I’m sure by now, you’ve seen the bivalent “Stroke signal” report in the Vaccine Safety Datalink.
It says that they have a record of 130 strokes in the 3 weeks after vaccination, but that all 130 victims survived. Igor Chudov has a write-up on how unlikely this is:
But I propose that this is a classic example of "Survivorship Bias”. Pretty much, only if the victims end up in medical care at the enrolled facilities after their stroke are they going to be counted. We know that those that die at home are not being carefully autopsied for cause of death. (This is something that everyone concerned about excess deaths should be asking for. Regardless of your favorite theory on the WHY of excess non-covid mortality) Given Ivan’s numbers of 1 : 5.25 stroke victims die calculated from a stroke every 40s and a death from stroke every 3.5 minutes, we can model the ACTUAL number of strokes including stroke mortality as ~161. Basically it is the reported number 130 / (1.0 - 1.0/5.25) = 160.59.
Okay, so once we calculate that total of 161 strokes, we need to find the floor of stroke activity. If the entire US population is suffering 1 stroke per 40s on average, (A number derived from the estimate of 795k+ strokes per year) and our study population is 550,000 individuals, we should expect a rate of 1 stroke every 24000 seconds or 400 minutes. And this study was over a 3 week period, so it is 21 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes = 30240 minutes. Divided by 400 minutes per stroke for 75.6 strokes.
Basically the rate doubled.
Now there are some rather important caveats here. First, this is an older cohort, so the rate of strokes per person is likely higher.
But in contrast, 1 in 4 strokes is a repeat stroke, and only 87% are Ischemic strokes and the VSD data was tracking only Ischemic strokes.
So let’s remove repeat strokes and non-ischemic strokes from the mix, while adjusting for population. This is a very rough, order-of-magnitude kind of adjustment. Do not take these numbers as true, simply an attempt to compensate the analysis.
From the US Census, there are 52,362,817 people 65+ in the US. And if we take the 62% number from the stroke risk variance, we get a total of 492,900 strokes 65+. If we remove 13% we get 428,823 and remove a further 25% for repeats, 321,617. Now only 550k people were covered in the VSD analysis which is 1.05% of the population 65+. In that population, we should expect 3,377 first time, ischemic strokes in a year. I’m certain that distribution is not uniform over the year, but I don’t have that data, so we are going to spread it evenly which gives us 9.25 strokes per day (the 0.25 makes sense to keep in this context). Over 21 days then, we would expect 194 strokes.
So the Bivalent booster is protective from stroke!
Obviously, something is wrong here, and the original article hints at it. “…within the first three weeks after their shots, compared with weeks four through six.” This is most likely an example of the healthy patient bias, and part of why SCCMs are valuable. The population acts as it’s own control group correcting for things like the healthy population bias. This population has a lower rate of strokes to the average background rate. It’s also possible that vaccine induced strokes are MUCH more fatal than normal and are being lost in the “died at home” numbers. We just don’t know.
Also keep in mind that these people have ALREADY survived at least 2 doses and likely 3-4 doses of the original vaccines. It’s possible that stroke outcomes will diminish as those most susceptible to that outcome will have already died or stopped vaccinating after having a stroke. It is another form of survivorship bias at work. The fact that they say Moderna doesn’t show the same issue could point to this idea, since Moderna dosage is much higher and given the high degree of dose dependency we have seen on vaccine side effects, the stroke vulnerable population is likely weeded out one way or the other.
So where does this leave us? Honestly, in the very uncomfortable position of having to rely on the good faith of the investigators to not sweep this under the rug. The problem being, they have squandered ALL that good faith in the past three years.
Check out Ezra Levant’s and Avi’s total take down of the Pfizer CEO at Davos. It’s on twitter. Might be under Rebel News. I’m not on twitter so can’t link to it. This is what a reporter should be doing to hold these people accountable. Epic!