Articles related to VACCINES/IMMUNIZATION

BMJ’s investigation findings raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight concerning Pfizer’s vaccine trial. A regional director told the BMJ that Pfizer falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in the pivotal phase III trial.

Evidence is mounting that much of the concern about waning immunity to COVID-19 is overstated and that vaccines provide high levels of protection against the respiratory disease and its variants over the long-term. Immunologically, plasmablast and B-cell response after mRNA vaccination is long-lived and memory B cells increase over at least six months. And in the field, the evidence is that vaccination is doing what it is intended to do: reduce the severity and spread of the infection.

This BMJ editorial examines whether approaches better equipped to compare rates of menstrual variation in vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations are needed, based on the reports of changes to periods and unexpected vaginal bleeding after vaccination. The US has taken the first step, earmarking $1.67M from the National Institutes of Health to encourage research.

Source: MedPage Today (from JAMA Oncology)Design: Analysis was from a previously published prospective cohort study that evaluated the rates of antibody response to Pfizer’s vaccine in 102 cancer patients who were on active treatment compared with 78 healthy controls. A fourth of the patients were undergoing treatment for lung cancer, 26% for gastrointestinal cancers, and 18% for breast cancer.Results: After four months from the second dose of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, 87% of cancer patients who had been on active treatment continued to produce COVID-19 antibodies.

Nearly a third of all Americans (100 million people) have now been infected with COVID-19. And scientific evidence shows that natural immunity from infection is durable and long-lasting. So why is it then that inoculations continue to be pushed for all people regardless of whether they have contracted COVID-19 or not? And why isn’t natural immunity factored into medical decisions about how we prioritize vaccinations?

The two new studies in the Morbidity and Mortality Report compared data from July and August 2021 – when delta was dominant to the earlier period in the pandemic – and found that about 1.4 of every 100,000 children/adolescents were hospitalized for COVID-19, nearly 5x the weekly rate in late June and close to the peak in January. Also, the weekly rate of 1.9 per 100,000 children ages 0-4 years in mid-August was nearly 10 times that of late June.