Recently one of my readers asked if I was going to get the new Covid booster. Because this is a family oriented blog, I politely said, ‘no,’ instead of something more descriptive.
Throughout this whole Covid hysteria, I have always like Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at John’s Hopkins University. Perhaps this was because he was a contrarian of sorts, not brown-nosing anyone, but rather expressing his own opinions.
On 8/30 Dr. Makary had an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal, the title of which was “Biden Waves Through Another Covid Booster.”
The sub-headline asked, “He’s certain that it ‘works,’ but there’s no data. Is this how we approve drugs now?”
From Coffee and Covid:
“After disgustedly pointing out the last round of boosters was approved after only a “study” of eight mice, Dr. Makary noted this time there is even less safety and efficacy data. That obvious point was already nice to see in print somewhere, but then Makary dropped a hammer on jab risks, citing a study showing serious adverse events in 1 in 556 doses.
Makary continues:
“Advocates of the new Covid boosters point out that the annual flu shot gets approved without a randomized trial. But flu shots use a traditional vaccine platform that has withstood the test of time, and Covid vaccines have higher complication rates. The latter have a rate of serious adverse events as high as 1 in 556 doses, according to a study published last year in the journal Vaccine. They have also been found to cause myocarditis in young people at a rate six to 28 times the incidence after infection, according to a 2022 JAMA Cardiology study.”
According to my calculations 1/556 comes out to 0.18% which is certainly immensely higher than the Covid risk for the vast majority of individuals, especially the young in whom the risk of myocarditis alone should preclude any thought of a Covid booster.
Makary closes with :
“The novel Covid booster shot may be warranted for some high-risk patients. But pushing it hard for young and old alike without human-outcomes data makes a mockery of the scientific method and our regulatory process.”
Marty Makary … “I love this guy!”
9/8/23