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ast month the U.S. CDC and FDA released a joint statement stating that they had identified a statistical signal of increased strokes after vaccination with Pfizer’s bivalent Covid booster vaccine in those aged 65 and over. This sounds worrying, but the FDA and CDC were quick to reassure the population that they were only being open and transparent in releasing this information, and that they were sure that in reality the vaccines were very very safe and highly effective (and so everyone older than six months of age should get their dose whenever they’re told to by their benevolent Government).
However, I was a bit puzzled by their joint statement – while it was eager with its reassurances, it didn’t actually include any data to support this reassurance. All we were told is that in the three weeks after vaccination there was a higher risk of stroke compared with the four to six week period after vaccination in those aged 65 or older. But there was no quantitative data on this relative risk, no information at all on the risk after this six week period and no statement on whether they’d actually even investigated stroke risk in other age groups.
Given this lack of data I thought I’d head over to the data on NHS hospital consultant activity to see whether that would offer some insight into the incidence of stroke in the U.K. over the last few years.
Hmm. The workload of stroke specialists appears to have suddenly increased in the U.K. by a very large factor just at the point where the vaccines were being rolled out in large numbers. As I recall the Government was very pleased with the speed at which it managed to vaccinate such large numbers of people over such a short period of time, so if there were a significant increased risk of stroke then an extremely rapid rise in stroke incidence would be exactly what you’d expect. Of course, this might just be coincidence, despite this strong temporal association with the vaccines…
