Day 656: Pfizer Can’t Count

Alex Berenson notes that Pfizer's COVID vaccine trial data has been mysteriously updated to include more deaths, with a notable increase among the vaccinated rather than the controls:

Pfizer said publicly in July it had found 15 deaths among vaccine recipients by mid-March. But it told the FDA there were 21 - at the same data cutoff end date, March 13.

21.

Not 15.

The placebo figure in the trial was also wrong. Pfizer had 17 deaths among placebo recipients, not 14. Nine extra deaths overall, six among vaccine recipients.

Could the discrepancy result from some odd data lag? Maybe, but the FDA briefing book also contains the number of Covid cases that Pfizer found in vaccine recipients in the trial. Those figures are EXACTLY the same as those Pfizer posted publicly in July.

Yet the death counts were different.

Pfizer somehow miscounted - or publicly misreported, or both - the number of deaths in one of the most important clinical trials in the history of medicine.

And the FDA’s figures paint a notably more worrisome picture of the vaccine than the public July numbers. Though the absolute numbers are small, overall deaths were 24 percent higher among vaccine recipients.

The update also shows that 19 vaccine recipients died between November and March, compared to 13 placebo recipients - a difference of almost 50 percent.

Sadly, the mystery of the missing deaths may not be solved until 2076, if Pfizer has anything to say about it.

Against the New York Times' advice, I went down this rabbit hole and found something rather different, a report challenging the CDC's assurances that mRNA vaccines are safe in pregnancy. The article disappeared from ResearchGate sometime this week (see the wayback machine version), but is still around at the bottom of the rabbit hole:

The use of mRNA vaccines in pregnancy is now generally considered safe for protection against COVID-19 in countries such as New Zealand, USA, and Australia. However, the influential CDC sponsored article by Shimabukuro et al. (2021) used to support this idea, on closer inspection, provides little assurance, particularly for those exposed in early pregnancy. The study presents falsely reassuring statistics related to the risk of spontaneous abortion in early pregnancy, since the majority of women in the calculation were exposed to the mRNA product after the outcome period was defined (20 weeks’ gestation). In this article, we draw attention to these errors and recalculate the risk of this outcome based on the cohort that was exposed to the vaccine before 20 weeks’ gestation. Our re-analysis indicates a cumulative incidence of spontaneous abortion 7 to 8 times higher than the original authors’ results (p < 0.001) and the typical average for pregnancy loss during this time period. In light of these findings, key policy decisions have been made using unreliable and questionable data. We conclude that the claims made using these data on the safety of exposure of women in early pregnancy to mRNA-based vaccines to prevent COVID-19 are unwarranted and recommend that those policy decisions be revisited.

Which is to say, the CDC can't count, either.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a third of a percentage point today.