Does the risk of having an adverse reaction increase with dosage?
Does the risk of having an adverse reaction increase with dosage?
Suffering a serious adverse reaction does (7 min read)
I had friends staying recently. Over dinner, vaccines and the world situation was the dominant topic of discussion. They have both had two doses of Moderna and both have suffered adverse events after the second dose. Naturally concerned and knowing I can push a few numbers around, they wanted my opinion on the long term. To which I replied that I, along with everyone else, including the major pharma manufacturers, regulatory bodies and governments, just don’t know.
However, having previously written about myocarditis, I had noticed that the number of adverse events increased (especially in males) after the second dose.
So is there a pattern of adverse events, much like myocarditis, that increases with the dose? To do this, I broke VAERS data into two categories:
Non-serious Adverse Events - All VAERS events not classified as a ‘Serious Adverse Event’ (see next);
Serious Adverse Events - Events requiring hospitalization, life-threatening, causing disability, resulted in an ER/ED visit, or where the patient died.
Vaccine take-up
To normalize the results, we need to find out what the vaccination status by dose is currently in the US at the same endpoint as the VAERS data being used.
To do that, there’s a useful tool on usafacts.org that shows the number of doses administered by first, second and booster shots.
Vaccinations by dose (US)
This shows that on 12-30-21 (the date one day before my data ends) there were:
Dose 1 = 244M
Dose 2 = 206M
Dose 3 = 69M
Armed with this information and the US domestic VAERS data, I can calculate a rate per million per dose for each of the Non-serious and Serious adverse events.
Non-serious Adverse Events
After tagging the data and filtering out some ‘noise’ such as unknown manufacturers, I limited the data to at most 2 doses. Although the 3rd (booster) dose has started in the US, the program was only a few weeks old at the end of 2021 and so the data are not considered significant enough to warrant inclusion compared to doses 1 and 2.
Dose 1: 348,208 records
Dose 2: 212,500 records
Dose 3: 38,242 records
After dropping dose 3 from the analysis, the total records left in the data was 560,708.
From this corpus, I then chose to use a wordcloud to visualize the initial results. I’m a big fan of these and use them on the CAVE website (Coronavirus Adverse Vaccine Events) which I run to help people assess their personal risk of vaccine side effects.
This is the wordcloud generated from a randomly sampled 25,000 records from the 458,913 Non-serious Adverse Events for dose 1 and dose 2 events. Phrases in the symptom field have had hyphens used in place of spaces to keep them together.
Wordcloud: Non-serious Adverse Events
Along with generating the wordcloud, I also generated a term frequency list from the symptoms associated with each event to find the most cited symptoms. The top 25 symptoms were then analyzed between dose 1 and dose 2 and the number of events where these symptoms were mentioned were used to calculate an event rate per million. The list was ordered according to the Change in events per million.
Summary: Non-serious Adverse Events
Each Non-serious adverse event is presented in the first column. The next two columns describe the events/million (M) for dose 1 and dose 2 using the vaccination data from usafacts.org as the denominator. The ‘Change’ column is the delta between events/M for dose 1 and 2 with red showing things have gotten worse. Finally, the last two columns show the chances of suffering each of the Non-serious Adverse Events.
For example, the #1 change is Pyrexia (high body temperature), which has had a 21% increase in instances following dose 2 (181/M) compared to dose 1 (150/M). The chances of suffering from pyrexia following dose 2 was 1:5,539.
Serious adverse events
Next, I analyzed the 101,795 serious events. Interestingly, this made up 18% of all records in the corpus. That’s already a pretty serious statistic, almost 18% of all VAERS events are in some way classified as serious!
This is the wordcloud generated from a randomly sampled 25,000 records from the 107,082 events. Again, symptom phrases have hyphens in place of spaces.
Wordcloud: Serious Adverse Events
Some unpleasant terms are now beginning to appear as we would expect. But unlike the Non-serious Adverse Events where only 2/25 events showed an increase in events/M between dose 2 and dose 1, the number of Serious Adverse Events that increased was almost half as shown below.
Summary: Serious Adverse Events
This shows that while the occurrence Non-serious Adverse Events reduces for the second dose, the number of Serious Adverse Events increases for the second dose.
In particular, the death rate has increased by 33%. Also, Serious Adverse Events requiring CT or ECG scans have also increased (up 24% and 17%).
As a footnote, I have not applied any Underreporting Factor (URF) to the analysis. For those interested, please see Steve Kirsch’s excellent analysis on this.
UPDATE: Whilst researching this article the UK recently announced the fourth booster shots for over 75s.