A Vaccine That Adds Up to Nothing
Let’s ponder some Pfizer vaccine numbers reported by Alex Berenson that you can’t really discuss without being banned by Twitter. Most of Berenson’s blogs are free, but his paid content is worth paying for. Here’s his report on Pfizer’s clinical trial.
The study included 44,000 people, half of which received a placebo. By the end of the study, (buried in the appendix according to Berenson), 29 people died from “all causes,” fifteen with the vaccine and fourteen without.
Just stop right there for a minute.
Aren’t we supposed to be in the middle of a “killer pandemic?” In 2019, 2,854,838 Americans died of all causes, or about 869.7 per 100,000. If you were to think about this on a smaller scale, suppose you attend a wedding with 115 guests. One of them, on average, will be dead within a year. If your party were composed of Pfizer clinical trial guests, however, it’s a little less sad. Among these participants, the rate is about 659 per 100,000. According to Berenson, Pfizer’s study included only “a tiny handful of older people most at risk for Covid.” That fact, as Berenson points out in different terms, should make us all do a big, collective, “um, wut?”
(It’s unclear how much time passed, precisely, between start of trial and the “death from all causes” data, but even if you multiplied these numbers by 2, we aren’t talking about the Black Death here.)
Perhaps someone who knows more about clinical trials might be able to answer the question. Perhaps older, more frail people are routinely left out of clinical trials. Perhaps there’s a good reason to subject only reasonably healthy people to an experimental drug, but — if so — why would you then use that research to justify inflicting the experimental treatment on the very same people deemed too weak for the test in the first place?
The mainstream Covid voice would probably answer, at this point, “we expect the young and healthy to take risks on behalf of the old and the weak. We’re all in this together, building herd immunity, vaccine style.” That might work, I suppose, if it actually worked. Highly vaccinated countries like Israel and the UK are now experiencing increased hospitalization and death rates. Vaccine efficacy reduces in a matter of months, not years. Boosters are required. (No one seems to be asking the rather obvious question: if a 3rd shot is required, will a 4th, and a 5th, and a 6th?). All this is to say nothing of the variants caused by the vaccine itself.
Berenson also observes some troubling patterns among those 29 deaths. Nine of the vaccinated died of heart problems, compared to six among the placebo group. Three of the vaccinated died of sepsis compared to none in the placebo group.
I keep returning, however, to that wedding celebration, to that quotient of death we expect to see in the course of normal living. Early on in the crisis, I wondered what would happen if I approached a grocery store manager and asked, deadpan, “where do you keep the bodies?” The grocery manager would respond, “what bodies?” I would look puzzled at this point and say, “well, you folks are front line workers, essentials, exposed on a daily basis to a terrible pandemic. You must be piling up the dead workers and shoppers somewhere, right?”
Have people died? Yes. I knew a few of them. Have people endured horrible bouts of sickness as a result of this engineered virus, hatched in a Communist laboratory? Yes. Has our health care system faced a particularly unusual burden of care? Well, judging by unused hospital ships, I don’t think so.
Was it worth cancelling your daughter’s wedding? No.
Was it worth curtailing religious assembly? No.
Was it worth pushing thousands of small businesses into bankruptcy? No.
Would it be worth destroying our civil liberties and creating a health care police state? Hell, no.
Rise up and play the man, folks. Start identifying, defying, and arresting the drama queens if necessary. The next time an Austrian fascist tells you to “screw your freedom,” remind him what happened at Normandy, and then at Nuremburg.
