In last week’s newspaper, there was an article in “Viewpoints” by Dr. Angelo DePalma and Dr. Mary Rapuano about the connection between COVID cases and deaths and vaccines.
Reading the article and researching several of the sources they used and claims that they made, I found the article to be very misleading about the safety of vaccines and their efficacy.
The first claim they make states that data from the U.K. suggests that people who are vaccinated are more likely to contract and/or die from COVID than unvaccinated people. This claim was first brought up by writer Alex Bergenson, who posted about this on social media and talked about it on “The Joe Rogan Podcast.”
He lists the number of people who died from COVID in several age groups and points out that the number of people who were vaccinated and died is much higher that the number of unvaccinated people who died from COVID.
While this is technically true, it does not take into account the percentage of people who are vaccinated in the country.
As an article by Reuter’s Fact Check points out, when you consider the number of deaths per 100,000 people, the proportion of unvaccinated people who die from COVID is higher than the percentage of vaccinated people.
I’m not going to list specific numbers, but you can easily verify this for yourself using publicly available information.
The claim that Dr. DePalma and Dr. Rapuano make is that vaccinated people are “more likely” to experience serious complications or die from COVID than unvaccinated, which is simply not true.
The next source they bring up is that VAERS, the official government vaccine adverse event reporting database lists more than 15,000 deaths “directly attributed” to COVID vaccinations.
However, if you go onto the VAERS website to search the data they have collected, there is a disclaimer that states that anyone can submit a report of an adverse event to their database and that “reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness.”
“Vaccine providers are encouraged to report any clinically significant health problem following vaccination to VAERS even if they are not sure if the vaccine was the cause.”
Dr. DePalma and Dr. Rapuano claim that this data “directly attributes” the vaccines to these 15,000 deaths, while VAERS states that their data is not reliable and should not be used for scientific purposes.
They follow up this with a reference to a study conducted by Harvard Pilgrim Health, which found that VAERS drastically under-estimates the number of adverse events from vaccines. However, they fail to mention that this study was published in 2011 and used data from 2006-09, more than a decade before COVID was even discovered much less a vaccine developed.
More so, their extrapolation that the number of deaths from vaccines is much higher than reported is also incorrect. The study makes no reference to deaths reported to VAERS and therefore means that one cannot extrapolate the true number of COVID deaths from the VAERS data.
The claims that Dr. DePalma and Dr. Rapuano make are incorrect and based on a misleading presentation of data.
In the next few paragraphs of their article, they state, “All-cause excess mortality has skyrocketed worldwide and closely tracks vaccination rates“ and that these statistics are available on Ourworldindata.org.
Here, they are falling for the fallacy of correlation versus causation, trying to argue that vaccines are causing an increase of mortality around the world.
While is it true that both are increasing worldwide simultaneously, there is no evidence to show that they in any way cause each other.
It is entirely possible, and most likely the case, that vaccines have nothing to do with the increase in worldwide mortality. Yet their article is implying that this is the case.
In the rest of the article, the authors start to divert into claiming that there is a conspiracy by the world health community and pharmaceutical industry to push these vaccines onto people while silencing any scientists who ask questions.
The truth is scientists did and are continuing to ask questions. And then time and time again those questions are answered by peer-reviewed research that shows that the vaccines are safe, and they do work.
I don’t want to speculate on why two people with Ph.D.s in organic chemistry and biology would write such a misleading article about vaccines. Especially, considering that Dr. DePalma has worked in the pharmaceutical industry and written publications about the use of an oral COVID vaccine being tested in 2020, all of which are available on his website.
Their article is clearly meant to scare the public about the safety of vaccines by misrepresenting data and making false conclusions from it.
Do your own research, check your sources and find out the truth for yourself.
David Gemmers
Sparta