Risks of Illness and Therapy

 

                        Risks of Illness and Therapy

The European Medicines Agency called an “extraordinary meeting” to analyze the risks of the vaccine. The EMA said that the concern is related to blood clots with “unusual features” including low levels of platelets, which are involved in creating clots. Still both the EMA and AstraZeneca emphasized that the number of blood clot-related events, which could include clots in the legs and also more severe outcomes like heart attacks or strokes, seem not to be higher than the rate seen in the general population.

Sir Richard Peto, an emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Oxford, said that there was no good evidence of a hazard, and that he worried that the Norwegian medical agency, which first raised concerns, is not taking into account the underlying risk of clots. Even if the vaccine decreased the risk of blood clots in older people, Peto points out, some blood clots would be expected to occur.

“Unless they’ve got serious evidence of hazard, they shouldn’t put out press statements that will very clearly be taken as evidence of hazard,” Peto said.

Side effect scares are common with vaccines, but they also very often do not pan out. The reason is that so many people receive vaccines that some will experience what seems like a side effect by chance when, really, it is not related to the vaccine at all.

“Vaccines protect against one thing: the infection or the infection plus disease,” said Susan Ellenberg, a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania who once tracked vaccine side effects at the FDA. “They don’t protect you against everything else that might possibly happen to you.”

This is where societies need what used to be called "leadership," advice and guidance from those more knowledgeable. But, when information is used as a self-centered tool rather than a direction toward better action, it becomes almost worthless. Worse, in this situation, the public is being presented with the problem of weighing the severity of the illness versus the severity of the vaccine side effects. Such scrutiny might reveal that the illness was actually oversold as a threat.

None of this is good for the self-perceived Ruling Class.