Josh Guetzkow Profile picture
Apr 8, 2022 17 tweets 8 min read Read on X
Video of my comments to the FDA's VRBPAC meeting on more boosters, in 2 parts:
Pt 1: You need to ask yourselves: why did only half of all eligible Israelis go back for the 2nd booster? Could it be due to adverse events experienced by them or people they know from previous doses?
What you didn’t hear about today from the Ministry of Health is a survey they conducted last fall of about 2,000 Israelis 3 to 4 weeks after they received the first booster. The survey asked about adverse events they had experienced.
The adverse event rate per million doses calculated from the survey shows that people experienced unacceptably high rates of severe adverse events like bell’s palsy, hospitalization, and seizures.
In September, representatives from the ministry of health told this committee that there were only 19 serious adverse events reported to their safety monitoring system following the booster dose. And today they reported 12.
But a comparison between the survey results and their monitoring system clearly shows it [the monitoring system] is totally unreliable, as it undercounts adverse events by several orders of magnitude. @IsraelMOH
The MOH survey shows that sizeable percentages of people with pre-existing conditions reported that their conditions got worse after the 1st booster.
A large majority said their adverse event was either new or worse than the previous doses.
A significant minority said their condition was still ongoing 3 to 4 weeks later at the time of the survey and that they had sought medical care.
The fact that the vast majority of events started within 1 week of the vaccination and were not spread evenly over the time period strongly suggests they were caused by the booster.
The research from Sheba hospital on the 4th dose corrects for many biases that plague all of the large N observational studies on vaccine effectiveness, including the study you heard about today.
nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…
It showed a very high rate of severe systemic reactions and all signals of benefit were below 50%, which should make it ineligible for EUA.
Notably, there was no statistically significant reduction in infections or viral load, despite a strong antibody response. Could this be due to T-cell exhaustion? The European Medicines Agency has raised this concern.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
We now know that the first doses of these mRNA injections have varied and unexpected effects on the immune system in ways we are only beginning to understand. The effect of repeated doses is uncharted territory.
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
But one troubling indicator is that the per dose reporting rate of ‘immunodeficiency syndromes’ after the 3rd dose is 16 to 21 times higher than for previous doses. These are NOT like flu vaccines.
Approving additional boosters without having solid answers to the questions on this slide would be negligent and only serve to further erode the public’s rapidly waning trust in the FDA and other public health agencies.
Why did the 4th injection offer almost no protection despite increase in antibodies?
What are long term impacts of repeated injections of mRNA and LNPs (esp. on the immune system)?
Protection wanes quickly, so how can annual boosters help?
Why do so many not return for boosters?
For more on the MOH survey, see here: jackanapes.substack.com/p/the-israeli-…

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More from @joshg99

Jul 27, 2025
Responses to some criticism of our pre-print showing higher-than-expected pregnancy losses among women vaccinated for COVID in weeks 8-13 of pregnancy: 🧵
@RetsefL @TalPatalon @TracyBethHoeg @JosephFraiman
CONFOUNDING BY CALENDAR TIMING

A concern was raised that since vaccination with dose 1 was conducted in specific calendar months (i.e., early 2021), the observed-to-expected results for vaccination with dose 1 during weeks 8-13 is driven by unobserved factors unique to the specific months of vaccination. This concern does not seem to be valid for several reasons:

1) Women who received dose 1 during the same calendar months but during weeks 14-27 showed the opposite observed-to-expected pattern.

2) Dose 3 was given in different calendar months, but the observed-to-expected results during weeks 8-13 and 14-27 show similar patterns to those of dose 1 (see figure below that shows O-E results for doses 1 and 3 in the same graph).

The figure also addresses the concern that the dose 3 observed-to-expected results are driven by a single week. Clearly the observed number of fetal losses is higher than expected, in all weeks 8-13, and so the joint significance of those weeks is not attributable to a single week.Image
CONFOUDING BY RISK FACTORS

Another concern that was raised is that women who elected to receive dose 1 during weeks 8-13 were fundamentally at high risk, because they acted ‘against’ the initial recommendation to vaccinate only in 2nd and 3rd trimester:

1) First, the COVID vaccine was recommended for all pregnant women in any trimester on Feb. 1, 2021. Of the week 8-13 dose 1 cohort, 81% vaccinated on or after that date, with an observed-to-expected difference of 3.3 fetal losses per 100 pregnancies (12.1 obs. vs 8.8 exp).

2)Second, the similar observed-to-expected patterns for dose 3 further mitigates this concern.

