I have previously written about a tendency by medical study authors to downplay their results if they don’t conform with the official narrative regarding the COVID-19 vaccines. A study done in Iceland and published last summer found that double-vaccinated individuals were 42% more likely to become reinfected than others. But in their conclusions the authors called this just a “slightly higher” probability.
Now, a new study is out, published in the BMJ, that deals with female menstruation problems following vaccination. Nothing to worry about, according to mainstream media reporting. Indeed, in their conclusions the authors say:
Weak and inconsistent associations were observed between SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and healthcare contacts for bleeding in women who are postmenopausal, and even less evidence was recorded of an association for menstrual disturbance or bleeding in women who were premenopausal. These findings do not provide substantial support for a causal association between SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and healthcare contacts related to menstrual or bleeding disorders.
No reason to worry – really? Let’s take a look at the results section now:
2,580,007 (87.6%) of 2,946,448 women received at least one SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and 1,652,472 (64.0%) 2,580,007 of vaccinated women received three doses before the end of follow-up. The highest risks for bleeding in women who were postmenopausal were observed after the third dose, in the 1-7 days risk window (hazard ratio 1.28 (95% confidence interval 1.01 to 1.62)) and in the 8-90 days risk window (1.25 (1.04 to 1.50)). The impact of adjustment for covariates was modest. Risk of postmenopausal bleeding suggested a 23-33% increased risk after 8-90 days with BNT162b2 [Pfizer] and mRNA-1273 [Moderna] after the third dose, but the association with ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 [AstraZeneca] was less clear. For menstrual disturbance or bleeding in women who were premenopausal, adjustment for covariates almost completely removed the weak associations noted in the crude analyses.
So, actually significant risk for postmenopausal even after adjustments, but for premenopausal the “weak associations” were removed after adjustment for covariates. Why those huge adjustments? Before adjustment they found statistically significant increases of up to 44% – but that top figure was ‘adjusted’ away to just 4% (see Table 3). Yet even after these heroic adjustments there was still a 25% increase in menstrual disturbance following the first dose.
Anyhow, let’s look at the actual numbers by product for postmenopausal.
First Pfizer: adjusted risk (right-hand column) is 1.41 or 41% higher than the unvaccinated after 1-7 days from the third dose and 1.23 or 23% higher after 8-90 days. Both are statistically significant. “Weak and inconsistent?” Really?
Now for Moderna: adjusted risk is 1.33 or 33% higher than unvaccinated after 1-7 days from first dose and also 8-90 days after the third (the latter is statistically significant). Again, “weak and inconsistent”?
Finally AstraZeneca: adjusted risk is 1.24 or 24% higher than the unvaccinated 1-7 days after the first dose and 1.21 or 21% higher than unvaccinated after the second (though neither result is statistically significant).
Last October, the European Medicines Agency finally recommended adding menstrual problems to the already long list of COVID-19 vaccine side-effects. It was about time, after the flood of reports from women. The results of the new study reinforce those concerns, as shown above.
The question that remains is why the glaring discrepancy between the actual results and the authors’ conclusions?
The authors know full well that most journalists neither read nor understand scientific studies; they know how their highest ideal of verification is appeal to authority (‘the authors say, therefore it is true’). Every scientist knows this. Therefore, it is the authors’ responsibility to correctly portray and highlight their actual findings. But instead they try to hide them.
Why?
Is the answer to be found in the ‘competing interests’ section, perhaps?
Competing interests: All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form at www.icmje.org/disclosure-of-interest/ and declare: MG reports personal fees from AstraZeneca, Gilead, GSK/ViiV, MSD, Biogen, Novocure, Amgen, Novo Nordisk, outside the submitted work. SL reports consulting for Scandinavian Biopharma and is an employee of AstraZeneca since 16 January 2023. The work in this article was performed before this employment commenced. FN reports prior employment at AstraZeneca until 2019, and ownership of some AstraZeneca shares. MB and YX declare no competing interests. AS reported participating in research funded by governmental agencies, universities, Astellas Pharma, Janssen Biotech, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Roche, (then) Abbott Laboratories, (then) Schering-Plough, UCB Nordic, and Sobi, with all funds paid to Karolinska Institutet, outside of the submitted work. RL reported receiving grants from Sanofi Aventis paid to his institution outside the submitted work; and receiving personal fees from Pfizer outside of the submitted work.
If there are still any real journalists out there, how about getting in touch with the authors and actually asking? Would be a nice change, wouldn’t it.
