“BC Centre for Disease Control Caught Lying and Withholding Important Public Health Data”

Update on June 14, 2024: Many people requested a copy of the report described in this article. You can access it at this link.

This breaking news needs to be shared far and wide.

It is another narrative-crusher.

Placing the Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines into a Readily Understandable Context

When it comes to evaluating the safety of a vaccine, isolated numbers taken from a passive adverse event monitoring system are difficult to interpret because they lack an appropriate context. Among other issues, passive safety monitoring systems that rely on voluntary submission of reports substantially underestimate the true number of adverse events that occur following receipt of a vaccine. So, they yield artificially low numbers. Therefore, I have long advocated for placing the safety data for COVID-19 vaccines into a readily understandable context. Specifically, I have argued in favour of conducting head-to-head comparisons of adverse events following immunization (AEFIs) for COVID-19 vaccines with another ‘popular’ vaccine. The flu vaccine would be an ideal comparator because there are robust, long-term data sets available for this, it is an optional vaccine, and people have decades of familiarity with both the vaccine and the disease it targets.

People have a lot of experience making their own risk-benefit assessments in the context of influenza. Further, the peer-reviewed scientific literature has made it clear that for the vast majority of people outside of the high risk demographics (which are the frail elderly and those with multiple chronic illnesses), COVID-19 was, on average, of similar risk as the flu. For children, COVID-19 represented less of a risk than the flu. So, letting people know how the safety of COVID-19 vaccines compared to flu vaccines would have been extremely helpful for people to properly assess their personal risk from COVID-19 versus the COVID-19 shots. However, finding publicly available data sets amenable to an accurate direct comparison of the safety of these two types of vaccines has proven to be a challenge.

So, I was thrilled when I was granted an opportunity to review a report earlier today that was obtained by a lawyer in British Columbia, Canada, following a freedom of information request. It is a 1,315-page report documenting information shared among staff of British Columbia’s Centre for Disease Control and Dr. Bonnie Henry, who is the province’s Chief Medical Officer of Health. These experts of public health pulled data about AEFIs for both COVID-19 vaccines and flu vaccines from the same safety data base. One could not ask for a better-controlled public health data set. These experts used these comparative data for months to help them place the information about COVID-19 shots into a readily understandable context prior to releasing information to the public. But, the data and how they were handled and hidden in the public release are downright shocking.

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