3)Third, based on the observed covariates, it does look like the women in the 8-13 weeks dose 1 COVID cohort are healthier than the women in the corresponding influenza vaccine cohort (See Table S7 in the paper). In particular, the expected number of fetal losses (per 100 pregnancies) is 11.2 for the influenza cohort compared to 9.2 for the dose 1 cohort.

4)One can never exclude the existence of unobserved confounding factors, but if such exist, they would have to affect selection into vaccination in weeks 8-13 and fetal losses that occurred many weeks later (after gestational weeks 20 and 25).

5) It can’t be explained by COVID infections later in pregnancy during the summer 2021 Delta infection wave, since we’ve already shown that of the women who vaccinated with dose 1 in weeks 8-13, only 87 were subsequently infected with SARS-CoV-2 during pregnancy, with only 3 fetal losses among them.
Read 6 tweets
Jun 20, 2025
Our new pre-print on COVID-19 vaccine safety in pregnancy is out!

Women vaccinated in early pregnancy (weeks 8-13) had a higher-than-expected number of fetal losses:

Dose 1 = 3.9 more per 100 women
Dose 3 = 1.9 more per 100 women

Based on data on >200K pregnancies in Israel
🧵 Image
2/
Late pregnancy losses were a *big* part of the signal.

Among all women:

1.1% lost their pregnancy after week 24.

Compared to:

2.7% of women who received dose 1 in early weeks.

1.8% of women who received dose 3 in early weeks. Image
3/
In fact, most of the excess losses occurred later in pregnancy, including nearly half after week 24.

In Israel, abortions after week 24 are rare and must be medically justified and are very rare.

This strongly suggests biological, not behavioral, mechanisms are involved.
Read 13 tweets
Dec 21, 2023
Well, there we have it in black and white folks: Pfizer never did the study they said they would do comparing process 1 and 2 in humans subjects. They decided in Sept. 2022 that it was "no longer warranted." 🤷‍♂️
@Kevin_McKernan @P_J_Buckhaults @ChrisEd16512812
@Kevin_McKernan @P_J_Buckhaults @ChrisEd16512812
@Kevin_McKernan @P_J_Buckhaults @ChrisEd16512812
Read 4 tweets
Dec 3, 2023
Until recently, I was not aware of the extent to which Palestinians are indoctrinated into a belief system that glorifies martyrdom and the murder of Jews. Shockingly, the UN and Western donors not only condone this, they actively sponsor it. 🧵
The idea that Hamas' attack was the natural response to Israeli oppression completely absolves Hamas & the Palestinians and robs them of all agency. It assumes the culture they've developed that glorifies martyrdom and violence against Jews was inevitable. What if it isn't?
About 900K Jews were displaced from Arab countries in the 20th century, compared to 600K from Palestine. Yet Jewish refugees did not develop a culture that glorifies violent martyrdom in a Quixotic quest to return home. They built a new society instead.
Read 14 tweets
Nov 16, 2023
What?!?
In 2022 & 2023, the FDA cited significant violations at an EU facility where Pfizer's mRNA 'drug substance' is purified prior to LNP encapsulation. Violations including failure to assure compliance w/specifications & standards for endotoxin testing.
But there's more! 🧵 Image
Background: Pfizer used a new process scale up production for the commercial product (different from the one it tested). Using plasmids grown in E.coli bacteria, the new process introduced DNA & endotoxin contamination that required thorough purification.
In Oct. 2020, Rentschler Biopharma announced its contract w/Pfizer for "downstream processing to provide highly purified drug substance" where process-related "impurities will be effectively removed" at its Laupheim, Baden-Württemberg facility in Germany.
rentschler-biopharma.com/news/press-rel…
Read 14 tweets
Oct 11, 2023
Yesterday evening, my wife got a message that a BA student in her department, Bruna Veleanu, was killed at the rave in Southern Israel on Saturday. Bruna was an immigrant from Brazil, and her only family in Israel was her sister and mother. 🧵 Image
Her burial was set for later the same night, and there was concern there would not be enough people in attendance for a proper religious ceremony as required by Jewish law (aka a minyan). My wife sprang into action trying to mobilize people at the university, order flowers, etc.
As we turned off the freeway to the cemetery, we were met with a huge traffic jam from people trying to get into the cemetery. "Well," we said to ourselves, "there must be a lot of funerals now because of all the people who died." Waze said the 1 KM trip would take 30 minutes. Image
Read 8 tweets

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