‘There is an overweight of cardiovascular deaths in the Pfizer group’ which is ‘a potential danger signal that warrants further scrutinization,’ the study’s lead author Professor Christine Stabell-Benn said.
(The Daily Sceptic) – The lead author of a pre-print study in the Lancet examining all-cause mortality in the COVID vaccine trials has said that her work shows a “potential danger signal” for heart-related deaths connected to the mRNA vaccines that “warrants further scrutinization.”
Speaking to UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers, Professor Christine Stabell-Benn from the University of Southern Denmark added that there is “major pushback” to her efforts to investigate the effects of vaccines on all-cause mortality and many regulators and companies simply don’t want to know.
While stressing that the numbers in her study are often too small to provide statistical significance and ground firm conclusions, Prof. Stabell-Benn observes that “there is an overweight of cardiovascular deaths in the Pfizer group” which is “a potential danger signal that warrants further scrutinization.”
Addressing the wider context of safety signals from the mRNA vaccines, she adds (from 22’50”):
“I think there are danger signals in relation to cardiovascular deaths and diseases. We know that now with certainty for the mRNA vaccines with respect to myocarditis and pericarditis. But also anecdotally, I would say there are reports of cardiovascular deaths which I think deserve further scrutinization. This is just a piece in the puzzle, but it adds to the evidence that suggests this is something which should be investigated further for the mRNA vaccines.”
Prof. Stabell-Benn calls for back-to-back comparisons of the two new vaccine types, mRNA and adenovirus-vector, to compare their effects on all-cause mortality.
Addressing the politics of her research, she admits there is “not a lot of interest” from regulators and companies. “There is major pushback to be honest.” She adds:
“It is also a bit of a Pandora’s box, I think, for health authorities, because if they start acknowledging these effects there is also the huge problem of potential negative non-specific effects that have actually been brought to the attention of the WHO [World Health Organization] already 20 years ago, but they haven’t really responded with the investigations. So you can see the potential backlash for the WHO, for vaccination programmes, if it actually comes out that some vaccines have carried these negative non-specific effects.
So I’ve been in this business for many years and I know that there are powers out there who aren’t interested in really digging into these findings. And again, it also has implications for the way we test vaccines, so you can see it is complicated stuff also for companies, for regulators, if we need to design vaccine phase 3 trials which do not only study the specific disease but also study all-cause mortality and morbidity.”
Would she recommend COVID vaccination, Freddie asks. Based on what we know currently, “I wouldn’t recommend vaccination of anybody [under] 50 years of age” with the mRNA vaccines, she says.
Is she vaccinated? That’s “private,” she laughs.
Asked if she would recommend either vaccine to her (hypothetical) adult children in their twenties, her answer is an immediate and emphatic “no.”
“That comes from decades of studying non-specific effects of vaccines and realising that the protective immunity against the vaccine disease can come at a high price. With the unknowns in relation to the new vaccine types, I would be on the safe side of things and say that as long as your risk of severe COVID is low then I wouldn’t run the risk of taking a new vaccine which hasn’t been tested for its overall health effects. And regrettably, we still lack that data. We tried to do the best we can with the very limited data in this study that we have now submitted, but it’s not good enough.”
In the interview, Prof. Stabell-Benn also draws attention to the statistically significant benefits her study finds for all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality from the adenovirus-vector vaccines (in contrast to the mRNA vaccines).
