The magical mRNA elixir mysteriously heals the unborn

On the reports around the recent JAMA article

So I stumbled over this… inspiring headline, reporting on a recent JAMA article in the morning paper a few days back.

Science has now apparently not only bestowed upon us that the mRNA shots are completely safe for unborn children, they also, apparently, wonder upon wonder, protect from adverse neonatal events unrelated to covid, such as intracranial bleeding, ischemia, brain inflammation and death from all causes.

Mortality among kids whose mothers had been vaccinated was only half of those with unvaccinated mothers, the article above boldly emphasizes. An incredible tonic, this mRNA injectible product.

If whoever wrote those two paragraphs above had genuinely stopped to think about them for just one second, it would have been obvious that even a totally effective prevention of a virus which by the most amplified count conceivable during its two year run in Sweden only killed 10 out of 1 300 000 kids, is not going to actually cut neonatal mortality (1500 dead per year) in half.

Even the JAMA article’s own data makes it clear that there’s no connection between its stated outcomes and any covid infections.

This reporting is utter distilled bullshit. The outcome is an obvious effect of confounding variables, and you don’t toss around these numbers as if they’re some sign of the miraculous healing effects of a magical panacea.

But the authors of this famous article claim to have “no idea” why there are fewer neonatal deaths and other serious complications in the vaccinated group.

So what’s it really about?

Yeah, the control group of “the unvaccinated” is obviously rife with confounding factors. And it’s not just that almost half of the unvaccinated are non-Nordics and almost a quarter are MENA immigrants (who for various reasons, not least vitamin D deficiency, have higher rates of adverse neonatal outcomes). The non-vaccinated group also has twice the number of smokers, almost a full 10%.

But rest assured! The Scientists have “controlled” for the confounding variables through logistic regression analysis and restricted sub-analyses, to repeat some of the scientese incantations involved. Basically, if they did their job right, they attached well-founded average effects of something like smoking on the likelihood of adverse neonatal or perinatal events, and then adjusted the analysis accordingly.

There’s nothing wrong with this type of approach in principle, but since smoking has a dose-dependent effect on the likelihood of negative peri- or neonatal outcomes, you really need to know the details of the matter to make the relevant conclusions.

In this paper, however, the authors took a binary approach (yes/no) to the dose-dependent factor of smoking. They were comparing small groups with different cultural and contextual approaches to tobacco use, and they took a binary approach to the factor. Why?

How do you plausibly adjust for such a data point? You don’t. You can’t. There’s not enough data to control for this factor.

To illustrate, this approach is likely to even skew the data in the wrong way. The consumption of one cigarette per day gets lumped together with a package and a half as smoker compared to smoker, ostensibly entirely eliminating the variable of tobacco consumption as a causal factor to different neonatal outcomes between the two. So in other words, the one-cigarette mother of group 1 gets compared to the thirty-cigarette mom of group 2, and any difference in neonatal outcomes gets offloaded to other causal factors beyond the tobacco use.

See the problem? You could use this method to prove that the mother eating dish soap reduces the risk of infant mortality.

And what’s aggravating this issue, the approaches to smoking certainly differ not only between cultures and socioeconomic groups, but also in relation to vaccination status. I.e. if the unvaccinated are smoking, we should assume that they are generally likely to smoke more and more frequently than the otherwise obedient and line-toeing vaccinated smokers. Comparing smoker to smoker should then produce outcomes more favourable to the vaccinated.

In terms of other factors, they authors didn’t even assess nutritional status, not even through a self-reporting questionnaire. This is arguably the single most important factor for neonatal outcomes, and it’s certain to independently correlate to vaccination status.

Knowing the nutritional status would also serve to contextualize ethnicity data, whose significant correlations to adverse neo- and perinatal outcomes are mostly a proxy for nutritional status and vitamin levels.

So, yeah, this study definitely does not show the connection between the mRNA vaccines and a lower risk of death or adverse neonatal outcomes that both the study authors and the media have tried to claim.

But as Igor Chudov was quick to point out, the study’s trimester comparisons should indeed be cause for alarm. Why indeed are there worse neonatal outcomes for the early trimester vaccinations?

Even if we disregard the fact that the unvaccinated control group is an impossible comparison, why do we see such an elevated risk in almost every significant outcome for the group of infants whose mothers were vaccinated during the first trimester?

Why aren’t those questions being asked? Why isn’t this being reported? This is the most obvious and most robust finding of the study. You get strongly divergent outcomes within a relatively homogenous group, with the only differing variable being in which trimester the vaccine was administered.

Yet, somehow, all of this gets spun as a success story marketing the mysterious powers of the magical mRNA healing potion, instead of, you know, something akin to actual science being pursued.

We’re dealing with the power of myth here. The gravity of the symbolic authority of science, the notion of collective progress, and the technological couching of the supreme value of health.

Moreover, it’s not like the question of the mRNA shots being “safe” for unborn infants begins and ends with a short-term analysis of neo- and perinatal outcomes. Those potential problems have never really been a major issue for those of us who have researched the potential risks and negative outcomes of the mRNA platform, as there are many other glaring ones, so the entire media framing of this publication is a huge red herring.

And nonetheless, thousands upon thousands of people all across the land read this convoluted garbage and are relieved in submitting to the authority of the experts having once again reiterated their time-worn incantation of “safe and effective”.