RE: Promising CDC Pregnancy Threats
A recent CDC missive includes a V-Safe study follow-up with a strong safety signal, and a repeat of the lie that SARS-CoV-2 is a significant threat to pregnant women.
For the third week in a row, there was strong cause to go topical this Friday thanks to a sudden loudly-touted CDC update to Reality™. This time work was not interrupted. Still, the CDC’s Wednesday update to their advisory document deserves comment:1
These assertions are largely backed by a newly-released paper concerning V-Safe registrants.2 The last time we looked at a V-Safe-based study was in our excoriation of the “Preliminary Findings” paper. The conclusion arrived to then was ominous, but not alarming: Among the women registered in the V-Safe system who received a Covid vaccine within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, few follow-up calls had likely been conducted at the time the authors accessed the data. The new paper explicitly examines outcomes among registrants among whom such follow ups have occurred. It derives from this a miscarriage rate that is seemingly inside the normal, expected rate (though, I don’t know off hand if their exclusion of the 35 miscarriages occurring within 6 weeks is very sensible).
If this were a sci-fi horror movie, that would only mean that the Covid vaccines are sure to cause an adverse outcome in the last act, defying the normal statistical danger/safety divide of the 20-weeks mark; but since this is reality, we must regard these results as encouraging, and a welcome correction to the biggest flaw of the Preliminary Findings paper. However, it still has the other flaws - the selection bias and lack of data chain of custody inherent in using the V-Safe phone-based app, etc - which still warrant a measure of scorn, in the context of the study’s being used a surrogate for a legitimate scientific attempt to assess the safety of an experimental drug for pregnant and would-be pregnant recipients.
The second part of of the CDC update concerns trying to scare pregnant women into getting the Covid vaccines by overplaying the threat posed by infection from SARS-CoV-2. This links to studies which compare infection outcomes for pregnant women who experience an infection with women their age overall.3 I find this approach nonsensical - if pregnancy confers a higher negative outcome risk from respiratory and other infections in general, it makes no sense to use the relative risk of an infection with one particular virus as a surrogate for the change in total risk that would occur if that virus were banished from the Earth with a finger-snap.
Sharing air with other humans and their myriad germs is part of the bargain of the fateful voyage that is pregnancy; and scaring women into trying an experimental vaccine by applying a laser focus on just one virus is deceptive. It is an attempt to sell a product that will confer no benefit (i.e., no actual reduction to the overall risk of an adverse outcome during pregnancy). Instead, the valid comparison is between outcomes for pregnancies that do and do not experience an infection with SARS-CoV-2, and the CDC’s own data show no cause for alarm on this front. As I’ve addressed this subject before, and am on my way to the beach - I don’t even have time to proofread! - it will have to suffice to link to my previous comment.
I haven’t had time to review all of them; but I presume that only those which used this methodology (including the one I did review) would have produced any “cause” for alarm.