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Soon after the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in 2020, top scientific journals published studies declaring the vaccines to be safe and effective — even amid mounting evidence of serious health concerns that eventually led vaccine manufacturers to add warning labels and pull products off the market.
In a new preprint study, scientists from Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and the Brownstone Institute reanalyzed data from those studies. Their analysis found clear health risks linked to the Pfizer and AstraZeneca shots, suggesting the studies “appear biased by design.”
CHD Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski, an author of the preprint, criticized the highly credentialed researchers involved in one of the earlier studies.
“The bedrock, the foundation, the cornerstones, and the pinnacle of the scientific establishment” published an analysis of 46 million adults in England only “to proclaim ‘cardiovascular safety’ where, in fact, there is a veritable cardiovascular catastrophe,” he said.
For their preprint, Jablonowski and his co-researchers performed a safety analysis of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines using information from several large datasets from the U.K. — the same datasets used as the basis for numerous earlier studies, published in major journals, that concluded the vaccines were safe.
The new analysis confirmed that a significant risk for myocarditis and pericarditis associated with the Pfizer vaccines was evident in those earlier studies. Yet the studies’ results explicitly promoted the “cardiovascular safety” of the shots. The Moderna vaccines were also linked to heart risks.
CHD and Brownstone researchers also found that the risks for cardiovascular disease and death from the AstraZeneca vaccine were significantly higher than those of the Pfizer vaccine.
The AstraZeneca vaccine was a non-mRNA vaccine. It was never authorized or approved in the U.S., but was widely distributed in the U.K. during the early phase of the vaccine rollout. Like other vaccines, the AstraZeneca shot was advertised as safe and effective.
In 2024, AstraZeneca admitted in court documents that its shot could cause deadly blood clotting known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome — also referred to as vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia. The Johnson & Johnson shot was also linked to the condition.
Months later, AstraZeneca withdrew its vaccine from the market, though it denied the move was linked to the drug’s serious health risks.
At this time, major studies were published — including a highly cited 2024 study in Nature Communications — that promoted the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine and other COVID-19 shots.
According to the new preprint study, these earlier studies failed to identify risks associated with the vaccines because they neglected to compare the relative safety between the different vaccine types.
When the trio of scientists reanalyzed the data and compared the vaccine types, they identified multiple safety signals that indicated links between the vaccines and adverse events.
These results, which contradicted the safety claims in the earlier studies, would have been evident if the original authors had compared the various vaccines, the scientists said.
“The primary studies reached false conclusions that were avoidable by making comparisons of the different products, raising concerns about investigational bias,” they concluded.
Safety results ‘fall apart’ if vaccines are examined against each other
The authors of the original studies had access to large datasets from the U.K. government. Scientists Jablonowski, Dr. Clayton J. Baker and Brian Hooker, Ph.D., requested access to the data but received no response.
Instead, they analyzed the data published in the papers. They focused their analysis on five major studies:
- The 2024 Nature Communications study, which examined the cardiovascular safety of different COVID-19 vaccination doses among 46 million adults in England.
- A 2022 study published in PLOS Medicine, which used the same data to investigate blood clotting that led to hospitalization.
- A 2022 study published in The BMJ, which estimated waning vaccine effectiveness.
- A 2023 study published in The Lancet, which evaluated the relative effectiveness of different vaccine doses.
- A 2023 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which estimated vaccine effectiveness overall.
They assessed the relative safety or hazard of the different vaccines found in each study’s data.
Jablonowski and his colleagues discovered “extreme and veritable hazards” associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine at higher rates than the Pfizer vaccine.
AstraZeneca showed hazards for cardiovascular disease and death. Pfizer showed hazards for myocarditis and pericarditis.
The scientists found that, relative to people who got the Pfizer shot, people who received the AstraZeneca vaccine had:
- A 19% greater chance of a heart attack.
- A 24% greater chance of an ischemic stroke, which is a blood clot in the brain that causes a stroke.
- A 39% greater chance of deep vein thrombosis.
- A 29% greater chance of pulmonary embolism.
- A 265% greater chance of intracranial venous thrombosis, which is another type of brain blood clot.
- A 180% greater chance of thrombocytopenia, which leads to low platelet counts.
- A 49% greater chance of bleeding or blood vessels bursting in the brain.
Although the five earlier papers used largely the same datasets and sometimes included the same authors, the Nature Communications paper didn’t list mortality as a hazard, while the PLOS Medicine paper did, the scientists said.
Mortality is “the easiest number to count,” so there is no justification for failing to include it, Jablonowski told The Defender.
“Although the Nature Communications article chose not to inspect mortality, four previous articles (with overlapping authors) showed a consistently higher mortality rate for Oxford-AstraZeneca than for Pfizer-BioNTech,” he said.
Including that information could have saved lives, Jablonowski and his colleagues stated.
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Instead, the authors of the Nature Communications article said their results offered “reassurance regarding the cardiovascular safety of COVID-19 vaccines.”
Jablonowski told CHD.TV Program Director Polly Tommey, in an interview on “Good Morning CHD,” that this offer of “reassurance” was particularly concerning because the influential paper — which had been read more than 160,000 times — was published by some of the world’s top researchers from Oxford.
The AstraZeneca vaccine was developed through a partnership between AstraZeneca and Oxford University.
The Oxford researchers compared data from vaccinated and unvaccinated people and concluded in the Nature Communications paper that the vaccinated had better health outcomes.
“These findings support the wide uptake of future COVID-19 vaccination programs,” they wrote.
Jablonowski said the findings “fall apart when you ask a very simple and obvious question, ‘How do these vaccines compare to each other?’”
Part of the problem with the study stems from how the researchers adjusted their data, Jablonowski said. This refers to how analysts modify their findings to account for confounding variables like age, sex, health history and other factors that could influence outcomes.
The adjustment methods used by the Oxford researchers made it appear that the vaccinated were healthier than the unvaccinated.
Jablonowski said:
“We are left with two inevitable conclusions: the Oxford-AstraZeneca ChAdOx1 vaccine was devastating to the population of England, and the highest echelons of scientific institutions would have us believe otherwise.
“The authors fully adjusted individuals and their diagnoses to show the vaccinated were healthier than the unvaccinated, if you believe their adjustments. When we reanalyze (because they didn’t do it) to see how two vaccines compare, 9 of the 13 conditions probed were statistically significantly worse for Oxford-AstraZeneca than Pfizer-BioNTech. The only condition mRNA vaccines showed relative harm was for myocarditis, a well-established adverse reaction.”
Jablonowski and his colleagues concluded that the Nature Communications study was “biased by design” to support the findings of “cardiovascular safety,” while the data used did not support that finding.
They wrote:
“As authorities in the United States and elsewhere call for reform in medical research away from tendentious and willfully misleading study design and execution, [Nature Communications] will also serve as a key example of the fatal flaws inherent in current medical research methods.”
Watch Karl Jablonowski’s interview on CHD.TV:
