Are the Covid Vaccines Safe?
Vaccine safety has been a subject I have been interested in for over 40 years. I have read a ton of books on the subject and found many books and articles that have helped form my thoughts on this subject. No medical intervention is entirely risk-free. Research and personal testimonies show that vaccines are not safe for everyone – some react very poorly to vaccines, some have serious adverse affects and some die. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) allows someone who thinks they have been injured by a vaccine to seek compensation through the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The program is overseen by the Office of Special Masters—a.k.a. “the vaccine court”—and is considered a no-fault alternative to filing a lawsuit with a vaccine manufacturer. Compensation, when approved, is provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). If both parties want to avoid the time and expense of this process, a negotiated settlement can be made out of court. In fact, most compensations awarded by the VICP come from such settlements. In such cases, blame is not assigned and a determination of cause is not made.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System** (VAERS) was set up by the CDC and FDA in 1990 to monitor the safety of vaccines. If an adverse event occurs after receiving a vaccine dose, an individual or their doctor, guardian, or representative can report it to VAERS. Reports are welcome even if it is unclear whether the vaccine caused the adverse event or not. Vaccines have been pulled from the market when too many deaths or adverse affects were noted in the VAERS system. In 1998, a rotavirus vaccine called RotaShield was pulled from the market after VAERS data showed that it could cause intussusception (a rare form of intestinal blockage) in small babies. While the risk was low (about one in 10,000), it was enough for the FDA to discontinue the vaccine’s use.
An original analysis of common adverse events reported after Covid-19 vaccine by Sharyl Attkisson
Sharyl Attkisson is a nonpartisan, five-time Emmy Award winning investigative reporter with a long history of awards for her investigations. Click the link above to read her bio. She has compiled 80 of the most common adverse events reported after Covid-19 vaccination in this podcast. I found her history in investigating issues with vaccine adverse effects in the early 2000’s to be very insightful and helpful in understanding where we are today. I have taken the liberty of transcribing the first 22 minutes of her podcast and will reproduce it below and in pdf format (I still recommend listening to her voice telling this story).
Today, with unprecedented vaccine mandates already here for millions of people and on the way for millions more, I have some helpful and hard to find information: 80 common categories of adverse effects reported after Covid-19 vaccination.
Before we get to the nitty gritty, a little history that I think you’ll find interesting. The phrase “anti-vaccine” was popularized by vaccine industry interests in about the early 2000’s. This was not something that was said about people commonly prior to that, certainly not in the media. Why did it become a thing? Well, prior to that time it wasn’t even controversial to question vaccine safety. That’s when I was first assigned at CBS news to look into some vaccine safety issues and stories. I was like a lot of people at the time. I try to remember that state of mind when I report today, because it feels like it was so long ago, but I was very skeptical. It sounded crazy to me that anybody thought vaccines could cause brain damage or other medical effects. I’m reasonably intelligent, but I had no information on the biological mechanisms of how vaccines work or how they could possibly cause side effects.
But of course, I was assigned to cover certain stories, so I researched, I read, I listened to scientists. I had many good sources that I developed inside the government, and I was shocked by what I learned, really. It’s quite simple once you look at the peer-reviewed published scientific studies that many people told me didn’t exist, or today may tell you don’t exist. Again, that taught me a lot about whom and what to believe as sources. This was in the early 2000’s after the childhood vaccine schedule had tripled. Remember, kids were never getting so many vaccines before, but in the mid-to late 1990’s they started really getting loaded up with vaccines.
Well that coincided with an explosion in some disorders in children, including autism and other neurological problems and cases (lawsuits) began working their way through the very secretive Federal Vaccine Court, a court in which, through an arrangement made by congress, the vaccine industry does not have to pay damages – you pay them based on a trust fund that is funded by a tax paid on every dose of vaccine that you get – so, sort of an indemnity of sorts for the pharmaceutical industry. Now they say there is a good reason behind that because there were so many cases coming forward at the time – the pharmaceutical industry went to congress and said if you don’t protect us from these lawsuits, we won’t make vaccines, and you will really be in trouble in this country. So, congress made this arrangement. It pays victims or victim’s families when people are injured or killed by vaccines. That’s widely acknowledged – it’s not like it doesn’t happen. That was kind of eye-opening to me as well. And it kind of keeps things quiet because most people don’t know they can file a case there and there are very strict requirements, and short, short statues of limitations so by the time a lot of parents may understand that their children have a disorder and that it could have been caused by the vaccine, then it’s too late to file, or they don’t have the proper documentation. If they have the proper documentation, or their doctor was on the ball, they get automatic payments for certain accepted injuries for certain vaccines. Anyway, this was all building and building in the early 2000’s, and really I think the pharmaceutical industry felt it was fighting a losing battle in the court of public opinion. Because it was not just me at CBS news who was assigned to cover these stories, but reporters in all of the major news organizations, and local news, were covering this very big story. After all, most everybody gets vaccinated. And before it was taken over by so much propaganda, it was just considered a really interesting and important news story that impacted many people. It wasn’t something that was controversial to cover.