This article was first published on Thorsteinn Siglaugsson’s Substack newsletter, From Symptoms to Causes. You can subscribe here.
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My starting point and probably finishing point would be that nothing should be done about “misinformation” of any kind, same goes for “fake news”, “hate speech” etc. Limit restrictions to libel, slander and anything criminal e.g. direct incitement to commit a specific crime, threats etc. And I suppose do something about porn and extreme violence.
If only porn and extreme violence is allowed to be censored, everything some backroom entity disapproves of will become porn or extreme violence. The procedure of someone being an anonymous judge & jury whose decisions need no justifications, who won’t allow the judged to state their view of the situation and against whose decisions no redress is possible is fundamentally broken. Tweaking the set of conditions enabling such an entity to spring into action won’t help.
Yes, I would not advocate censoring them per se, but maybe consider warnings or safe search features or something on sites that were intended for family consumption, though I tend to think in general that adults should be able to look at whatever they feel like and parents can police their kids consumption of the internet, TV, books, whatever.
For this to work sensibly, it needs to be implemented on the consumer and not on the producer side because the information to do the latter is simply not available. Ideally, platform providers would tag content suitably and cooperating clients would then refuse to display it if configured to do so. That’s obviously not bulletproof, but nothing is. Such a system is still open to abuse, the example would be certain UK ISPs classifying TCW as adult content. But at least, it’s not abuse-by-design.
Indeed. Given how important free speech is I would err on the side of people seeing content they shouldn’t rather than people being prevented from seeing stuff. And the cases of people seeing content they shouldn’t are in my mind limited to keeping kids away from porn and extreme violence and the like.
Like a fox asking for suggestions on running the henhouse.
I never have, nor ever will have any involvement with Twitter, Facebook, et al. Easy.
You have no involvement, but almost everyone else does.
I have no debt, but my customers do.
I keep enough time between my vehicle and the vehicle in front, but when they all pile into each other, I am caught up in it, and can’t move backwards or forwards.
The actions and ideas of the masses affect us all. The ideas of individual responsibility and personal freedom are the way out of this and need constant reinforcement. This task always falls to the little guys, because the big guys have no interest in your personal freedom.
PS this is not an advert for socialism. Defo not.
The mission of the Facebook Oversight Board is to ensure that Facebook content moderators don’t accidentally stray into the territory of insufficient wokeness, ie, it’s a last resort for complaints about content which wasn’t censored. Other cases won’t be handled by it, no matter how flagrantly a moderator decision violated stated Facebook policy. That’s presumably based on the theory that excessive censorship cannot do harm, only too lenient one.
What a terrific response, but then again you might expect the founder of something called the Free Speech Union to be able to articulate a good argument for free speech.
I’m not sure Facebook will pay much attention to it, but it certainly inspired me.
I love the quote from the WSJ comment piece.
It is starting to dawn on social media companies that the onus of responsibility is about to be kicked into their court as regards to content moderation due to the demands of the impossibly complex Online Safety Bill. Having very little idea about how to go about implementing these confusing regulations (identifying the unidentifiable vulnerable individuals likely to be harmed by unidentifiable harmful information), it looks like they’ve come up empty-handed and resorted to asking the general public for advice on this!
My blunt recommendation would be to go with the principle of Occam’s Razor and simply allow people to talk bollocks on facebook and twitter. Perhaps we should be taking social media posts a little less seriously – most of what gets discussed on these platforms comes under this category anyway. It’s clear, as Toby points out here, that it’s mainly the right-of-centre views and and the holders of these views that are targeted for demolition. If it’s mostly nonsense, as I firmly believe most social media posts are (I would describe many as the culmination of anger, alcohol consumption, and virtue-signalling bigotry), then what we currently see is certain types of nonsense being tolerated at the expense of other types of nonsense.
I don’t know how these content-moderating algorithms sleep at night!
The sound sleep of those self-justified by self-rightousness, probably.
Brilliant.
All parts of it. I think it would work better as a whole if it was shortened somewhat.
I wish I could be brief, but I just don’t have the time!
Hip hip hooray, Toby! Great letter. And the right strategy, to refuse to answer their facile questions.
Well said Toby. But perhaps the best lines for us to take away from this is right at the beginning:
“I’m not going to respond to the questions directly. The way they’ve been drafted, it’s as if Meta is taking it for granted that some suppression of health misinformation is desirable during a pandemic – because of the risk it might cause “imminent physical harm” – and what you’re looking for is feedback on how censorious you ought to be and at what point in the course of a pandemic like the one we’ve just been through you should ease back on the rules a little.”
