For six months, the MHRA and other national regulators have been sitting on a Pfizer report about Covid vaccine safety. Worryingly, the abstract which I have just found online doesn’t look good at all:
- the vaccinated cohort have at least 23-40% higher risk of some heart-related conditions; and
- the risk is higher than in Pfizer’s previous report (i.e., it is increasing over time since vaccination).
The report in question is Pfizer’s report C4591021 ‘Interim Report 5’ dated March 12th 2024. It is a Post Authorisation Safety Study (PASS) of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine. In summary, national regulators routinely require pharmaceutical manufacturers to conduct PASS studies as a condition of authorisation of most new medicines. The regulators provide data to the manufacturer covering millions of patients registered in national healthcare systems. The manufacturer then conducts analysis to determine whether the medicine has increased the risk of specified health conditions.
I have previously written a couple of articles about Covid vaccine PASS studies. First, in October 2023, to raise awareness of the studies and the fact that most of them were not being published. Second, in January 2024, to report that I had obtained copies of PASS studies by Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca via a Freedom of Information request to the MHRA. In the second article I picked out three health conditions (arrhythmia, heart failure and acute coronary artery disease) from Pfizer’s ‘Interim Report 4’ where there was a higher incident rate in the vaccinated cohort.
Knowing that Pfizer had completed its ‘Interim Report 5’ in March 2024, in April I submitted FOI 24/075 to MHRA asking for a copy. MHRA applied a Section 22 Exemption: “information intended for future publication.” This seemed very odd given that it had sent me previous ones only three months before. However, helpfully, it stated that it “will be published in the fourth quarter of 2024”.
So in late August, I submitted another FOI (24/475) to check that this was still MHRA’s intention. Imagine my surprise when it backtracked: “We cannot confirm whether the Pfizer C4591021 Interim Study Report 5 prior to December 31st 2024 is still due to be published. We have contacted the company, who have informed us that the final report is due for submission at the end of 2024 and plans for publication will be decided at this point.” I read that as: “We’re worried about the results in Interim Report 5, so we’ve decided to wait for Pfizer’s Final Report before deciding if and when to publish either of them.”
Imagine my further surprise when I just found an abstract of Pfizer’s ‘Interim Report 5’ online. As I said at the start, it doesn’t look good. Here are the first six conditions mentioned in the abstract:
Now, a Hazard Ratio of 1.23 means that the condition is 23% more likely in the vaccinated cohort, and “CI” mean confidence interval, i.e., we can be 95% confident that the ‘true’ number lies between the following two numbers. So those data are extremely worrying. This is the manufacturer bearing out the numerous anecdotal reports of increasing heart issues since 2020 as well as various independent research reports.
Worse, those data are worse than the corresponding figures in Pfizer’s previous ‘Interim Report 4’. In other words, the risk appears to be increasing over time since Covid vaccination.
And by the way, none of the above can be attributed to Covid itself: the exposure to Covid will be broadly the same in both the vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts, which comprise millions of individual patients.
That said, there are potential confounders. The abstract suggests two:
- that for any condition, the seriousness might vary within and between the cohorts; and
- ‘healthy vaccinee’ bias – the argument that vaccinated individuals are more likely to seek medical attention.
But that’s one reason why we need to see the whole Pfizer report – to see the whole dataset, results and argumentation which lead to Pfizer’s explanation about confounding.
Even more importantly, we need to see the whole report because the Hazard Ratio will vary by age: younger people are normally much less prone to heart-related conditions than older people. Imagine how surprised I will be if the Hazard Ratios in the full report for younger age groups are even worse than those in the abstract (which are averages across all age groups). Is MHRA sitting on information which actually confirms the many siren warnings that it was reckless for MHRA to authorise, and JCVI to recommend, Covid vaccination of younger people who were at extremely low risk from Covid when it was known at the time that the Covid vaccines didn’t stop transmission and there were no long term safety data?
In summary, if, as I suspect, MHRA is worried by the results in Pfizer’s ‘Interim Report 5’ then no wonder it is sitting on it.
One final thought. The Covid Inquiry Module 4 (Vaccine & Therapeutics) oral hearings are scheduled for January 14th-25th 2025. It would be a travesty if Pfizer’s ‘Interim Report 5’ and ‘Final Report’ were withheld from the inquiry. Perhaps one of the core participants or their legal representatives will request copies or question MHRA about the data at the oral hearings.
Until Nick retired a few years ago, he was a Senior Civil Servant in the Ministry of Defence responsible for the safety and effectiveness of ammunition used by the Armed Forces. He is co-author of the Perseus Group report on U.K. medicines regulator the MHRA.
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550 mile range in my diesel Audi.
5 mins to fill it.
Heater on, fast as a like.
Plants get free CO2 to eat too.
Plus 12 year black kid in the Congo didn’t have to go down a mine to get the stuff that makes the silly EV work
850 on a tankful in my Renault Trafic. Heater or a/c full on
450+ in my little Hyundai i10 .. with heater, lights and radio on. £30 pa road tax; cheap to insure.
EVs are simply not a practical idea for long-distance driving. But perhaps that’s the whole point. They want us either not to travel far, or to use public transport and ditch private vehicles altogether. Remember the old prediction that people will own nothing, and be happy.
And the most galling thing is that all this inconvenience isn’t going to have the slightest beneficial effect on the climate.
Just like the attacks on Farmers harvest (pun intended) very little. This seems to be part of the Agenda 2030 push to Build Back better.
Or ‘Extract Money Faster’
“EVs are simply not a practical idea..”
