A few days ago Derek Lowe** over at In the Pipeline, had a short post about the dangers of apparent side effects being wrongly attributed to the Covid-19 vaccine(s) – ie. false side effects.

We’re talking about treating very, very large populations, which means that you’re going to see the usual run of mortality and morbidity that you see across large samples. Specifically, if you take 10 million people and just wave your hand back and forth over their upper arms, in the next two months you would expect to see about 4,000 heart attacks. About 4,000 strokes. Over 9,000 new diagnoses of cancer. And about 14,000 of that ten million will die, out of usual all-causes mortality. No one would notice. That’s how many people die and get sick anyway.

But if you took those ten million people and gave them a new vaccine instead, there’s a real danger that those heart attacks, cancer diagnoses, and deaths will be attributed to the vaccine. I mean, if you reach a large enough population, you are literally going to have cases where someone gets the vaccine and drops dead the next day (just as they would have if they *didn’t* get the vaccine).

We need to remain alert for this, and ensure that others understand this. Because people get sick and die constantly. As Lowe goes on to say:

The key will be whether they are getting sick or dying at a noticeably higher rate once they have been vaccinated. No such safety signals have appeared [during] the first [vaccine trails] … we should be seeing the exact opposite effects on mortality and morbidity as more and more people get vaccinated …
I certainly think mass vaccination is the most powerful method we have to knock that back down to normal. That’s going to be harder to do, though, if we get screaming headlines about people falling over due to heart attacks after getting their vaccine shots. Be braced.

Yes, we need to be alert and realistic, but not ignore possible side effects. Remember that in the UK possible adverse reactions to any pharmaceutical can be reported by patients as well as clinicians through the Yellow Card Scheme.

** Derek Lowe gained a PhD in organic chemistry from Duke University. Since 1989 he’s worked for several major pharmaceutical companies on drug discovery projects against schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases.