The egregious double standard for attributing causality for vaccine harms continues
In a recent letter to Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo the CDC and FDA continue to apply absurd and egregious double standards with respect to harms from the COVID vaccines versus harms from COVID itself
I wrote in 2022 about the egregious double standards applied in assessing alleged harms from COVID, versus harms from vaccines, and from “breakthrough cases” of COVID (where someone who is fully vaccinated gets COVID).
One would hope that, given all of the recent reversals and reporting on COVID lab leaks, exaggerated deaths and hospitalizations data surrounding COVID, and an ongoing recognition that the COVID pandemic was probably the biggest public policy debacle in history, we might see CDC and FDA being a little bit more self-reflective and honest about the data.
But no.
In a March 2023 letter to Florida’s courageous surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, they warn about the impacts of Florida’s recommendations against boosters for people under 50 (because it is quite clear at this point that any possible benefit of the vaccine is far outweighed by the side effects for under 50 year olds), CDC and FDA state, among other things:
Most [COVID vaccine adverse event] reports do not represent adverse events caused by the vaccine and instead represent a pre-existing condition that preceded vaccination or an underlying medical condition that precipitated the event.
Oh really?
What happens if we apply this same logic to COVID itself?
Oh, right, the vast majority of alleged COVID hospitalizations and deaths disappear from the data because in the vast majority of COVID hospitalizations and deaths there is a “pre-existing condition that preceded [COVID] or an underlying medical condition that precipated the event.”
CDC’s own data show that on average there were 4.0 other causes of death (comorbidities) in US “deaths involving Covid-19” (this is how CDC describes what the media generally just call “Covid-19 deaths) (“For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death”; see Table 3).
They also write:
Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination do not mean that a vaccine caused the event. Since December 2020, almost 270 million people have received more than 670 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S., with over 50 million people having received the updated bivalent vaccine.
Let’s again substitute COVID for vaccine harms: “Reports of adverse events [after getting COVID] do not mean that [COVID] caused the event.”
But as is well-known now, CDC and WHO rules required that any suspicion of COVID be listed on a death certificate, rendering that person a “COVID death” with zero showing of causal connection being required. And ditto for “COVID hospitalizations”: if a person simply tests positive either upon entry to the hospital or at any time during hospitalization they are listed as a “COVID hospitalization.”
The end result was a massive exaggeration of the COVID stats from start to finish, with probably well over 90% of the stats being exaggeration — rendering the harm from the virus well within the range of a normal seasonal flu.
It is truly astounding that CDC and FDA can write this kind of thing without any recognition that this same logic completely undermines the case for COVID being a serious pandemic.
