Not medical, legal, or any other advice - reported for information only.
More than six months ago, in April 2021, a Reuters fact check concludes that "COVID-19 vaccines are not experimental". As always, the fact checkers work with carefully selected claims and convoluted language. In this case, they link the term "experimental" to an online claim that the animal testing stage of vaccine development was skipped, a claim that could easily be disproved. Reuters also attempts to discredit the experimental nature of the jabs by pointing to the government approvals received, though they had to correct themselves later as they seemed unaware that the vaccines had only received emergency use authorization at that time, not approval. And Reuters misrepresents the nature of scientific experiments when they state that the study completion dates in 2022 (Moderna) and 2023 (Pfizer/BioNTech Phase 1/2/3) somehow are not part of the clinical safety and efficacy trial, when in reality the continued monitoring of participants is a core feature of clinical trials.
As you will know, Pfizer received the coveted full approval from the US FDA in August 2021. So why do I still call their product "experimental"? The manufacturers are required to monitor the safety of the injections in perpetuity. According to the FDA approval letter, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is to be used. The role of the manufacturer is to encourage health care practitioners to report all suspected adverse events, and they also collect reports themselves which they pass on to the authorities. It is the government's duty to monitor the system for safety signals and act upon them. One such safety signal might be the sheer number of reported deaths in conjunction with the COVID-19 vaccines shown in the above graph from OpenVAERS in comparison with the death reports collected by the system since 1990.
Yet, the adverse event reporting is a standard requirement for medical treatments that does not necessarily make them "experimental". What is more concerning in the FDA approval letter is the number of new safety and efficacy studies required, and their timelines. Pages 5-10 of the eleven-page letter list a total of thirteen studies. They include several studies of a specific condition, myocarditis and pericarditis, which was found as a safety signal in young males, as well as studies in specific populations including children 12-15, children <12, infants, and pregnant women. The end dates of most of these studies range from 2023 to 2025, with the study of "long-term sequelae of myocarditis" ending in 2027. Although this is a whopping five years from now, I would not call this "long-term" either, since it is well known that things we do to our body can cause complications decades in the future.
What can we say about the COVID-19 vaccines' safety and efficacy at this point? First of all, we are nowhere near conclusive evidence of safety. Short-term safety seems questionable if compared with the safety of drugs and medical treatments brought to market in the past (see VAERS overview chart above). One of the most concerning recent news was an analysis showing that all of the deaths reported to VAERS were linked to only 5% of the batches, suggesting major production or transport issues, and turning taking the jab into a game of Russian roulette. From the approval letter, we can conclude that the medium-term safety, in particular in children and pregnant women, is only being studied now and for several more years, raising the question as to why on earth we are proceeding with mass vaccination of these groups. And logically, long-term safety is unknown because a long-enough period of time has not yet passed since the introduction of these products. Due to the novelty of the mRNA technology we cannot even deduce safety from previous applications, which do not exist at this scale.
When it comes to the effectiveness of these experimental jabs, I had previously examined data from Public Health England that show that vaccinated individuals increasingly contribute to cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. That development of courses mirrors earlier trends observed in Pfizer's "real world lab", the country of Israel, and is expected to happen elsewhere over the next few months, depending on each country's vaccination timeline. One of the best videos I have seen during the pandemic pecks at the efficacy narrative by combining confident quotes from America's Dr. Fauci with news headlines reflecting the plummeting efficacy percentages. This "Twitter user video showing the shifting narrative in vaccine efficacy" would be hilarious if this wasn't a life-and-death situation for some of us.
The verdict of this reality check: No, the current COVID-19 injections are neither safe nor effective.
