Vaccines are a great business, but quite costly to develop and commercialise. That’s why pharmaceutical companies do everything they can to get authorisation and then keep it for long periods of time, even if the damage caused is considerable.
Pfizer has launched a modRNA preparation against influenza and recently completed a phase III study and published the results of the study. The press release announced a brilliant success and the German mainstream media in particular indulged in euphoric articles, as TKP reported here.
The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which at least used to be renowned. It is full of flaws, as TKP explained in detail here, based on a critique by journalist Alex Berenson
Another criticism comes from the well-known Swiss infectiologist Prof. em. Dr Pietro Vernazza. The former senior physician in infectiology at the Cantonal Hospital of St. Gallen uses the authorisation study for the modRNA influenza preparation to demonstrate the lazy tricks being used. He concludes that this study is not a scientific breakthrough, but rather an example of how whole stories can be told with half data – and how a renowned scientific journal is prepared to play along.
The study design alone is highly questionable, but it is a very common trick. The comparison is not between vaccinated and unvaccinated test subjects, but between those vaccinated with the modRNA vaccine and those vaccinated with a conventional vaccine. Another popular method is to compare a vaccination group with another group that does not receive a genuine placebo with a saline solution, but the vaccine without the attenuated or killed viruses, i.e. with the active boosters, usually consisting of aluminium compounds, which are responsible for side effects such as strokes.
The biochemical mechanisms of how drug boosters cause damage such as microstroke attacks are well known, at least among scientists. I have explained this in detail here.
Adults between the ages of 18 and 65 were included. The primary endpoint was the occurrence of laboratory-confirmed influenza with symptoms. Both preparations analysed showed hardly any differences in results that were in any case of little relevance. “This ‘no worse’ is now being sold as a success – as legitimisation for a new generation of vaccines,” says Vernazza.
Vernazza’s first point is that the study comes from Pfizer itself and is therefore implausible from the outset:
1. list of authors: Scientific fig leaf
A glance at the list of authors shows that practically all of them are Pfizer employees. The first author, Fitz-Patrick from Honolulu, is an endocrinologist and appears in several Pfizer publications as a co-author without having an independent scientific career in the field of influenza or vaccine research.
This procedure is typical for industry-financed studies: The study is planned, conducted, analysed and written by the company. For scientific credibility, an external clinician is recruited as first author – a fig leaf that creates the appearance of academic independence.
But it gets worse: data that doesn’t fit is simply omitted. For example, in the authorisation study for the Covic-modRNA preparation, there were more deaths in the vaccination group than in the placebo group.
Vernazza:
2. confidential data: The over 65s
One point is particularly serious, which the NEJM does not mention at all: According to the study registration, subjects over the age of 65 were also included. However, only data from 18- to 65-year-olds appears in the publication.
This is not a minor formal shortcoming, but a scientific scandal. Because the over-65s are precisely that population,
which carries a high risk of hospitalisation,
who dies of influenza,
and for whom an effective vaccination would actually be relevant.
The fact that this data has not been published allows only one conclusion to be drawn: No convincing effect could be shown in this age group. So the results that look better are published selectively.
Vernazza then also takes up the missing comparison group:
A placebo arm is completely missing. This means that a central question remains unanswered: Do vaccinated people get influenza less often than unvaccinated people?
A large study of employees at the Cleveland Clinic(Shrestha et al, preprint) shows that this scenario is by no means theoretical in healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 65. There, the risk of contracting influenza was higher in vaccinated than in unvaccinated people.
Without a placebo, it is not possible to determine absolute efficacy. All that remains is a relative comparison of two vaccines – without knowing whether both have any relevant benefit at all.
It is therefore the same picture as with most authorisation studies for vaccines. The paediatric vaccines were also never tested against a placebo group.
In fact, however, the Pfizer study shows a totally negative result for the modRNA preparation – the vaccinated people developed flu-like symptoms more frequently than the comparison group (and probably more frequently than the unvaccinated average of the population).
Vernazza proves this:
The published safety data show a remarkable picture: With the mRNA vaccination, 30 to 50 % of those vaccinated developed systemic flu-like symptoms such as fatigue, headaches, muscle aches or chills – exactly the symptoms that the vaccination is supposed to protect against.
Systemic side effects after mRNA influenza vaccination compared to control vaccination (adapted from Fitz-Patrick et al., NEJM 2025). Shown are fatigue, headache, chills, muscle pain and fever by severity.
The fever findings are particularly striking:
5.6 % of those vaccinated developed a fever
0.8 % even high fever of ≥ 39 °C
These are not trifles, but clinically relevant side effects that can lead to at least temporary incapacity to work. On the other hand, the benefits are unclear. Due to the lack of a placebo arm, it is only possible to roughly estimate how many infections were actually prevented.
An epilogue by Professor Vernazza throws a spotlight on conventional medicine and the scientific community surrounding medicine:
A personal postscript
During my active time as chief physician, I could hardly have afforded such a text. I would have been too worried about jeopardising research proposals, collaborations or my academic reputation. Perhaps this explains why voices critical of pharmaceuticals are rare – and why you hear them more often from doctors who have left their careers behind them.
The judiciary plays along, as US Secretary of Health and Human Services Kennedy stated in the face of the fact-denying and science-denying political justice of German courts.
And, of course, politics is at the forefront, starting with the EU Commission, which directly finances the pharmaceutical industry and buys 10 doses of the mod-RNA Covid preparation. This type of “scientific business”, which produces such studies, is promoted by giving people with self-confessed serious conflicts of interest, such as Florian Krammer, an institute for “science communication”,
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