For several weeks, blogs, tweets or Facebook posts have been circulating relaying alleged revelations about the “dangerousness” of the anti-Covid vaccine, which would come from “Pfizer documents”. If these documents do exist, they have been distorted and decontextualized. We take stock of the countless publications that abound in English, Serbian, French, Finnish, Dutch or German on the Internet.
Where do these documents come from?
The American Medicines Agency, the FDA, is gradually publishing tens of thousands of pages relating to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, authorized from the end of 2020. Constrained by a court decision, it had to make some 330,000 pages public at due to “more than 12,000 pages” before January 31, 2022 then “55,000 pages every 30 days”, since March 1.
With each batch of “Pfizer documents”, many misleading claims resurface, although most have already been refuted by many scientists around the world and have been the subject of numerous verification articles. Some are built on these documents, others are simple recycling, tagged with the keyword #pfizerdocuments to ensure maximum virality.
What do they say ?
Many publications claim that these documents list countless disturbing side effects, with some Internet users evoking 8 or 9 pages of disorders and diseases.
In reality, this list is that of “adverse events of particular interest” (AESI) theoretically possible (for example because they have been noted in the case of previous vaccines) and therefore which must be the subject of a special monitoring after the product has been placed on the market. This is not the list of effects reported for this vaccine, as confirmed by several pharmacovigilance experts.
Info or intox ?
Some publications also claim that Pfizer documents reveal that during vaccine trials, more than 1,200 people – “3%” of participants – died. Yet the 3% figure cannot show the mortality rate of vaccination, which would imply having the number of deaths attributed to vaccines versus the number of doses given.
Many publications also put forward other figures, such as “1% efficiency”. There are actually two ways to calculate the effectiveness rate of a vaccine: the “relative risk reduction” (the famous 95%) and the “absolute risk reduction”, which although statistically valid, is difficult to read. since it turns for the Pfizer vaccine around 0.85 points. This is where the figure of 1% put forward by Internet users seems to come from.
Finally, the question of pregnant and breastfeeding women who should be avoided from this vaccine. In a note dated December 8, 2020 (beginning of the vaccination campaign in the United Kingdom), the British Medicines Agency (MHRA), wrote that the Pfizer vaccine “is not recommended during pregnancy” and “not should not be used during lactation”. But it is explained that these precautions are due to the lack of data at that time. And for good reason, the phase 3 trials of the vaccine excluded pregnant women, which has been known from the start.