You’ll all have no doubt heard and read possibly statistically-challenged journalists hyperventilating about the new ‘miracle drugs’ – Ozempic and Wegovy. At first they were targeted at the very lucrative weight loss market. But now a new study tells us they can also reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes:
- ‘Weight loss jab could reduce heart attack risk by 20% said the BBC
- ‘Weight loss drug could reduce heart attack risk by 20%‘ said the BBC’s in-house journal – the Guardian
- ‘Obesity drug cuts risk of heart attack or stroke regardless of weight lost‘ said Sky News
- ‘Weight loss drug also protects against heart disease‘ wrote Scientific American
- and lots of other media contained the same story
But there are some curious aspects to this story. Firstly, this impressively-positive study was sponsored by Novo Nordisk – the manufacturer of the two drugs. Moreover, the latest version of the study was completed a couple of months ago. The fact that it is now being so widely reported suggests that what we’re getting may be a well-funded PR campaign rather than hard-working journalists coming to conclusions based on actually looking at the detailed study results. Some cynics have even suggested that the ‘miracle, breakthrough drugs’ campaign has been launched to try to distract us from stories about the negative and sometimes dangerous side-effects of these two drugs.
But perhaps the key issue is: what is actually being measured by the reported “20%” reduction in heart attacks and strokes in the drugs manufacturer’s study?
There are two main ways a pharma company can express results of its clinical trials – ‘relative risk’ and ‘absolute risk’. Let me use a simple example to explain.
Let’s imagine a five-year study done on a new statin in a medium-risk group of say 10,000 participants. Half the participants are given the new statin and the other half a placebo. Let’s further imagine that just 1.9% of those given the statin have heart attacks during the five years compared to 3.1% in the placebo group. The statin manufacturer could report that the risk of a heart attack in the group given the statin reduces by 120 heart attacks per 10,000 people. That’s an absolute risk reduction of around one person per 100 people or 1.2%. But given typical side-effects of statins – headache, dizziness, feeling sick, feeling unusually tired or physically weak, digestive system problems such as constipation, diarrhoea and indigestion, muscle pain, sleep problems, low blood platelet count – many doctors would not be too enthusiastic about prescribing this statin and many people wouldn’t be too excited about taking it for the rest of their lives if it just reduced the risk of a heart attack by one person per 100.
However, there’s another way for the pharma company to report its study results – this is the ‘relative risk’. In this case, the ‘relative risk’ of having a heart attack for those not taking this ‘wonderful new groundbreaking’ statin would be around 63% higher (3.1÷1.9) than those taking the statin. So using the ‘relative risk’, the pharma company could report that their statin more than halves the risk of a heart attack. Now that’s a more impressive claim to encourage doctors to prescribe and patients to take this statin.
However, when reporting side-effects from their products, pharma companies tend to use ‘absolute risk’. For example, study of around 467,000 people on various medical databases was conducted to assess whether there was an increased risk of people on statins developing acute pancreatitis. In the non-statin group (233,425) there were 1,355 cases of acute pancreatitis and in the statin group (233,647) there were 1,807 cases. If the pharma company was to use ‘relative risk’, it’d have to admit that there was a 33% increased risk of developing acute pancreatitis from taking statins. That’s not likely to encourage either doctors or patients. However, using ‘absolute risk’ the pharma company could say that the increased risk of acute pancreatitis from statin use was a mere one case per 1,000 people. That’s obviously a much more positive message than using the ‘relative risk’ of saying there was a 33% increased risk of acute pancreatitis.
I admit I haven’t looked through the detail of the new Novo Nordisk study suggesting that its products, Ozempic and Wegovy, are new wonder drugs which, in addition to being effective against obesity, can also significantly reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes. I’m sure that there are many contributors to and readers of the Daily Sceptic who could do this much better than I can as I tend to get my numbers mixed up when calculating percentages. But I strongly suspect that Novo Nordisk has played the ‘relative and absolute risk’ game when reporting its study results. I imagine that Novo Nordisk has used ‘relative risk’ for reporting the benefits of its products and ‘absolute risk’ when admitting the likely side-effects. I look forward to someone investigating this to find out what is really going on.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
Stop Press: The boffins at HART have crunched the numbers for Ozempic and Wegovy and found that while the relative risk reduction for cardiovascular outcomes was 20% (8% vs 6.5%) the absolute risk reduction was just 1.5%. Moreover, the dropout rate due to adverse events was 8.2% vs 16.6% – that’s over twice as many in the treatment group, or a 102% relative risk increase (it’s never reported this way of course). As an absolute risk that’s 8.4% up, compared to 1.5% helped. Or to put it another way, for every person who was helped by the drug, five or six had to stop using it because the side-effects were so severe. You won’t see that on a press release.
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Imagine injecting poisons and heavy chemicals into a human shoulder to generate ‘spike proteins’ and finding out that it kills and injures and does nothing against a non-existent ‘viral genomic structure’. Shock news surely. No single isolated Sars II ‘virus’ in its ‘shell’ exists, making the creation of a ‘remedy’ rather difficult. $cience, fraudology and all that. See HIV for more info.
