By Peter C Gøtzsche
It is very difficult to publish anything about the COVID-19 vaccines that goes against the official narrative, which is that these vaccines are highly effective and safe even though both claims are seriously wrong.
Among those that have claimed 100% efficacy of the vaccines are the FDA, Anthony Fauci, the Australian government, Science Magazine, Reuters, CNN, US National Public Radio, The Hill, Sky News, Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson. Fauci and President Joe Biden have both declared in interviews that people cannot get infected if they have been vaccinated, which is 100% efficacy.
The effectiveness of the vaccines is nowhere near 100%. The virus mutates, and effectiveness in practice is much closer to 50% than to 100%, and even a rate as low as 24% after two vaccine doses has been reported. This means the COVID-19 vaccines are poor vaccines.
The claims about safety are also highly misleading. My co-worker Maryanne Demasi and I have so far been unable to publish our systematic review of the serious harms of the COVID-19 vaccines, apart from in predatory journals that have offered rapid publication with no obstacles after they saw we had uploaded our review on a preprint server. The placebo-controlled trials Pfizer and AstraZeneca published in New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, respectively, were seriously misleading.
In the summer of 2021, I published the book “Vaccines: truth, lies and controversy.” I have now uploaded the section about the COVID-19 vaccines from this book as I believe – like reputable medical journals do – that important information about COVID-19 should be freely available.