I read the start of Kirsch’s article here since I’m slightly interested in vaccine skepticism and have never dug into it before. (I’m not sure if this is the article that Bret is gushing about.)
The first claim in the article is that there are many more deaths reported by VAERS. I ignored this because without some other context it seemed unsurprising and uninformative that VAERS is used more for the covid vaccine than for the flu vaccine (and the absolute numbers of deaths reported are negligible given the number of people who have taken the vaccine). The inference of “at least 20,000 deaths due to the vaccine” looks like it’s probably bullshit but it would take a few minutes to establish that and so I moved on.
The next claim about harms was “82% miscarriage rate in first 20 weeks”, which links here. But this number seems to be computed as “Amongst pregnancies that ended, how many were miscarriages?” The table was published in April 21 about people who were vaccinated December 14 - February 28, and it looks like there shouldn’t have bee enough time for anyone to have a healthy live birth if they were vaccinated in the first 20 weeks.
The authors of the letter-to-the-editor acknowledge this as saying “We acknowledge this rate will likely decrease as the pregnancies of women who were vaccinated <20 weeks complete but believe the rate will be higher than 12.5%,” but it’s unclear why they believe this (the study reports 96 spontaneous abortions amongst something like 1000 people who were vaccinated in the first trimester, which seems like it may be right on track). And of course that wouldn’t make the 82% number less dubious.
So as far as I can tell this datapoint is very misleading, and this should have been obvious to anyone who took a cursory look before including it in an article. It’s also such an extreme and bizarre claim that it should certainly have warranted a cursory look.
I didn’t look into any of the other claims because it would probably be more valuable to instead read some more credible vaccine skeptic.
I read the start of Kirsch’s article here since I’m slightly interested in vaccine skepticism and have never dug into it before. (I’m not sure if this is the article that Bret is gushing about.)
The first claim in the article is that there are many more deaths reported by VAERS. I ignored this because without some other context it seemed unsurprising and uninformative that VAERS is used more for the covid vaccine than for the flu vaccine (and the absolute numbers of deaths reported are negligible given the number of people who have taken the vaccine). The inference of “at least 20,000 deaths due to the vaccine” looks like it’s probably bullshit but it would take a few minutes to establish that and so I moved on.
The next claim about harms was “82% miscarriage rate in first 20 weeks”, which links here. But this number seems to be computed as “Amongst pregnancies that ended, how many were miscarriages?” The table was published in April 21 about people who were vaccinated December 14 - February 28, and it looks like there shouldn’t have bee enough time for anyone to have a healthy live birth if they were vaccinated in the first 20 weeks.
The authors of the letter-to-the-editor acknowledge this as saying “We acknowledge this rate will likely decrease as the pregnancies of women who were vaccinated <20 weeks complete but believe the rate will be higher than 12.5%,” but it’s unclear why they believe this (the study reports 96 spontaneous abortions amongst something like 1000 people who were vaccinated in the first trimester, which seems like it may be right on track). And of course that wouldn’t make the 82% number less dubious.
So as far as I can tell this datapoint is very misleading, and this should have been obvious to anyone who took a cursory look before including it in an article. It’s also such an extreme and bizarre claim that it should certainly have warranted a cursory look.
I didn’t look into any of the other claims because it would probably be more valuable to instead read some more credible vaccine skeptic.
There is an interesting critique of the miscarriage claims (and some of the other claims) in this Medium post:
https://medium.com/rebel-wisdom/on-vaccine-safety-ivermectin-and-the-dark-horse-podcast-an-investigation-f32491d4c970