Are there no deaths after the Pfizer bivalent booster?
For a change, we also have a denominator for our analysis
In a recent article, Bloomberg reported this:
Among 550,000 people 65 and older who had been vaccinated and received the Pfizer bivalent booster, 130 had strokes in the first three weeks after getting the shot, according to the CDC, and no deaths have been reported.
So let us check out VAERS data and look at all the adverse events for the bivalent booster and verify if this is all true.
VAERS now records the bivalent booster as VAX_TYPE = COVID19-2 which is very helpful for doing this filtering.
So I simply created a dataset from the existing VAERS CSV files filtering for the following conditions:
select d2022.* from "2022VAERSVAX" v2022
join "2022VAERSDATA" d2022 on v2022.VAERS_ID = d2022.VAERS_ID
where VAX_TYPE = 'COVID19-2'
AND AGE_YRS >= 65
and VAX_MANU like '%pfizer%'
UNION
select d2023.* from "2023VAERSVAX" v2023
join "2023VAERSDATA" d2023 on v2023.VAERS_ID = d2023.VAERS_ID
where VAX_TYPE = 'COVID19-2'
AND AGE_YRS >= 65
and VAX_MANU like '%pfizer%'In other words, I filtered all the VAERS DATA records for age >=65 and Pfizer booster, which gives us a good way to compare with what has been mentioned in the article.
I had to do a little bit of cleanup after this to remove records where the VAX_DATE was before 31st Aug 2022, which was the date the FDA approved the booster dose.
It removed a small fraction (<5%) of the rows. Even if they ARE legitimate records, I don’t want to muddy the analysis by adding stuff which might be wrongly recorded.
As you can see, it falls just a few records short of 4000.
Are there any death reports?
So let us first fact check the CDC on the number of death reports.
When you filter for DIED = ‘Y’, you get 78 deaths in this cohort.
It is possible that some of these have nothing at all to do with the booster, so let us just filter it down to the deaths which happened on the same day.
That still gives us 9 deaths.
More than 50% of the deaths happened within a week, which is consistent with many other peoples’ analysis.
Severe adverse events
Now let us classify all reports where DIED is not ‘Y’, but the patient had a severe adverse reaction. We do this by checking if they were hospitalized, or went to the ER, or if the AE was marked as life threatening.
There are over 400 such severe adverse events.
Of these nearly half of them happened within 2 weeks of vaccination.
Rate of adverse events
For a change, we also have a denominator which we can use for our analysis.
I don’t know the cutoff date for the 550K number mentioned in the article, so let us suppose it was off by a large margin and say a million doses of the Pfizer bivalent booster was administered to people over 65 in the US.
Combining deaths and severe adverse reactions gets us to almost exactly 500.
And for ease of calculation, let us suppose between 500K - 1000K doses were administered.
That still means between 1 in 500 and 1 in 1000 people who got the dose either died or had a severe adverse reaction after the vaccine.
In my view that is a shockingly high number for a vaccine.
plus VAERS is severely under-reported