Pfizerleaks: Global and local (body-internal) distribution of COVID-19 vaccine harm

Post-marketing insights from the Australian freedom-of-information disclosure log regarding adverse event numbers by country and by system organ class

A few days before Christmas 2022, news broke from Australia that “Dr Kerryn Phelps reveals ‘devastating’ Covid vaccine injury, says doctors have been ‘censored’”. The subtitle of the news.com.au article read: “Dr Kerryn Phelps has broken her silence about a ‘devastating’ Covid vaccine injury, slamming regulators for ‘censoring’ public discussion with ‘threats’ to doctors.” It looks like Dr. Phelps is quite the VIP in Australian medical and political circles, including the fact that she was “the first woman to be elected president of the Australian Medical Association” and thus supposed to be part of the captured professional class.

I like to run news organizations that I don’t personally know through the Media Bias / Fact Check site. It’s an easy predictor in terms of whether anyone who is not already on board with a skeptical perspective has any chance of being convinced by a news platform. It turns out that news.com.au merely has a “right-center bias” and is considered “mostly factual” in its reporting, thus it is nowhere near the right-extreme or “tin-foil hat conspiracy and quackery level pseudoscience” ratings of papers such as The (Daily) Expose, which has published excellent, if somewhat exaggerated, COVID-19 stories. The fact that news.com.au puts words like “censoring”, “devastating” [vaccine injury], and “threats” [to doctors] in the story title and subtitle in quotation marks suggests indeed that they are distancing themselves from the subversive claims made within. While I am not a fan of the MBFC site, it is a good barometer for the acceptability of a source for our narrative-believing family and friends.

Based on the above article, Dr. Phelps has suffered cardio-vascular complications from her second dose of the Pfizer injection in July 2021, while her spouse had a severe neurological reaction to Pfizer’s dose 1. Both injuries were reported to the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) with no followup from the agency. This leads me to the main topic of this post: I want to share more information from the TGA freedom-of-information disclosure log, which I discovered in November and already perused for a long-winded blog post on “What regulators knew about the mRNA shots and journalists ought to have investigated”.

The document of interest for today’s post is titled “APPENDIX 2.1 Cumulative Number of Case Reports … from Post-Marketing Data Sources” (FOI 3727) and was released on 22 July 2022. Although a two-months time span from mid-February to mid-April 2022 is indicated in the file header, the “cumulative number” and the sheer magnitude of adverse-event reports suggest that the data cover the entire global vaccine rollout from December 2020 to April 2022. I extracted the numbers from the paginated tables in the PDF file using a free PDF-to-Excel converter and created the following summary graphs.

The cumulative number of reports includes over 4.5 million adverse events for over 1.3 million “cases” (= injured individuals). Over two-thirds of these are women, just a quarter are men, with the balance having no data on sex. I have seen the stark imbalance between female and male vaccine victims in the better-known post-marketing report from the PHMPT document release, when I examined “Adverse events and biodistribution of the mRNA injection” in March 2022. Also shown above is the age distribution of adverse event reporters. The largest number of close to half a million vaccine-injured are in the age group from 31 to 50 years, followed by about a quarter million in each of the cohorts from 18-30 years and 51 to 64 years. Children of all age groups combined account for about 50,000 cases, while over 100,000 are between 65 and 74 years old, and close to 90,000 are 75 years or above. To see the vast majority of adverse events reported by working-age people is unexpected and greatly concerning, in my opinion.

Update (12 Jan 2023): A reader noted a couple of challenges with interpreting the age distribution. The age groups that are given in the report are indeed unequal in length, thus we can only make general comments, as above, regarding the total burden among all children or all working-age individuals. In addition, making the age groups comparable by normalizing the counts by the number of doses administered in each group is not possible unless we could obtain those benchmark vaccination data. Nevertheless, the raw counts of adverse event reports are highly relevant as safety signals for further examination, in the course of which public health epidemiologists would attempt to determine more specific risk rates.

