Criticism of misinterpretations of Danish research

In the previous article about a Danish study on the variable batch qualities, from the day before yesterday, I had added a heading "Postscript 3-7-2023" yesterday. In case you haven't seen the article, it was about a Danish study that recognized strange profiles in the vaccine batches in Denmark. Different mortality rates per batch coinciding with different prick quantities: of the most lethal batches, the fewest jabs were made and the fewest lethal batches were not tested. The article asked for dates to indicate this.

In the meantime, quite a lot of stuff has been made and I wanted to add that in that postscript afterwards. However, it became more and more extensive. See below.

The Danish study (already a year and a half old!) is suddenly hot, presumably because of the interview with German scientists who find the Danish research worrisome and have started to find out if they observe something similar in Germany. One of the German scientists who delved into the figures slipped during the interview: "Angry tongues could claim that placebos look like this too." That was a thought, a speculation, but definitely not the crux of the Danish article. And that's exactly where everyone jumps on top of it, which led, for example, to an article in The Daily Sceptic that headlines "Pfizer Vaccine Batches in the EU Were Placebos, Say Scientists".

That is not what the Danish study is about. But that is what makes all kinds of people suddenly angry and look critically at that study.

What does the criticism boil down to

If we put aside the criticism of the spectacle about the suspected placebos - because that of those placebos is not claimed anywhere else - there is still something to be said about the study itself. This mainly concerns limitations that the Danes themselves mentioned in their study. You can go and insist on that, but yes, we already knew that.

What several critics point to is the average age of the pricked, which could vary per batch color. Jessica Rose¹ https://jessicar.substack.com/p/debunking-the-yellow-dot-lot-placebo found that the blue were on average 50 years old and the yellows 37 years old. She explains that the blue batches were set at the beginning of the year, hence the older population, which was first. That would explain the difference.

But "average 50 years" would be something like 35-90 years and an average of 37 years: from 15-45 or something like that. There is at least an overlap of a bups in their thirties/forties/fifties, which should have shown intermediate values between the blue and the other spheres. That area is now virtually empty. So she did have a point, but not very strong in my opinion. I wrote that in a comment below her article and she liked it but didn't elaborate on it.

Her argument is inconsistent with what a German professor says in the interview with Preradovic: "These blue batches, from this dangerous batch, have appeared again and again and not only at the beginning or only in different countries, so widely distributed, both in time and geographically." They had checked. He has to talk to Jessica about that because that's obviously not true.

Denis Rancourt² https://denisrancourt.ca/entries.php?id=131&name=2023_07_01_does_the_analysis_of_schmeling_et_al_suggest_a_batch_dependent_safety_signal_for_the_bnt162b2_mrna_covid_19_vaccine thinks that with such restrictions you should not make such firm statements at all. (He calls his own writing style "direct," by the way. Then apparently it's allowed.) But the Danes do not make any firm statements at all. They are waving a red flag and indicate that data are urgently needed for independent follow-up research.

He actually makes the same age objection. He lists three reasons why missing age differences is crucial. He corresponded with the Danish authors about this and received the neat answer which showed that in all three groups the percentage of over-70s with side effects was similar and in the blue (most harmful line) even the lowest:

“The assumption that the age factor was responsible for the results may not be true. We now have access to data on the age of vaccinated individuals with reported SAEs, and in the batch group with high SAEs (blue trendline in Figure 1), only 21% of SAEs were reported in individuals 70 years of age or older, i.e., 79% were under 70 years of age (younger frontline health workers were also among the first to be vaccinated, of course). For the 'medium SAE batches' (green trend line) 22% were 70 years or older, and for the 'low SAE batches' (yellow trend line) this ratio was 27%. It therefore seems less likely that selective administration to old and vulnerable individuals during the first phase of the pandemic was an important determinant of the 'emergence' of the batches with high SAE.“

In my view, that refutes the age confounding as a determining factor for distinguishing between the three vaccine profiles. Rancourt then continues to argue about what "suggests" means and what exactly "incorrect" is, but he remains adamant about his own right. I asked him in a comment why he did not accept those arguments, they seemed quite valid to me. He replied that I should read everything again. I did that well, but it didn't help.

They're all males to me.

And then another thing I noticed about Jessica Rose: it is widely thought that placebos cannot have significant side effects. That is not correct and where the threshold is, I have no idea. Of course there are complaints after vaccinations, but are there also more than usual? Is it really the injected substance? That's why you use control groups.

In any case, the placebo effect is very powerful, also in a negative sense (nocebo). People who are very afraid that they will get sick are often right. Even a sugar pill can make people vomit, as long as they are warned in advance that severe nausea is a possible side effect. (see also an earlier article on The Nocebo effect). An injection is a 'dramatic intervention', as Dr. Ben Goldacre calls it. A placebo injection has much more impact than a placebo pill. Even more than two pills. If 200,000 injections have been made without a single entry in VAERS, I rather suspect a system error. Whether most of those lots have been thrown away – but that too is speculation because we have no data, people are silent as the grave.

Placebos don't have to be saline either. They can also have an almost identical composition to the real vaccine, but without the active substance (the mRNA). Even in the production of such a placebo, anything can go wrong.

Jessica Rose shows a table of the 18 'yellow' lots. 0 (zero) deaths have been reported in 17 of them. The bottom four, together more than half a million jabs, have not produced any reports of an adverse reaction... The bottom seven, more than a million jabs: 4 side effects in total! Seems impossible to me.

The third from above, just under half a million jabs: 5 deaths! Strange, isn't it? That alone is a signal of possible product instability.

Spectacle speculation

The "debunkers" sometimes speculate more than those they debunk to show how many other possibilities there are besides the suggested ones, which are then not even in the original research. So let me speculate for a moment.

If the blue batches were indeed set in the first months, the green batches in the summer and the yellow ones in autumn/winter, then you could also suggest that the increased natural immunity has had a protective effect against the vaccination side effects. The hypothesis is that if you have had Covid, your immune system has already had a training in clearing these spikes. That would immediately explain why Sweden has a lower post-vaccination excess mortality than other countries: the Swedes were already immune when vaccinations were carried out. The upside-down world: getting sick to protect you from vaccinations. I thought it was funny.

Without data, you can think of anything. No, Pfizer really does have something to explain.

(update July 6: Meanwhile, John Campbell has also picked up the Danish research.)

and this one preceded that (nothing new further)

References

• 1
  https://jessicar.substack.com/p/debunking-the-yellow-dot-lot-placebo
• 2
  https://denisrancourt.ca/entries.php?id=131&name=2023_07_01_does_the_analysis_of_schmeling_et_al_suggest_a_batch_dependent_safety_signal_for_the_bnt162b2_mrna_covid_19_vaccine