Nagoya Uni prof finds twice as many post-vax deaths as Covid deaths among Japanese in their 20s in 2021
Japan will start offering yet another mouse-tested Covid booster to the general population from 20th September. The same as ever, the government is assuring us that “the benefits outweigh the risks for all age groups”, but Nagoya University’s Prof Seiji Kojima is less than convinced. The quoted text below comes from his recent article titled “Should people in their 20s get the Covid vaccine? Comparison of Covid deaths and post-vaccination deaths”. All highlights are my own.
I’ve decided to discuss the pros and cons of vaccination by comparing the number of deaths due to Covid and the number of deaths after vaccination. For deaths due to Covid, I use the numbers reported in the Vital Statistics Survey announced by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW). The numbers are based on death certificates and are considered the most reliable. The number of deaths after vaccination is taken from reports submitted to the Adverse Reactions Investigation Committee (ARIC) of the Health Science Council, Immunization and Vaccine Subcommittee.
This helps to get around the problem of inflated Covid deaths since death certificates are unlikely to include incidental PCR positive test results. So what are the numbers?
The number of deaths due to Covid among people in their 20s was 15 in 2021 (13 men, 2 women) and 35 in 2022 (22 men, 13 women). On the other hand, the number of reported deaths after vaccination was 30 (male: 22, female: 7, unknown: 1) in 2021 and 10 (male: 8, female: 2) in 2022. Surprisingly, in 2021, the number of post-vaccination deaths was twice the number of Covid deaths (Fig. 1).
Even I’m surprised by the results for 2021, especially considering fewer post-vax deaths per million doses have been reported in Japan than elsewhere since only medical institutions and vaccine makers can report them. But why were far fewer post-vax deaths reported during the booster campaigns in 2022?
Covid vaccines have different mortality rates depending on the lot. For Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, the fatality rate for the 20 lots supplied in May and June 2021 ranged from 0 to 0.0024%, with a median of 0.0011%. Twelve lots had mortality rates greater than 0.001%…The fatality rate for the 22 lots supplied in 2022 ranged from 0 to 0.0004%, with a median of 0.0001%, less than 1/10th of the lots supplied in May and June 2021. The decrease in reported post-vaccination deaths in 2022 is likely due to a reduction in vaccine toxicity.
I agree hot lots may partly explain these results, but I think Prof Kojima overlooks dose dependency. There were twice as many deaths after second shots as first shots (25 vs. 12), suggesting that having too many lipid nanoparticles floating around your system at any one time may be bad for you. Next, Prof Kojima looks at causes of death.
Post-vaccination myocarditis is said to be more common in men in their 10s and 20s, and six of the seven cases diagnosed with myocarditis were men, and all cases developed within two weeks after vaccination.
Of the 14 cases where fatal arrhythmia or heart failure was reported as the cause of death, 12 were male and 13 had symptom onset within 2 weeks after vaccination, showing the same tendency as myocarditis. Of the 8 who died suddenly, all but one were male, and all developed symptoms within 1 week after vaccination.
Fatal arrhythmia, heart failure, and even sudden death may also have been triggered by myocarditis.
So 18 out of 21 cardio-related deaths were males, as were 7 out of 8 sudden deaths. I don’t know about you, but I reckon those ratios are strongly suggestive of causality. But then again, I’m not an “expert”.
The Adverse Reaction Investigation Committee has not recognized a causal relationship in any of these cases, arguing that viral infection as the cause of myocarditis cannot be excluded, even if myocarditis is diagnosed by pathological diagnosis.
The job of the ARIC is seemingly to come with up reasons to avoid blaming the jabs for all the deaths and injuries they’ve caused. And to be fair to them, they’re very good at it: in only 2 out of 2167 fatal cases have they determined “The causal relationship cannot be denied.” At the same time, the MHLW also has a Covid-19 Vaccination Health Damage Investigation Subcommittee which has so far paid out compensation to the families of 159 people who died after getting Covid jabs, with hundreds more claims to be adjudicated. Having one committee finding excuses not to blame the jabs for deaths and another paying out money to bereaved families means people in government can avoid taking responsibility for recommending vaccines with serious safety problems while the bereaved families can feel their suffering has been sort of recognised. A very Japanese win-win. Anyway, back to Prof Kojima.
Looking back, there have been several times when vaccination across the country was suspended because of post-vaccination deaths. After two infants died after receiving the DPT1 vaccine in 1975, that vaccine was discontinued. I had worked in the pediatrics department of a hospital that treated one of the dead infants, so I had the opportunity to hear about this from people involved.
The infant who died had an underlying medical condition, and no causal relationship between vaccination and death was established. In Japan in the past, the DPT vaccine was suspended nationwide when two people died after vaccination, but now Covid vaccinations aren’t stopped even when the number of deaths after vaccination exceeds the number of deaths due to Covid infection. Which is a more preferable response?
It’s because of past incidents like the infant deaths after the DPT vaccine that the mainstream media regularly bemoaned “vaccine hesitancy” in Japan prior to the rollout of the Covid jabs, blaming so-called misinformation and the zero-risk mentality of many Japanese. Unfortunately, many young Japanese fell for the misinformation that not taking the jab was the high-risk choose because of the dangers of Covid. If this story has a moral, it is to stay sceptical. Because credulity can be deadly.
Diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. This was written as “triple vaccine (3種混合ワクチン)” in the original article.
We had a meeting last week where they were surveying how many people would get the new booster. In my mind, they were gauging if they could mandate it or would it cause a backlash at the university.
The benefits are fewer "useless eaters", the risk is killing some useful eaters in the process of elimination of the former. Then everything makes sense.