Massive Study Puts a Nail in the Coffin of Anti-Vax Arguments

 


CDC and Kaiser Permanente analyzed the health records of 6.2 million members of 8 participating US health plans. They found that no serious health effects could be linked to either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines. The study was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

It looked at cases of serious outcomes, including acute myocardial infarction, Bell palsy, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis/pericarditis, pulmonary embolism, stroke, and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome within 21 days of vaccination.  It compared those outcomes to the same ones in people who had not been recently vaccinated.

Though there were instances of these conditions, they were extremely rare, measured in the tens to hundreds of cases per million person years (MPY). More importantly, none of the differences between those vaccinated and those not vaccinated in the same time period were statistically significant.

That means in a sample of the size drawn for the study, you could get the difference observed between the vaccination group and control group just by luck of the draw. For example, for transverse myelitis, there were 3.0 cases per MPY in the vaccine group, and 2.7 per MPY in the control group. There are only 0.3 more cases per MPY for those recently vaccinated—not even a whole case!

Moreover, for some conditions there were more cases in the control group than the vaccination group. For example, both kinds of strokes had lower incidence in the vaccine group (ischemic 1611.8 and hemorrhagic 364.7 per MPY) than the control (1780.9 and 480.2 per MPY, respectively). 

Now this doesn't mean vaccines protect you from strokes. Cases where there are higher rates and lower rates of disease in the vaccination group occur by chance. There are no statistically significant differences either way.

So there you have it. Vaccines don't increase your risk of any of the conditions listed above (and then some). They will not make your arms fall off, or cause genital atrophy, or spontaneous combustion.  Considering that there have been over five billion shots administered, if they did we'd have heard about it by now.  

Not that scientific evidence will sway the crackpot anti-vaxxers, but it's nice to see proof of how absolutely and totally wrong they are. There is no legitimate reason to not get vaxxed (except perhaps particular medical conditions).

Header Image by Angelo Esslinger from Pixabay 


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