Orwell Revisited

The Forbidden COVID-19 Chronicles
Why Many People Are Not Getting a COVID Vaccine: Part VI
Pamela A. Popper, President
Wellness Forum Health

For 26 years, Wellness Forum Health has helped consumers to make informed decisions regarding all matters related to health, ranging from which dietary supplements to take to evaluating treatments for stage 4 cancer. We’ve also trained health professionals all over the world to help their own clients and patients to do this too.

Our process involves the use of specific criteria for evaluating risks and benefits. These include factors such as conflicts of interest and differentiating correlation from a cause- and-effect relationship. It is only through applying pre-determined filters to the medical literature that one can arrive at the real truth about the value of any proposed medical intervention.

The pressure to get a COVID vaccine has become increasingly intense, with some officials even offering entry into multi-million-dollar lotteries as incentives to get the jab. Perhaps that alone should arouse some suspicion. If the vaccines were, as promised, safe and effective, it seems that seven-figure enticements would not be required – they would sell themselves. The appetite for medical treatment in the U.S. is huge – Americans spend about $3.5 trillion dollars on healthcare per year. So why are so many people refusing to get vaccinated? And should you consider it? An objective look at risks and benefits of COVID vaccines is required in order to make an intelligent decision.

According to the vaccine makers and their government and media partners, the vaccines have been proven to be safe and effective. Let’s look at efficacy first. Tal Zaks, Chief Medical Officer of Moderna, admitted in 2020 that the clinical trials were not designed to prove that his company’s vaccine prevented infection, transmission, hospitalization, or death. [1] It seems that the reason to get the vaccine would be to prevent these events. But in spite of this rather stunning admission, the vaccine makers and government officials report that the vaccines are as much as 95% effective. How can this be?

One of the ways in which the public is consistently misled about the efficacy of medical interventions is the reporting of data in relative rather than absolute terms.
Drug companies like to use relative reporting of trial results because doing so makes their products look better.

For example, let’s say the incidence of a disease in the general population is 2%. A company makes a vaccine that reduces the risk of disease from 2% to 1%. There are two ways to report these data:
the vaccine reduces the risk by 50% (1 is 50% of 2)
the vaccine reduces the risk by 1% (the difference between 1 and 2 is 1)
Aside from the fact that you might not be concerned about a disease that you have a 98% chance of not getting, clearly 50% reduction sounds more compelling than 1% reduction.

The constant use of relative data is a form of reporting bias that makes COVID vaccines and many other medical interventions appear more appealing than they might be if the absolute data were used. So let’s see what the real absolute efficacy rate is for two of the COVID vaccines.

For the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine:
relative risk reduction 95.1% (90.0%-97.6%) - sounds really good!
absolute risk reduction 0.7% (0.59%-0.83%) – not so good

For the Moderna vaccine:
relative risk reduction, 94.1% (89.1%-96.8%) – sounds really good!
absolute risk reduction, 1.1% (0.97%-1.32%) – not so good! [2]

These minor reductions in risk can sound even less appealing when considering that according to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), as of May 21 2021, 4224 deaths had been reported from COVD vaccines, along with thousands of injuries, some of which are serious enough that it is unlikely that the affected people will recover. [3]

You have to decide what you think of these data and what you think is best for your own health. But the average person reading this article has a 99.98% chance of recovering from COVID-19 if he or she becomes ill. For children there is a statistically 0% chance of serious illness and death. It seems that the COVID vaccines are a solution looking for a non-existent problem to solve.


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[1] Doshi P. "Will COVID vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us." BMJ 2020;371:m4037
[2] Brown RB. "Outcome Reporting Bias in COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Clinical Trials." Medicina (Kaunas) 2021 Feb;57(3):199
[3] vaers.hhs.gov/