You could have stopped there. If they were we would have been driving them for decades instead of ICEVs.
And you wouldn’t need to subsidise them with taxpayers cash or use taxpayers money to provide charging points.
Recall of MPs Act 2015:https://notonthebeeb.co.uk/so/c8PDZE4U1?languageTag=en&cid=426765f9-8b6f-43e7-9ca1-b318db924f5c
£1.12 per kWh is a rip off, if you convert the thermal content of petrol at roughly 9 kWh per litre & guesstimate the efficiency of your engine at around 30%. It’s like paying out £3.50 a litre.
Incidentally, at todays prices my petrol car averages about 9p per mille, with most fuel being bought from ASDA – and a lot of the total is longish M road trips.
The whole “Green Energy” thing is a rip-off. Pay more and get less. (If it’s available, that is. And with unreliables such as wind and solar, that’s not guaranteed.)
The huge question is will TPTB allow us to continue to nurse our ICE cars for as long as we can manage? Or will there be a huge bunch of taxes, ULEZ schemes and restrictions on spare parts so as to ‘drive’ us off the road?
If we are allowed to keep them going? I think there will be a big industry in keeping old ICE cars on the road. But if they force the issue and make it EVs or nothing then it is a dismal outlook. I suspect that new technologies will come along for transportation but the current generation of EVs will spell the end of happy family leisure motoring. At best us hoi-polloi may have a cheap low range Chinese EV for local utility travel.
I’m sure the easiest thing for TPTB would be to target fuel supplies. If they can find a way to stop us getting supplies of petrol and diesel, then it’s basically game over for the ICE vehicle.
And there was me thinking the Government are there to facilitate the will of the electorate!
Oh no, it’s there to shape the nation according to its own will. But first it has to hoodwink enough of the electorate into thinking that they both have the same interests.
What a quaint notion!
Let’s face it – if you remove personal transport then the leisure industry is dead. Unemployment, no tax income follows. Think of all the places that are not reachable by public transport. Think of all those who support motor vehicles who will now be unemployed. The hit to the government finances would make Rachel from Account’s imaginary black hole real by many times more.
Mileage with the heating off is not the proper mileage though. It is like saying my plate of steak and chips will fill me up but only if I eat 3 Kitkats first.
The British writer Patrick Hamiltion wrote about the horror of the motorcar. He is almost completely forgotten these days but his novels are well worth reading. Hangover Square, The Slaves of Solitude. He lives on though in one sense and that is through a play he wrote called Gas Light. There was a good Ingrid Bergman film of it. This term has found its way into modern political discourse, gaslighting, although its meaning has been distorted slightly.
One thing I like about the Brits, the common people, is that they never get all enthusiastic about a new technology like the Yanks do. They might adpot it eventually, usually out of laziness and vacantness but there isn’t any expectation that all of this crap could ever make life better. Although I have read horrible stories in educational supplements about how teachers are applauding the fact that every child in their class has an electronic tablet. Basically a zombie machine and you hear that parent give phones to children as young as ten. This is horrific just slightly less horrific than the demoniac smiles of the Yanks selling this crap.
The number of mobile phones per capita far outreached that in the USA in the 1990s.
The cost per unit of electricity obviously varies depending on which type of tariff you’re on but is at least 40p/kwh so charging the author’s Ford at home would work out as about the same cost per mile as his Honda Civic. Therefore it would be impossible to recoup the massive extra cost of the Ford. Proof that EVs are only for the well off.
It would be interesting to compare the cost per mile of an EV versus a petrol or diesel for urban driving and see if the costs work out about the same as motorway driving. Driving at speed means far more air resistance hence higher energy use per mile but urban driving is often stop start. Accelerating uses far more energy than driving at a constant speed and a lot of this energy is lost when braking so driving in traffic may result in roughly the same energy use per mile as motorway driving.
The nail in the coffin is the cost of battery replacement.
It astounds me that anyone chooses to buy an EV – apart from company car drivers who have to get one and gain some tax advantages.
“if you regularly cover high mileage in an EV, you need to travel when everyone else isn’t to avoid queuing at chargers.”
Au contraire, I see all the BEVVERS travelling in groups. It’s so they have fellow BEVVERS to socialise with while they wait together for two hours to charge their BEVs not too quickly to avoid damaging the batteries. They also get to share enlightening, heartwarming stories about how well they are saving the planet. And they MUST be friends, because fighting over chargers isn’t a very planet friendly look. Too much CO2 is emitted when you fight.
A bevvy of electric car drivers.
“Every cloud has a silver lining though. Your correspondent predicts an impending boomtime for old style garages and the market in spare parts for petrol cars for years to come.”
The Government will simply outlaw cars over a certain age, 12 years perhaps, and maybe make it illegal to sell spares apart from brake pads – all with no reference to Parliament of course.
Drugs are illegal but people get very rich selling them without too much problem.
”To eke out the range I travel everywhere with the heater off, which currently demands a substantial coat, hat and gloves.”
Yes prior to the 1970s cars required that, and many afterwards too for a number of years.
I do so love technological progress.
James May a few years back showed that the range of battery cars had barely increased since the 1890s. Yes, they are more comfortable. Yes, they go much faster….for a short while.
That’s the funniest bit for me – EV’s are not new tech. Sure lithium ion cells and 0-60 times in a few seconds is newish (and pointless day to day), however the electric BEV is over 100 years old… and we ditched them for petrol and diesel powered vehicles… until governments started bribing people with subsidies and tax breaks to start buying them again