Marc Grey
Recently Stuff published an article about a heroine doctor who spends some of her time helping people by explaining medical questions and issues. Now she does sound like a nice person and it is not the intent here to personally attack her.
However, we are going to look at the article itself! Near the end of it she proceeds to ” ‘debunk’ four Covid myths“. It is instructive to examine these so-called ‘debunkings’ as it provides insight into the effectiveness of the narrative surrounding the Covid vaccine issue and how even qualified and intelligent people are not seeing through it!
“I’m worried that this new mRNA technology hasn’t been tested properly”
She points out that there have been decades of research into mRNA tech. Also that the phase I-III trials have been run in parallel, and concludes that nothing has been missed out. Now, these points are true. But the fact that there has been a lot of research around mRNA tech does not mean that it was ready to be applied in a commercial product, or more significantly that this vaccine was tested properly!
The running of phase I-III trials in parallel is in fact a concern e.g: phase I is supposed to check dosage safety – so how do we know what doses to use in phase III if it has started before phase I has worked this out? What about if phase I shows some serious safety issues…and we are already running phase III? There will be a tendency to downplay them as we are committed to phases II and III. However, these all pale in comparison to what was overlooked! The phase III trials are not complete, and we have rolled the vaccine out to everybody. This is the very definition of “not tested properly“.
“I’m trying to conceive and worried. What if I get pregnant – is the vaccine safe?”
She discusses how Covid can be bad for pregnancy. This is possibly true but not entirely relevant to the question. She also states that the vaccine and its components cannot reach the baby. Pfizer’s own updates have warnings that state safety with respect to pregnancy is unknown (note that they are doing a study on this). Additionally exactly where all the mRNA ends up in the body is still a subject of research. So again, her assertion is not borne out (could not help the delicious pun here) by even a modest investigation.
“Is the vaccine effective against Delta?”
She says it is our greatest defence as it makes the vaccinated 5 times less likely to catch it and 10 times less likely to be hospitalised. Data from Israel suggest that the vaccine is not very effective (37-39%) against the delta variant. Her numbers about the likelihood of hospitalisation are not borne out by looking at the current UK data, but are to some extent by older Israeli data. So I’ll be kind and rate this one as inconclusive.
“I have a great immune system, so I will be OK”.
She remarks that getting vitamin D and eating well is good. I agree. She states that getting vaccinated will prime your immune system to fight off Covid. While this is true, it is not answering the question! A reasonable reading of the hospitalisation data immediately shows that comorbidities and age are the biggest risk factors for Covid – which certainly suggests that if you are healthy, you might want to weigh your Covid vaccine vs Covid disease risks differently from that group!
So overall, this ‘debunking’ is very poor, full of reassurances that are slightly off-topic and dangerously misleading in some places (the pregnancy issue). Finally – like a broken record – rolling the vaccine out while the phase III trials are ongoing is absolutely not ‘fully tested’! The overlooked point is that this vaccine that has been rushed out to us is not only a vaccine for a new disease, but uses a new delivery mechanism – so it really needed more testing, not less!