Good point. We all have to be very careful answering surveys because they are all open to misinterpretation. For example (say):
Do you agree strongly, agree somewhat, don’t have a view, disagree somewhat or disagree strongly with the following sentence: “there is some content on social media sites that should be censored?”
Most normal people would answer that “agree somewhat” or “agree strongly” because there are some sites that should be censored (eg snuff movies). But the next thing you know the authors of the survey are claiming “95% of respondents said there should be some censorship of social media”. The trouble for us is that if we don’t respond then the survey results are even worse.
I disagree with the implied statement that existing practices in this area would be basically ok and just needs some tweaking, ie, It’s generally fine provided I get to decide what should be deleted. There are legal procedures for dealling with so-called illegal content and these exist for a reason (basically, humans are partisan and fallible).
Excellent piece Toby as usual. But that’s short and punchy?!!!😀
Brandeis, not Brandies
I would like to see what Farcebook has to say about the comments regarding the vaccines Steve Kirsch is getting from medics in the USA who are beginning to speak out, albeit anonymously at the moment. Here is his summary…
1. They are afraid to come out publicly due to intimidation tactics such as loss of job and/or license to practice medicine.
2. Unvaccinated healthcare workers are extremely upset with the medical community. They feel they have been treated unfairly.
3. It is the vaccinated workers who are getting sick with COVID, but it is the unvaccinated who are punished with constant testing, restrictions, and threats of losing their jobs.
4. The COVID shots are a disaster. Even for the elderly which is supposed to be the most compelling use case, death rates in elderly homes went up by a factor of 5 after the shots rolled out. Each time the shots are given, the deaths spike. Nobody is talking publicly about this. It’s not allowed.
5. Doctors are seeing rates of injury and death increase dramatically in all ages of people. The injuries are only happening to the vaccinated. There is no doubt that this is happening but many doctors have so much cognitive dissonance that they don’t see it.
6. One nurse with 23 years of experience says she’s never heard of anyone under 20 dying from cardiac issues until the vaccines rolled out. Now she knows of around 30 stories.
7. Doctors aren’t recording vaccination status in the medical records so that all the deaths are attributed to the unvaccinated.
8. Doctors are deliberately ignoring the possibility that the vaccines could be the cause of all the elevated events. The events are simply all unexplained.
9. Many doctors have either quit or will quit.
10. Some doctors and nurses at top institutions such as Mass General Hospital have falsified vaccine cards. They publicly toe the line and encourage their patients to take the shot knowing full well it is deadly. They value their job more than the lives of their patients. The important thing is they are risking 10 years in jail for doing this. These highly respected medical workers are telling the world that these COVID shots are so dangerous that they are willing to risk 10 years in prison to avoid taking the shot. That’s the message America needs to hear. And if Biden were an honest President, he would call for full amnesty and protection from retaliation for all these cases if people admitted publicly they did this. He’d be amazed at the number of responses he’d get. But he won’t do that because it would be too embarrassing for his administration.
11. Things don’t seem to be getting any better.
12. The medical examiners all over the world are not doing the property tests during an autopsy to detect a vaccine-related death. Without doing the required tests, it is very hard to make an association. There isn’t a single “guidance” document from any medical authority anywhere in the world to do these tests on people who die within 3 months of their last COVID vaccination. This is why no associations are found: they aren’t looking.
13. Doctors are being forced to take other vaccines (such as the HIV vaccine) so the hospital can meet their quota. This was admitted to them.
The article is at: https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/silenced-healthcare-workers-speak
I would love to know how they could label this ‘misinformation’.
Yea its a good response but I find the certainty expressed regards the election misplaced.
I’ve read Rules for Radicals relatively recently, published in 1971, and on page 108 it covers a Democrat politician from Chicago becoming very angry with Alinsky because he ‘doesn’t even bother to vote more than once’.
I have absolutely no evidence for any shenanigans on the day, besides the minor stuff and Maggie Hemingway’s book Rigged, but would I be certain they didn’t do anything?
Absolutely not.
There is motive and past form.
No offence, but Facebook is toxic. Why would any intelligent person use Facebook. I cannot understand it. I also cannot understand why any intelligent person would support a platform which suppresses and censors free speech. That is outright dangerous.