And, of course, I learned so much – I learned that there was knowledge of certain issues, there were many cover-ups involved on the part of certain government people – and vaccines were causing adverse events in children – that was known – including autism, which had been acknowledged already, including in court cases that the government moved to have sealed, and kept secret, so that nobody would know the government, the Department of Justice, on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry, had made the admission and paid out a settlement, even as they publicly told parents they were crazy to think that the vaccines had done anything to their children. Again this is not to say that vaccines don’t do great good for some. It depends on the vaccine, it depends on the child – there are a lot of factors in play. So this is not intended to be anti-vaccine, or sweepingly pro-vaccine. This is just a news story – I treated it like any other news story that involves potential cover-ups and government corruption – so many things do.
So, really it was an all-out war that the pharmaceutical industry was fighting at the time, throwing everything it had to try to stop this reporting – to stop the questioning, the scientific inquiry. This involved taking out or discrediting scientists who were unlucky enough to do research that uncovered vaccine safety issues; to disparage or destroy reporters who reported on the issues; to stop them from talking about it; to lobby the media organizations through many different ways; to lobby members of congress to stop holding hearings on these things – and to this day they won’t; to disparage parents who talked publicly about their injured children; to stop politicians and doctors who investigated or responded to the growing body of evidence.
That’s when “anti-vaccine” became a widely used propaganda term. And based on how I know things work, I’m sure it was widely tested and deemed to be very effective. Nobody wants to be called anti-vaccine – it’s part of portraying vaccines as a monolithic theme, like part of patriotism, or a religious belief that you can’t speak against them, or ask about them, or you’re suspect and not to be trusted. But if you think about it, wherever you stand on the issue, that characterization is silly, illogical, and anti-scientific. Not all vaccines are the same, they are not all equally safe and effective – that’s not in dispute. The government has pulled some vaccines from the market because the government determined after they had been in use that they were not safe or effective enough – that’s not even a question. All medicine has side-effects – that’s not a question. Not all people react to the same medicine or vaccine the same way – that’s not a question. Not all vaccines are equally necessary or work the same in all people. A vaccine for a very fatal, life-threatening disease is viewed differently in terms of risk vs benefit as a vaccine would be for something that is a mild disorder. Penicillin is a great thing, and saves lives, except for the people who are allergic to it and it would kill, but nobody says you are anti-medicine if you say that, or if you can’t take penicillin. Yet very strangely, they say that about vaccines, if the question is asked – or if someone has a child who is injured by a vaccine, they are called anti-vaccine for speaking about it – a strange, but oddly effective, propaganda campaign. And so it continues.
And this I’ve said before – the government putting out some false information and propaganda, has created a mistrust so many people have in the government’s health advice, including on vaccines. If they would simply address the facts in a rational way, I think it would build confidence in the nation’s vaccine programs, but they’ve done the opposite.
A few examples of the irrational public narratives that are out there that I know some of you have been thinking about when you hear them: When an unvaccinated person dies of Covid, it’s supposedly because they didn’t get vaccinated, although there is no way to know if the vaccine would have prevented their death and they are considered a Covid death despite their underlying conditions or co-morbidities, but when a vaccinated person dies of Covid, like Colin Powell, it’s because of his co-morbidities and other illnesses and pay no attention to the fact that he was vaccinated. Here’s another: When someone dies who tested positive for Covid or even became sick with Covid, but they had something else very seriously wrong with them, then it’s still counted as a Covid death, but when someone vaccinated dies of Covid, with something else like serious cancer and Parkinson’s, like Colin Powell, well, of course, the death has more to do with that.
When vaccinated people are hospitalized and dying – well that’s said to be a small, tiny, tiny fraction of vaccinated people – we’re not supposed to pay attention to it – but, according to the stats it’s also a very small fraction of unvaccinated people who are hospitalized and die – nobody ever says that.
And if you look back, when the vaccines were being developed we were told, at first, they will make it where you don’t get Covid – then we were told, OK, maybe you’ll get Covid, but you won’t get sick – then we were told, OK, yes, maybe you’ll get sick even if you are vaccinated but you won’t get very sick and you certainly won’t end up in the hospital – and then they said, OK, yes, some people are ending up in the hospital, but nobody dies if they’re vaccinated – then, when people were dying, they said, well, at least they don’t spread it, you still need to get vaccinated so that you don’t spread it – and then that turned out to be false – all of it turned out to be false. They kept changing the metric of what made a successful vaccine. People do get sick – they do get hospitalized – they do die – they do spread it. And yet every time someone gets Covid, it’s blamed, without evidence, on unvaccinated people.
