CDC Data: Moderna Causes 42% MORE Miscarriages Compared to Pfizer
Is there a DOSE-RESPONSE Relationship?
[I am in a hospital ER right now with a broken foot. Please forgive me if this post is more incoherent than usual. The wait is taking a while, so I decided to try to finish my post about this]
Summary
This article will show that CDC’s own statistics prove beyond statistical doubt that the higher dose Moderna vaccine causes 42% MORE miscarriages, compared to the Pfizer vaccine, casting doubt on CDC’s claim that both are “safe for pregnancy”.
ACIP Hearing Presentation
A recent CDC expert committee (ACIP) hearing regarding approving Covid vaccines for childhood vaccine programs, was much discussed online.
Buried in the documents submitted for the hearing, is a curious PowerPoint presentation (archive link) that was analyzing the effect of vaccination on pregnancy outcomes such as miscarriages and stillbirths, and more.
Its purpose, was, of course, to show that Covid vaccines are safe for pregnant women. It uses certain questionable methods of comparison — comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated women — that I will discuss later in this post referring to arkmedic.
However, Slide 32 compares miscarriage rates of women who were in perfectly identical situations (vaccinated during pregnancy), with the only difference being whether they took Pfizer (30 mcg) or Moderna (higher dose 100 mcg, 50 mcg for booster) vaccine.
This is a true apples-to-apples, vaccinated-to-vaccinated women comparison. (you can think of them as “internal controls”) Those women, fairly randomly based on personal preferences, chose between Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The samples were very large: 12,751 women took Pfizer and 8,365 women took Moderna.
The outcome here is “miscarriage”, that is termination of pregnancy before 20 weeks gestation. So everything is very simple. 422 Pfizered women had a miscarriage, whereas 395 Moderna women had a miscarriage.
Here’s the summary of their miscarriages:
You can see that 3.3% of women inoculated with the Pfizer vaccine suffered a miscarriage, whereas 4.7% of women inoculated with [a higher dose of] Moderna had a miscarriage. (the denominator includes ALL women who took the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine regardless of pregnancy stage) This works out to a 42% GREATER RATE OF MISCARRIAGE in the Moderna group, compared to the Pfizer group.
Is this Meaningful?
Let’s look at this further. In statistics, this is called a “two-sample proportion comparison”. We have two samples: the Moderna group and the Pfizer group. We can assume that the groups are identically sampled from the population, except their vaccines — and outcomes — differ.
One group (Moderna) has a 42% higher rate of miscarriages than the other group (Pfizer). Is this a statistical fluke, or is this meaningful?
Statisticians use a “two-proportion Z-test” to check if the difference could be due to a random chance, or not. Skipping some statistical minutiae, the greater the size of the samples, and the higher difference in proportions (rate of miscarriage), the less likely the possibility that the between-group difference is due to random chance.
To give an example of a statistically meaningless comparison, suppose that you met 5 men and 5 women on the street. Three women out of 5 wore hats and only two men out of 5 wore hats. Could you conclude, from this tiny sample, that women are more likely to wear hats in general? Of course not, as your samples are way too small!
However, if you sampled thousands of men and women for hat-wearing, on different streets and at differing times, and found that one gender wears hats 42% more often, THEN you would be able to make meaningful conclusions!
Contrary to the above example of 5 men and women, samples of Moderna and Pfizer women are HUGE — in the THOUSANDS — and so are the numbers of miscarriages. Is the difference between these groups meaningful?
We can plug the numbers into the Statology Two-Proportion Z-Test calculator:
The calculator tells us (P-value of near zero) that these samples ARE different, five standard deviations away from each other, and the difference has tremendous statistical significance. In other words, this is not a chance difference, but a fundamentally important one.
In response to Brian Mowrey’s comment: You may ask, why is the rate of miscarriage so low in this slide? The reason is that many women in the sample were PAST 20 weeks gestation — and the slide does not provide the number of women who were vaccinated under 20 weeks gestation. Also, the rate of miscarriages drops dramatically after 6 weeks of gestation. They use “all pregnant women” as the denominator.
Another indication that the early-pregnancy vaccine mix was the same as the overall mix, is the “ectopic pregnancy” line (ectopic pregnancy outside of the uterus is definitely NOT related to vaccines taken after the first couple of weeks of pregnancy) shows the same proportion of ectopic pregnancies as the proportion of Pfizer and Moderna in the overall vaccine mix.
The above proves that the early-pregnancy vaccine mix was roughly the same as the overall vaccine mix — and the 42% higher miscarriage risk in Moderna is a valid and significant finding.
Dose-Response Relationship?
The explanation is, likely, that we are seeing a dose-response relationship! Moderna is a higher dose injection — and Moderna-injected women have more miscarriages! If that is the case — and we’d need to confirm it more — this is all proof we need to know that Covid vaccines affect miscarriages.
Questions
If Covid vaccines are safe for pregnancy and do NOT affect miscarriages, how come the rate of miscarriage for Moderna is 42% higher than the same rate for Pfizer, with the difference having extreme statistical significance?
How come nobody at the CDC asked this question?
How come our media is silent on this?
“Safe for Pregnancy” Debunked
Due to my broken foot, mild pain, and sitting hungry in the ER, I cannot write long missives, but fortunately, the infamous Arkmedic explains very well how Shimabukuro’s and the CDC’s assurances of vaccines being “safe for pregnancy” are intentionally based on false calculations.
This article is a year old, but aged very well:
UPDATE Oct 21!!! Arkmedic posted a great blog post today, diving deeper into the story of miscarriages, and the slide set that I used. Very worth a read.
Anyway, I guess Moderna is 42% more unsafe for pregnancy than Pfizer. But I would not recommend either of them.
What do you think? Do you know any affected women?
And oh yeah… you’re a braver man than I. If I broke my foot, the last place I’d go right now is a hospital. I’d look up a veterinarian.
My new argument against the pro choice crowd.
“Relax…no one’s taking away your abortions, you still have the COVID vaccine for that.”