Fraudology indeed, the new pseudo-scientific umbrella term that encompasses virology, genomics and (sadly) epidemiology. I know of several fraudologists blissfully unaware they are, I guess they’re useful idiots.
The question is ‘how do we stop them?’
We may need to start with daddy fraudster himself, Loius Pasteur and his hubris, erroneous inferences and data manipulation. Swiftly followed up by exposing the epistomological flaws in ‘germ theory’ and the circular reasoning employed by virologists.
It’s going to be a long messy fight, but I’m game!
Here’s another recent one, if it hasn’t already been shared on here. Dr McCullough is one of the authors.
Results;
”Approximately 98% of the King County population received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by 2023. Our analysis revealed a 25.7% increase in total cardiopulmonary arrests and a 25.4% increase in cardiopulmonary arrest mortality from 2020 to 2023 in King County, WA.
Excess cardiopulmonary arrest deaths were estimated to have increased by 1,236% from 2020 to 2023, rising from 11 excess deaths (95% CI: -12, 34) in 2020 to 147 excess deaths (95% CI: 123, 170) in 2023. A quadratic increase in excess cardiopulmonary arrest mortality was observed with higher COVID-19 vaccination rates. The general population of King County sharply declined by 0.94% (21,300) in 2021, deviating from the expected population size.”
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202405.1665/v1
Regarding excess deaths/democide, Jacqui Deevoy makes this valid point. And I think the answer is simple, as somebody rightly points out in the comments: the police are obviously paid to prioritise and protect the government ( and their various agendas ), not the people. Examples of this abound across all of the government-pushed narratives. We are nothing more than cattle or collateral damage and zero f***s are given;
”We have recently seen evidence that the police have been told not to investigate jab injuries and deaths when a video showing a police officer explaining this to someone who’d gone to them about a jab death went viral.
I’ve believed for years that the police in the UK have been instructed not to investigate the Midazolam murders too.
It would appear that investigating democide – death by government policy – isn’t their thing.
This belief stems from my own experience of trying to get the police to look into my dad’s suspicious death back in 2021 and from hearing accounts from members of my support group who’ve approached the police about the involuntary euthanasia (i.e. murder) of their loved ones only to be turned away.
Can the police be forced to investigate these deaths? If not, how can it be that such blatant democide can be totally ignored?”
https://x.com/JacquiDeevoy1/status/1807418901589852466
Thanks Mogs
But negative effectiveness in itself is no problem.
The real problem is that they are actually er, shall we say rather toxic.
And there my kindness ends.
The bastards knew this, or should have known –
https://doorlesscarp953.substack.com/p/walkthrough-fcfc-interactions-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=650045&post_id=146127883&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=x6a6a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=emailwn.
Were we not in Clown World, they would be facing prison.
Some might think a greater punishment should befall them.
Well, negative effectiveness is a problem if you’re elderly and, thus, more likely to be infected. For the elderly, even catching a cold can ultimately be fatal.
I’m glad I said no, wait and see, in March 2021.
During the next “pandemic”, which may come during your preferred Labour government, you may not get the option to “wait and see”: Sir Keir Starmer Reveals How He Would Handle Anti-Vaxxers & Reacts to the New COVID Measures | GMB Sir Keir Starmer Reveals How He Would Handle Anti-Vaxxers & Reacts to the New COVID Measures | GMB (youtube.com)
I understand that medical scientists want to write articles in a way that may get them “published in a major medical journal” but it’s been bleedin’ obvious for more than two years that the Covid vaccines are not effective. Anyone who wants to look (e.g. on the Worldometer website) can see the graphs showing the MASSIVE increases in Covid cases and Covid deaths in Australia, New Zealand and many Asian countries after mass vaccination compared to before. An effective vaccine is supposed to REDUCE cases and/or deaths, not be followed by MASSIVE INCREASES in cases and deaths, as the graphs for Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and many other countries clearly show:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
We need to add the possibility of the Antibody Dependent Enhancement Effect as an additional mechanism why Covid infection in vaccinated people flourish.
Antibodies developed after vaccination with a certain strain, can potentially enhance virus entry and replication by the next strain that is slightly different.
One of the reasons not to mass vaccinate during an outbreak.
What are the clear and specific symptoms identifying the illness named Covid-19? If there are none then maybe there is no such thing as Covid-19, especially if you can only identify a person as having the illness by means of a PCR analysis, when the inventor of PCR said you cannot use this method to identify illness.
And why did anyone believe, it being the case that Covid-19 takes on so many different forms of illness (like being run over by a bus), that a vaccine can be created to supposedly protect against this undefinable disease?
I suppose we should be happy our politicians did not react like they do with the bird flu – massacring whole bird populations at any sign that one of them is sick. Or maybe that is more or less exactly what they did …