And as you probably notice, many public health officials and federal officials and people in the media continue to ignore the elephant in the room: natural immunity – people who have recovered from Covid and according to a growing body of scientific studies have at least as good as, and probably better protection, than the vaccines, since according to the experts, vaccine immunity seems to be wearing off after a couple of months.
It took a lot of man-hours (figuratively), but I recently updated my analysis of Covid vaccine adverse events that have been reported to the Federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). We will go over what I found in some detail.
This is a reminder to be sure to consult CDC.gov for information on the Covid-19 vaccines or any medical issue – do your reading. I’m neither promoting nor discouraging Covid-19 vaccination for any individual person. In fact I think it’s irresponsible every time I hear someone insist that people they’ve never met or certainly never medically treated should get the shot. Can you imagine if I were to demand that you take penicillin even if you are allergic to it or if your doctor said you shouldn’t? Or for an illness that’s mild and unnoticeable in most people, or you have no risk factor? That’s happening every day with Covid-19 vaccine, and it seems like barely an eyebrow is raised.
Part of the reason for talking about this is to help you understand, as I’ve often reported, that the online and news information you receive is so manipulated to try to give you in many instances a false impression of what is really going on and what people really think. There are people controlling your access to information and in this case they want you to believe that only stupid people and only selfish people are asking the sorts of really logical and rational scientific questions that many people are asking. So I’m trying to provide some of that information, but if I were you, I wouldn’t rely on any single source to get my information for my own self as to what I ought to be doing when it comes to Covid-19 vaccine. Read and listen to what the government says. Look around and try to find studies, source information. I’ve published that at www.sharylattkisson.com so that you can look at the material and not have to rely on my interpretation, or someone else’s interpretation if you don’t want to. You can look at the material yourself and make up your own mind.
I did something that I haven’t seen other people do when looking at adverse events reported after Covid-19 vaccination. A lot of times, when adverse effects are reported on any medicine by the federal government, the same type of adverse event is called many different things.
Years ago I broke the story internationally that Viagra causes blindness. That wasn’t on the label originally and the drug company initially denied it. But it was very clear to me, well how? Because when I looked through the VAERS Database for Viagra, instead of just counting the number of cases of blindness reported, I also looked at vision issues that were called something else – maybe some kind of retinal impairment, or giving it a different name. I learned that method from an FDA scientist who told me back in the early days of me covering medical issues – he said that pharmaceutical companies, when they submit their applications for approval for a prescription drug to the FDA, the FDA scientists have to be like detectives. They go through, at least at that time, non-electronic binders and binders of information – their job was to find what they’ve hidden, in terms of reporting on studies. And at the time I was covering a story about rezulin, a diabetes medicine, that was ultimately pulled from the market after I did several weeks of reports – I had good sourcing on it. It wasn’t pulled from the market just because of my reporting – other reporters had been covering it for some time, including a great reporter at the LA Times. But once I got on the case, since it was CBS news, and we did a lot of high profile reporting on the evening news about it, I think that probably hastened the withdrawal as word got out there about what was happening. But, the scientist told me he had been a part of approving rezulin as a drug, and yet it was causing so many liver problems, and he said “I had to figure out what had I missed in looking at the studies and submissions”. And what he told me was, if you just looked at liver damage alone, there wasn’t really a red flag from the studies for rezulin, there were just a couple of cases. But after the fact, when he went back and looked through the material, he found all kinds of red flags – liver signals – but they weren’t called the same thing. Some of it was called hepatic failure – in other words – there are different ways you can report similar issues and because they were not grouped together and he hadn’t thought to group them together he didn’t know they had occurred before members of the public took it and then these liver problems started arising.
I learned from that when I go through the VAERS data base I pull together related disorders, or maybe the same disorder that can be called different things. And when you do that, I think you can see patterns and signals that are not otherwise visible. Yes, the government scientists should be doing this as a matter of routine, but apparently they don’t. They really aren’t hunting for reasons to pull a drug off the market or to issue a safety warning – quite the opposite. They are, as agencies at a high level, so co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry – I find that they often are trying to explain away the safety signals that they are getting, rather than expose them. And I’m not talking about the scientists who do the work behind the scenes – some of them are great sources for me – I’m talking more at a bureaucratic and executive level.
Before we go into what I found with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System on Covid-19, a couple of caveats: my analysis does not include all of the adverse events that have been reported. I summarized some of the most common or problematic categories. A report to the VAERS does not necessarily prove the reported illness or death was caused by the Covid-19 vaccine. The system was designed to collect adverse events to uncover any patterns that were not covered during vaccine studies. Government scientists told me that studies may pick up a little bit, but you don’t really know what a vaccine or another medicine will do until the general population takes it for quite some time. That’s how they uncover most of the adverse events and effects.
