A lot of you have asked about the Pfizer data dump

To be honest, it is mainly a distraction from more important issues

Last week, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Food and Drug Administration released a huge batch of documents about the Pfizer mRNA shot - which people are claiming show the vaccine is only 12 percent effective.

They are also claiming the documents prove the vaccine isn’t safe for pregnant women.

I would be happy to tell you if that’s what the documents showed.

But they don’t actually show anything like that.

Maybe more importantly, they also don’t show much that wasn’t in the initial FDA briefing documents in 2020. They are headfakes from both the real issues around the clinical trial that led to the approval of the shots and the problems with the shots that have come up since - which are far deeper and more important.

Take the pregnancy issue. The screamers on Twitter are trying to make hay with the fact that the documents show Pfizer didn’t know if the jabs were safe for pregnant women at the time they were authorized.

BUT THAT WAS NOT A SECRET.

Pfizer excluded pregnant women from the pivotal trial - which was a standard and reasonable precaution. Thus no one knew the mRNA vaccines were safe for fetuses.

As it happens, I don’t think pregnant women should get the shots (unless, maybe, they are morbidly obese). They are at very low risk from Covid. But we now have more than a year of detailed pregnancy data, and not just from the professional whitewashers at the Centers for Disease Control. And the numbers are among the few bright spots about mRNA shot safety. A huge British dataset shows no extra fetal deaths or severely low birthrates in women who received the shots - if anything, the numbers lean slightly in favor of the vaccines. Norway and Israel have had similar findings.

What about the 12 percent effectiveness figure? It comes from data about people who had Covid symptoms but did not test positive for Covid. Pfizer called them “suspected but unconfirmed” cases. But ultimately most of those people were found NOT to have Covid after being tested.

The bigger issue here is that the symptoms of mild or moderate Covid are indistinguishable from other respiratory illnesses or even allergies. And for almost everyone who isn’t morbidly obese or very old, Covid rarely progresses beyond the moderate stage.

Thus for most of two years we had an incredibly intensive and intrusive testing regime to chase cases. Now we have basically dropped that testing regime, with no apparent impact on public health. (I won’t even mention tracing, the even more useless flip side of testing.)

Further, the 12 percent figure takes no account of the more recent data showing that the Pfizer jab probably has negative effectiveness against the Omicron variant. In other words, forget protection - people who take the shot are MORE likely to be infected with Omicron.

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Again, the failure against Omicron cuts to a much more important issue, which is that the mRNA shots may cause a dangerous version of a phenomenon known as original antigenic sin. Essentially, the vaccines may imprint the body to produce antibodies against the original virus even after it has long mutated into a new form.

Original antigenic sin can be an issue for people who are naturally infected, too. But because the shots produce a response to just one part of the coronavirus, we have reason to fear it may be more severe in people who receive the vaccine. (And original antigenic sin is not to be confused with antibody-dependent enhancement, in which the vaccine-generated immune response actually worsens the course of disease.)

But the 12 percent number, which is fiction anyway, ignores these risks.

The fact is that the vaccines do have a short window of effectiveness, maybe three to five months after the second shot, when antibody levels against the coronavirus’s spike protein are supra-naturally high. The companies perfectly designed the trials to take advantage of that window, while at the same time colluding with regulators to ignore the fact that the shots probably led to MORE infections shortly after the first dose.

None of this was a secret. It was all obvious by late January 2021, at least to anyone paying close attention to the trial design (I have the receipts in my Twitter feed, too bad you can’t see it).

What was a secret - at least to the regulators and those of us who only had access to the public data - was just how quickly those anti-spike antibodies would vanish, and how quickly protection against infection would fade. Did Pfizer and Moderna know? They may have become aware of the problem by March or April, because they were following patients who had been dosed in the Phase 2 trials in late spring or early summer 2020, but those trials included a relative handful of patients and the signal may not have been clear.

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But even the companies probably didn’t know just how quickly and aggressively the virus would mutate (in fact, it had barely mutated at all in 2020). Their public statements in the winter and spring of 2021 offer a clue to what they hoped - that the original shots would remain effective for years. Thus as antibodies faded, they would simply top people up with an mRNA booster once every 12 to 24 months, producing tens of billions of annual profits - not sales, profits - for the companies indefinitely.

But the antibodies faded too fast, and the virus mutated too fast. Now the most highly vaccinated nations in the world have an coronavirus/Omicron epidemic that is waxing in some countries and waning in others but shows no signs of disappearing.

Covid deaths in Australia, where essentially all adults are vaccinated (and most are boosted):

This is the scandal, and the Pfizer documents have nothing to say about it.