[ad_1]
This week, some 35,000 Minnesotans aged 65 and over will receive a dose of the coronavirus vaccine.
About 100 will likely die within a month, according to statistics.
But not because of the vaccine. Because people are dying, especially the elderly.
There are still cancers, heart attacks, and a myriad of other potential causes.
The challenge for public health officials is to prevent even a few of these inevitable deaths from being seized as evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous or even killer.
There is no evidence at this point that the Pfizer / BioNTech or Moderna vaccines – both which have been injected into the arms of millions of Americans – carry any risks except for occasional allergic reactions which can be countered with drugs. currents available during vaccination. sites.
Still, part of the public remains nervous about a brand new vaccine that has yet to undergo long-term testing – and could presumably cause issues that scientists are not yet aware of. Some health officials, determined to get an overwhelming majority of the public vaccinated, fear the nervous group will be targeted by disinformation campaigns, especially by opponents of the vaccination who cling to lies and often exploit a false appearance of cause and effect when one thing follows another.
This is all the more likely now that vaccines are widely administered to older citizens, who, statistically speaking, are the most likely to die due to their age.
Michael Osterholm, who served on President Joe Biden’s transitional COVID advisory committee, has been among those warning of the scenario since December.
“If a person dies and gets into the media, there’s a very good chance other people will see them, and they’ll say, ‘Wait a minute, my grandmother died a week later too. ‘ And soon you have a lot of deaths, and they’re all real, but they weren’t from the vaccine, ”said Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
It’s already started.
BAD INFORMATION BEGINS
When baseball legend Hank Aaron died on January 22, 17 days after being publicly vaccinated, anti-vaxxers, led by Robert Kennedy Jr., sought to connect the two, based solely on the two events, in publications widely shared on social networks.
The team that administered the vaccine and the medical examiner’s office released statements that Aaron had died in his sleep for reasons unrelated to the vaccine.
Aaron was 86 years old. Based solely on his age and sex, he had a 10 percent chance of dying within a year. On average, each year more than 877,000 Americans over 85 die, the vast majority of natural causes, according to federal death statistics for 2018 and 2019, the latest available years – and before the pandemic. This means that, on average, within 17 days of Aaron’s vaccination, nearly 41,000 Americans his age or older are expected to die.
And over the next several months, every American this age is expected to get vaccinated.
Even traditional media like newspapers can add to the confusion.
Late last month, TwinCities.com published an Orange County Register article about a 60-year-old California health worker who died four days after receiving his second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Four hours after the stroke, he developed severe breathing difficulties.
The story says he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and cites no medical reasons to suspect the vaccine, but the headline says it all: “California health worker dies after second dose of COVID vaccine, inquiries into Classes.”
It was the fourth most read story on TwinCities.com of the month, carried largely by people who shared it on Facebook.
ALL DEATHS INVESTIGATED
In fact, all deaths that appear to be premature and within a short period of time after receiving a COVID vaccine are being investigated to some extent by federal drug safety officials. This is part of a series of standard protocols for immunization programs that range from physician observations to reports from the general public.
“There are robust systems in place that are in place not only for COVID vaccines, but for all vaccines,” said Kris Ehresmann, infectious disease manager for the Minnesota Department of Health.
The most common mistake made by the general public is to jump to the conclusion that because a vaccine was given, everything that followed was the result.
“There will be a number of deaths that will occur, but the mere time association, or temporal association, between the events does not amount to causation,” Ehresmann said.
This happened in the case of the deceased California medical worker. The story quoted his wife as saying, “But when someone shows symptoms two and a half hours after a vaccine, it’s a reaction. What else could have happened?
FALSE INFERENCES
“Yeah, I saw it,” Osterholm said when asked about the story. “That’s exactly what I meant.”
The same has happened with autism: some children started showing their first symptoms of autism soon after being immunized, leading parents to believe the gunshot caused the onset. – a notion that has been excluded by researchers.
Scientists now suspect that many of these events happened so closely together by coincidence: When you vaccinate enough people, there is a good chance that a small number of them will have a health problem soon after. , whatever happens.
Osterholm likes to tell the story of a child who suffered a seizure in front of a nurse who was holding a needle, preparing to immunize the child, who was being held in their mother’s arms. The child had a condition not previously detected.
“If this seizure had happened 30 seconds later, this mother might have assumed the vaccine had caused it – and could you blame her for thinking that?” Said Oserholm.
NUMBERS GAME
The vastness of the COVID mass vaccination campaign – about 1 million Americans are vaccinated daily – almost surely means that a large number of deaths will follow the vaccinations.
Here are a few examples, based on Minnesota and national data on deaths:
- There are nearly 920,000 Minnesotans aged 65 and over, and almost all of them are priority for immunization. Based on pre-COVID death rates, more than 39,000 are expected to die this year anyway, about 108 per day, or between four and five per hour.
- If you vaccinate 100,000 Minnesotans between the ages of 65 and 79, statistically you would expect about 17 of them to die of a heart attack or other heart disease before it’s time for their second. dose three weeks later. Twice that number would likely die of cancer, although cancer patients on the verge of death should not be vaccinated.
- It’s not just the elderly. If you immunize 10 million people aged 35 to 44 across the country, you would expect about 240 to die of a heart attack or other heart disease in a week.
- It’s not just fatal events that could trigger an alarm – but that is to be expected. If 10 million Americans aged 55 to 64 were vaccinated, one would expect about 735 of them to suffer from a stroke within a week.
CRITICAL MEDIA
Osterholm and others who have warned of misinterpreting these deaths have suggested that public health officials need to be clearer in their messages so the public is prepared – and the media need to do a better job of verification of the information, especially in an age when it can be disseminated via social media among people already skeptical of vaccines looking for “evidence” that reinforces their skepticism.
Ehresmann said she believes the central message – that vaccines have so far been shown to be safe – is enough.
“We hadn’t specifically thought about saying that we expected a number of people to die after vaccination anyway,” she said. “I think the important message to the public is that there are safety assessments that took place before the vaccination was approved, and that those safety assessments continue, even after approval, so that we can make sure we have the safest and most effective vaccines. available.”
Osterholm said more could be done.
“The real fear is that more people are dying because they don’t get the vaccine because they are alarmed by all these stories.
[ad_2]
Source link