Legitimate questions on "Real-World Immunogenicity and Reactogenicity of Two Doses of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccination in Children Aged 5–11 Years"

This entry contains data, code and document references that support the paper entitled as the entry.

The aim of this paper is pose some questions raised by the reading of the paper "Real-World Immunogenicity and Reactogenicity of Two Doses of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccination in Children Aged 5–11 Years" published in the Vaccines journal. 

Future versions will include the  submission documents, and the editor responses if any.

1 Risks and benefits

All along the COVID-19 has been an extensive debate about the tradeoff between risk and benefit as if there was only one category and a single problem. However there are a miriad of risk-benefit evaluations at diverse people and with extremely diverse interpretations of the words “risk” and “benefit”. For instance, writing this paper I face the risk of being insulted and harassed by fact checkers and authorities. Being rejected is not minor thing. My only benefit is the reivindication of my right to question, think and express my thinking. Big pharmaceutical companies expect benefits in the order of tens or hundred of billions (euros or dollars), while the risks if the new drug fail are not much, payment seems to be settled and secured in advance and there is no risk of being held liable of anything. For a fragile person the balance is in another category of thinking. The experimental drug may affect heavily an already ovewhelmed system, even producing death. The benefit lies in the acceptance of the narrative of fear and doom. Besides, no institution or company will review your case to compensate for damages, because they do not exist as per definition. Notice that the original clinical trials excluded fragile people, so there was not any clue on the effect of the so called vaccine on them. In such situation it is often a caregiver or some family in charge that takes the decision, if you choose no you may charged with the death, if you choose yes, the death will go to the count of “you know, these things happen”. If the person is healthy and without risk of COVID-19 bad outcome, the benefits are negligible and the risks are becoming more apparent every day. The emotional blackmail of “doing it for the community” has lost any social meaning after the clear declaration by a Pfizer top executive at the European Parlament that they had no information about the “vaccine” stopping transmission. 

The critical issue in all these decisions is the ability to pose the legitimate questions in order to understand what the true benefits and risks are for each person. Depossessing us of our right to question and to seek independent opinions from people without conflicts of interest is very likely the “Crime of the Century”.

2 Marketing versus scientific writing and conclusions

Some hints: Marketing papers almost never share the source data, it is infrequent to have the actual code used to compute the reported results. On the other hand: Scientific papers increasingly provide full access to data and code. The issue of conflicts of interest is a rather tricky one. Digging into the ways that such influence may surface should not be limited to read the mostly uninformative declarations of the authors. For instance, in [vaccines10111954] authors declare no conflict of interest, however the funds needed for carrying out all the work and the analytics should come from some source, even the vaccines have some costs, and brief search shows quickly strong ties between the institution and the industry. Marketing papers use confusion and association tools, like ignoring negative results even when they are published in the paper, or include positive associations that are completely unsuported in the paper. Tricky incorrect statistics, such as hidden sampling bias or biased estimations of critical parameters that can not be checked in absence of the source data, are also applied.