Scientists have estimated that adverse events caused by medicine occur at a rate, listen to this, of up to a hundred thousand times higher in the general population that what is reported in this database (see video at bottom of post)**. In other words, you may have a handful of reports about something. It could be occurring at a rate of up to a hundred thousand times higher in the general population, because most adverse events aren’t reported to the database. On the other hand, there are some who are claiming well that’s not the case with the Covid-19 vaccine because their adverse events aren’t as likely to be underreported due to close monitoring and wide-spread publicity. So, you can take that for what it’s worth. They are either under-reported or over-reported. That’s why I’m not looking at sheer numbers – I’m looking for patterns – that’s where I think the main value is. And a reminder that according to the CDC, and the FDA, the benefits of the Covid-19 vaccines outweigh the risks for all groups and age categories authorized to receive them.
What did I find when I analyzed the reports in the database? I will start in order with some of the very most common ones.
Follow this link for Sharyl’s original analysis in visual form on the web. I recommend listening to the balance of the podcast starting at 22:00 as she reads through them.
Transcript done by Gala for galasgleanings.com – any mistakes in transcription are totally my doing.
Exclusive Summary Covid-19 Vaccine Concerns by Sharyl Attkisson
While the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is marketing widespread use of the emergency-use vaccines in the U.S. for both old and young alike, many other countries are limiting Covid-19 vaccine use. Health officials around the world are giving varying advice on safety issues as Covid-19 vaccines are given to more people, and more information can be collected.
Summary by Safety Concern
General
In the UK, some scientists analyzed adverse event reports and called upon the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency to stop the Covid-19 vaccines as “not safe for human use” due to reports of issues with bleeding/clotting, pain, immune system, neurological, loss of sight/hearing/smell/speech, and questions about impact in pregnant women.
A petition of scientists led by Linda Wastila, Professor, Pharmaceutical Health Services Research University of Maryland School of Pharmacy is calling for Covid-19 vaccines to be disapproved.
Fifty-seven authors from 17 countries have signed an endorsement urging that Covid-19 vaccinations be stopped unless new safety mechanisms are immediately implemented.
The authors include Dr. Peter McCullough, cardiologist and former Vice Chief of Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, who has called for a halt to vaccinating 30-year olds due to “no clinical benefit” and safety concerns.
Here are summaries of some of the concerns that have emerged or been raised by medical officials.
Click here to jump to: Summary by safety concern
Click here to jump to: Summary by vaccine
Click here to jump to: Summary by country
Click here to jump to: Additional reading and studies
More Sources, Research and Video Presentation
The Dangers of Covid-19 Booster Shots and Vaccines: Boosting Blood Clots and Leaky Vessels
Why Parents, Teens, and Children Should Question the COVID-19 Vaccine
Cov-Sars2 Vaccine Persistent Neuro Symptoms Survey
Does COVID-19 Vaccination Warrant the Classical Principle: “either help or do not harm the patient”
Winning the War Against Therapeutic Nihilism & Trusted Treatments vs Untested Novel Therapies – video of Dr. Peter McCullough’s presentation at AAPS on October 2, 2021 (slides shown are below for download)
Slides from Dr. Peter McCullough’s presentation
A Guide to Home-Based Covid Treatment(A Step-by-Step Doctor’s Plan That Could Save Your Life)
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System** (VAERS) – Are vaccine adverse events under-reported?
Sharyl Attkisson says that the actual number of adverse effects could be up to 100,000 times higher than those actually reported. Deborah Conrad, a hospitalist physician’s assistant on the frontlines of the pandemic, pulls back the curtain on the complete lack and disregard in her hospital for reporting Covid vaccine injury to VAERS, this country’s only mechanism to track the safety of these rushed-to-market, mandated products. In riveting detail, including emails & recorded phone conversations, Conrad exposes the internal push to turn a blind eye to injuries and “tow the company line” that this vaccine is safe. Video below:
Deborah Conrad, a hospitalist physician’s assistant, talks to Del Bigtree (thehighwire.com) of her experience seeing many vaccine adverse effects in their hospital patients and the lack of reporting to VAERS.
A Covid-19 Vaccine Fractured Fairy Tale
By Sharyl Attkisson
“This is a news analysis and commentary by Sharyl Attkisson. It was first published on Sept. 9, 2021. Any similarities to people living or dead is purely coincidental. However, the facts provided by “Other scientists” are accurate.” [Sometimes stories/fairy tales can illustrate the big picture using a different humorous lens.]
Our Fractured Fairy Tale begins in Spring of 2020.
All studies and documentation can be found at the links below: