{"id":180653,"date":"2021-03-15T12:01:46","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T12:01:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=180653"},"modified":"2021-03-09T08:44:18","modified_gmt":"2021-03-09T08:44:18","slug":"the-vaccine-conundrum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/03\/the-vaccine-conundrum\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vaccine Conundrum"},"content":{"rendered":"

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How effective, and safe, are covid vaccines really?<\/strong><\/p>\n

8 Mar 2021 – <\/em>Initial data from Israel and Scotland appeared to indicate a very high<\/a> real-world vaccine effectiveness, even in senior citizens. However, much of this data was heavily adjusted for various factors and therefore somewhat tentative and not easy to interpret. Numerous reports of covid outbreaks in care homes even after the second vaccination<\/a> have raised additional questions.<\/p>\n

To clarify this situation, a German study with 176 participants, published last week as a preprint<\/a>, measured the age-dependent immune response to the Pfizer vaccine. Somewhat shockingly, the study found that one third of people over the age of 80 developed no neutralizing antibodies<\/strong> at all, and thus were potentially without seroprotection even after the second vaccination (see above).<\/p>\n

Some of these elderly people developed non-neutralizing antibodies, but their role in Sars-Cov-2 infection remains unknown: they might help reduce symptoms, but they could also increase<\/em> symptoms (so-called antibody-dependent disease enhancement, ADE<\/a>). The official vaccine trials included hardly any people of the 80+ age group and so didn\u2019t answer this question.<\/p>\n

In vaccine science, a reduced immune response in the elderly is known as immunosenescence.<\/p>\n

If the reduced protection in the high-risk group gets confirmed, it may explain the somewhat disappointing<\/a> performance of many covid<\/strong> vaccination pioneers <\/strong>(such as Israel): in most of these countries, covid hospitalizations and deaths have decreased slower than expected, or have even increased, since the beginning of the mass vaccination campaign (see updated figure below).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, documented post-vaccination deaths<\/strong> continue to rise and are now close to 3000<\/a> in the US and the EU. Some of these deaths may be unrelated to vaccinations, but in the US, 47% of post-vaccination deaths occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours<\/a> of being vaccinated, and 31% of deaths occurred within 48 hours of vaccination. The average age was 78, the youngest case was 23.<\/p>\n

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Cumulative covid deaths in global covid vaccination pioneers, excl. the US and UK (OWD<\/a>)<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Swiss Policy Research, founded in 2016, is an independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit research group investigating geopolitical propaganda in Swiss and international media. SPR is composed of independent academics that<\/em> for personal and professional reasons prefer to protect their identities,<\/em> and receives no external funding; t<\/em>here are no financial sponsors or backers. <\/em>Our articles have been published or shared by numerous independent media outlets and journalists, among them Julian Assange<\/a>, and have been translated into more than two dozen languages.<\/em><\/p>\n

See also:<\/em><\/p>\n