Nine Newspapers misrepresents deadly drug Vaxzevria as safer than it really was

They're at it again, this time for the AstraZeneca gene-vaccine

Nine Newspapers has been caught spreading medical misinformation again, this time about the deadly AstraZeneca gene-vaccine for covid.

One month after telling readers that pertussis vaccines can stop people giving whooping cough to babies (they can’t), the Sydney Morning Herald misrepresented the killer drug Vaxzevria as much safer than it really was.

Forest of the Fallen memorial to the dead and injured gene-vaccine victims at the site of the mRNA factory, Macquarie University, Sydney, August 2024. Pic: Bevege

The story, headlined Why eight Australians died after having AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine, claimed researchers had “cracked the mystery of lethal blood clots” so that new jabs could avoid the problem of vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT), which killed “in total, eight Australians”.

Vaxzevria was responsible for 492 death and 48,512 injury reports to Australia’s Database of Adverse Event Notifications (DAEN), despite being on the market for just two years according to search results in February.

Reports are preliminary and do not necessarily mean the drug is the cause of the reported death or injury, however this is outweighed by the vast under-reporting of the voluntary register.

The Herald led its readers to believe the Vaxzevria toll was limited to 8 fatalities, and those people died because they had a rare genetic variation that left them vulnerable.

This is false.

The DAEN records 7 deaths and 100 cases for “immune thrombocytopenia”, which is the official MeDRA term used to catalogue VITT.

But 43 deaths and 686 cases were reported for the related term “thrombocytopenia”.

There were 11 deaths and 218 injuries for “thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome”.

The TGA dismissed two of these death reports as one was more than 30 days post injection and the other had underlying conditions.

However “blood clots” means much more than VITT, it covers dozens of categories for which injuries and deaths were reported to DAEN.

“Blood clots” also means thrombosis, thromboembolism, pulmonary embolism, venous thrombosis, deep-vein thrombosis, cerebral venous sinous thrombosis, cerebral artery thrombosis and many more.

There were more than a hundred AstraZeneca deaths from blood clots reported to DAEN.

There were 56 deaths for pulmonary embolism, 47 for heart attacks (often caused by blood clots), 41 for Fibrin D dimer increased (micro-clots in the blood), 38 from “cerebrovascular accident” (which means stroke, commonly caused by blood clots).

A further 13 deaths were listed for “thrombosis” (blood clots) from 319 cases.

A further 29 deaths were reported for deep vein thrombosis (blood clots) from 1128 cases.

A further 13 deaths for “myocardial ischaemia” (when the heart loses oxygen because of blood clots), from 21 cases.

A further 83 of these deaths were reported as “adverse event following immunisation”, so any number of these could have been caused by blood clots.

In addition to this are the unknown (and now unknowable) number of people who died of blood clots caused by this injection but whose deaths were simply accepted as “heart attack” or “stroke” or “thrombotic event” without ever being reported to the TGA as a suspected gene-vaccine death.

The only way to show the true scale of the problem is to request the all-cause-mortality figures for 2021, 2022 and 2023 stratified by age and AstraZeneca gene-vaccine status.

The Department could organise this but they have refused to do so for four years so far.

Vaxzevria was provisionally approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) on 15 February 2021, and made unavailable on 21 March, 2023. Its approval continued on paper until AstraZeneca “voluntarily” withdrew it on 23 April 2024, allowing the company to save face.

The Herald used the heartbreaking tragedy of the Vaxzevria death of Katie Lees to introduce its story, painting the product that killed her as safer than it really was.

Katie Lees, 34, had no need to take the AstraZeneca product as the median infection fatality rate for someone her age was only 0.011%, according to a team of researchers including the world’s most respected and cited epidemiologist John Ioannidis from Stanford University.

The beautiful and talented Lees died because she was encouraged to take a medical product that she did not need, to achieve a government target that was not useful since the covid gene-vaccines could not stop transmission - all of which was known to science in 2021.

This vibrant young woman, full of life, died because a medical product was misrepresented as safer than it was, and necessary when it wasn’t, an error repeated again by the Herald here.

If you want to make a complaint for breach of Australian Press Council principles, complaints may be made here.

Large-scale under-reporting broke the drug safety system

Contrary to public perceptions, the TGA has not ruled out a causal link between a large number of reported deaths and the covid gene-vaccines.

The TGA did not refer all covid gene-vaccine deaths to the Vaccine Safety Investigation Group for discussion, as Rebekah Barnett reported on Substack, archived here.

“Contrary to widespread belief, the documents show that the TGA does not thoroughly investigate every death reported to the DAEN. This is even the case where people died on the same day that they received their Covid shot,” Barnett reported.

The system is voluntary and vastly under-reported. If you don’t tell them, they don’t know.

Prior to 2021 there were less than 1000 reports made by practitioners per year, as reported in pharmaceutical journal Australian Prescriber.

During the covid panic the reporting system broke due to the exaggerated fear of the virus, propaganda promoting the products as safe, and the threatening of doctors by licensing boards.

Autopsies were never encouraged to establish causality for the covid gene-vaccines.

Only a tiny fraction of problems were ever reported due to a lack of public awareness – which means there are likely to be more, not less, deaths and injuries than the DAEN shows.

The Herald ignored an emailed request for comment.

The TGA ignored emailed requests to provide the exact number of Vaxzevria blood clot deaths reported in total, the number of Vaxzevria deaths reported to VSIG and how many investigations had been completed.

Selectively answering questions from approved and friendly outlets only is a strategy used to cultivate compliant reporting, and is just one strategy among many that governments and their departments use to marginalise adversarial and independent media.

All my Substacks are written free in the public interest. Please do share this story.

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Edits/corrections: 2 March - added link to prior story on SMH misrepresenting whooping cough vaccines. Changed par 2 to replace “The Age” with “One month after telling readers” since it was both The Age and SMH that ran that pertussis story.