The errors in the massive UK blood clot study should scare the vaccinated

In previous articles, I have discussed the problems with vaccine effectiveness; namely, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated have become distinct populations with a different set of characteristics most of which cannot be easily controlled for without more robust data sets. Those who have access to the fullest data sets, like health authorities, often only bother to do the most rudimentary adjustments when calculating VE.

Interestingly, there is an article in the British Medical Journal that does not compare these two distinct populations. Instead, the article looks at only those vaccinated with a first dose. The study is an observational study, which have their own set of problems, with a massive data set (29,121,633 individuals) based out of the UK. The authors looked for cases of low platelets and blood clots.

There are a myriad of reasons to raise eyebrows at this study.

1. First of all, they considered an exposure period of 8-28 days after vaccination and after positive cases of a PCR confirmed case of the virus to analyze severe outcomes. The given reason is to overcome the “healthy vaccination effect”. The healthy vaccination effect is an interesting excuse, in this case, because it refers to the fact that healthy and unhealthy individuals have different probabilities of getting vaccinated. The problem? They were not comparing the probabilities of severe outcomes in populations with different probabilities of getting vaccinated. Their entire population is vaccinated.

2. The study only analyzes first doses, which says little about the impact of second doses. There are reasons to believe that second doses of these vaccines cause even more severe adverse events. Not including a second dose is fair as doing so would likely violate the assumptions of the study, but it does not allow us to make any legitimate cost-benefit analysis from this study.

3. The data quality is questionable. As Johannes Kreis notes, “the authors observed an increased risk of adverse outcomes up to 28 days before the exposure. What should be the reason for that except that there is a considerable problem with the exposure dates and/or the outcome dates?”

4. In general, as we have seen in other datasets like Alberta, cases of the virus rise abruptly immediately following vaccination due to a weakened immune system. As I have outlined in previous articles, this occurs primarily in the first few days following the vaccine. In other words, people that got the virus in the first few days after a vaccine will have any outcome from the vaccine attributed to the virus (the authors seemed to arbitrarily make this editorial choice with enormous implications).

5. Holy cases, Batman. Nearly 1.8 million cases of the virus in this vaccinated population from December 1, 2020 to April 24, 2021? There were only 2.8 million cases in the UK reported during that period. In other words, the vaccinated in the UK at the time were driving the virus at an extremely high clip.

6. From (5), this means that many of the blood clots, even if they could be attributed to the virus, can be attributed to the vaccine because the vaccine was driving people to get the virus.

7. The risk of a severe outcome vaccination is given as 1 in 55,000 (and it does not vary with age), but due to the way this study is constructed and the aforementioned data quality issues in (3) and misattributation issues (4), the risk may well be much higher. Note, this is only short term risk for a single shot.

8. Again, related to (4), the incidence of a severe outcome on day 0 for the cases of the virus is extremely high. In other words, people who were already in the hospital for, potentially unrelated, events were merely tested for the virus at the time. The connection is unclear from the data, but those who have high incidence of, say, a clotting incident on day 0 will have a much higher probability of having one on day 8-28. I am no expert on self-controlled study designs, but I would guess this violates one of the underlying assumptions of the study.

9. The study only highlights people that received a positive PCR test as having the virus. How many actually had the virus during this period among the vaccinated group with no serious outcomes? This is going to sound like a broken record, but if that number is 2-3 or 10 times higher, as some studies suggest, it could seriously impact their conclusions.

This study, though full of errors, suggests that vaccinations have a high level of adverse events. The authors claim that the rate of severe events is higher in those who got the virus than the vaccine, but that is unclear due to many of the aforementioned points, especially (4). There should have, at the very least, been a strict control between the event dates, which was limited due to the short term nature of the study. More importantly, this is only a short term study and says nothing about the long term implications of the vaccine, the subsequent doses, and the fact that the vaccine only buys 6 months of protection. Yikes.

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