had had group sex at least once in the previous six months.)

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The trial’s failure is among the most compelling evidence yet that the observational studies that health bureaucrats and the media rely on to push the Covid and flu vaccines are little more than pro-jab propaganda.

In the real world, people who get vaccines differ from those who remain unvaccinated in crucial ways. They may be more concerned about their health, more likely to seek medical care or use condoms during sex (or stay home if they’re afraid of Covid). Researchers can try to correct for these differences, and good ones do.

But they inevitably fail, and the hidden biases almost always make vaccines look better. (I say “almost always” to be safe, but “always” is probably more accurate.)

The phenomenon even has a name: healthy vaccinee bias.

Healthy vaccinee bias is not a small effect. It typically gives vaccines a 40 to 50 percent advantage in observational studies — exactly the edge that the gonorrhea vaccine seemed to have but did not.

It is also no coincidence the Covid boosters, which have appeared essentially useless in clinical trials since Omicron emerged, often have about a 50 percent edge in observational trials. (Pfizer and Moderna have basically stopped running any randomized clinical trials on Covid jabs in the last couple of years, and governments and the bureaucracies have stopped making them do so; that’s not a coincidence either. You can’t find a vaccine doesn’t work if you don’t test it properly.)

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Meanwhile, stunningly, the study’s authors did not catalog ordinary side effects from the vaccine in the gonorrhea trial, claiming that its side-effect profile is understood from its use as a meningitis vaccine. (Yes, that’s what they said.)

However, they did record serious adverse events, those requiring hospitalization. Not doing so would have been a major ethical breach.

And, yes, the vaccine was linked to notably more of those serious events. Eighteen participants who received the vaccine reported them, compared to nine who did not. In the study’s appendix, the investigators said the vaccine might have caused the serious side effects in four cases, though — as is typical — they offered no details about specific cases to explain their judgments.

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(GoGo to the hospital, do not pass go!)

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Barring stunningly unexpected results in two other trials that are still happening, this trial should mark the immediate end of efforts to use the meningitis vaccine for gonorrhea prevention. Most heterosexual adults, and even many gay men in committed relationships, are at very low risk for gonorrhea anyway.

Yet public health bureaucrats are refusing to change course. As the BBC reported:

The UK Health Security Agency said it was not making any changes at this time. Dr Mary Ramsay, director of public health programmes at UKHSA UK, said it was “important to consider a range of evidence.”

The losers here will be gay men, who may believe they are protected by a vaccine that doesn’t work, rather than focusing on safer sex practices that actually do, like using condoms and being regularly tested for sexually transmitted diseases.

Ahh, the public health vaccine fetish! More powerful than leather at an all-male after-hours club.