In geography, we like to examine the spatial distribution of phenomena and in most analyses, we consider scale, potentially ranging from global to local. The TGA adverse-event data include information on the “country where event occurred”, which I mapped above in two different ways. The proportional circles represent the total number of injured people per country, which ranges from 1 for a number of countries to a staggering 181,882 for the United Kingdom. Most of the high-count countries are (in) North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, with additional noticeable counts in Latin America, the Middle East, South Africa, and South-East Asia.

The layer underneath the proportional circles represents adverse events normalized per 100,000 population. I have now (12 Jan 2023) updated the population data, which were from 2005 and contained some errors, resulting in a few exaggerated rates >1% in the original version of the post and map. The colour gradient is classified in an exponential manner with few very high (dark brown) countries with between 0.1% and 0.8% (updated!) of the total population having reported a COVID-19 vaccine injury (incl. Australia, Japan, and 19 European countries), followed by two lighter-red classes representing between 10 and 100 reports per 100,000 population and then between 1 and 10 per 100,000. Generally speaking, these two mid-rate classes capture the rest of the high-count countries from the other layer.

A total of 167 countries have reported adverse events according to the TGA disclosure. However, only 111 could be linked to one of the 177 spatial units included in the updated Natural Earth boundary dataset. The top 21 countries with over 10,000 cases each are named in the above barchart, along with the remaining data grouped by 4- to 1-digit counts. Noticeably absent from the dataset are populous countries such as China, India, and Russia, which is easily explained by their low vaccination rates and/or use of domestic injectables rather than the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA product that is being reported on here. With respect to the latter, we’ll now turn to a very different, sub-geographical scale by looking at the “local” distribution of adverse events within the human body.

The above chart shows the 63 specific diagnoses that were reported more than 13,500 times (1% of total case count). A variety of possibly mild conditions reported over 100,000 times include headaches, fatigue, fever, pain at the injection site, as well as muscle pain, general malaise, chills, nausea and joint pain. Of course, COVID-19 itself can follow “immunization” since these are not sterilizing vaccines. As for conditions that start to sound more serious to the medical layperson writing this post, loss of muscle strength (asthenia) and shortness of breath (dyspnoea) hit the 50,000 mark and are followed, among others, by pins-and-needles sensation (paraesthesia) and numbness (hypoaesthesia); chest pain, heart palpitations, and tachycardia; and heavy menstrual bleeding and menstrual “disorder” — all well above 20,000 reports. These rather serious diagnoses were selected and combined into groups concerning the nervous system, the heart, and female reproduction. In the dataset itself, a grouping by system organ classes (SOC) is provided, which looks as follows.

The SOC classification shown in this chart includes all 4.5 million reported adverse events. While “general disorders and administration site conditions”, with 1.5 million reports, sounds benign, this class does include: 2,894 deaths, 679 separately coded sudden deaths, 107 sudden cardiac deaths, 76 cardiac deaths, 47 brain deaths, and 32 drownings (hm?), as well as potentially serious injuries such as chest pain, influenza-like illness, (re-)infection (coded in a variety of different ways), “multiple organ dysfunction syndrome”, organ failure, and a number of generic classes such as “adverse event” and “adverse reaction”.

The general disorders are followed in frequency by classes of conditions affecting the nervous system (~650,000 reports); muscles, skeleton, and connective tissues (~500,000); gastro-intestinal system (~300,000); and the skin (>200,000). Respiratory, reproductive, cardiac, blood-related and vascular disorders, which would include some of the better-known mRNA side effects such as myocarditis, follow among the next ten classes.

As other critics have done in the last two years, Dr. John Campbell just recently reviewed a couple examples of historic vaccine withdrawals based on serious adverse event rates in the order of 1 in 100,000 to 1-2 in 10,000. Meanwhile, the mRNA shots continue to be pushed by manufacturers, MDs, public health officials, mainstream journalists, and politicians despite the concerning global A/E numbers known to regulators such as the Australian TGA. The “local” distribution within the vaccine-injured individuals’ bodies is also quite ubiquitous, affecting most organ groups to some degree. Readers with deeper medical knowledge can perhaps make sense of the seemingly higher and lower concentrations between some of these systems.