VERY URGENT: federal researchers find evidence Covid mRNA jabs cause seizures in young children
Guest Post by Alex Berenson
The safety signal appeared in a huge Food and Drug Administration database; did the Centers for Disease Control know before recommending Covid boosters for kids last month?
(NOTE: I asked the FDA for comment for this article before noon on Thursday. The agency has missed my deadline of noon Friday to respond. mRNA shots are still promoted to children, so the fact they may cause seizures is an urgent public health issue. I have decided to publish the article now, including my questions to the FDA in it. When they respond I will update.)
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Young children had a significantly elevated risk of seizures and convulsions after receiving mRNA Covid jabs, Food and Drug Administration scientists have found.
The FDA researchers quietly released the finding, which comes from an analysis of insurance claims databases, earlier this week. The FDA and Centers for Disease Control did not meet a deadline on questions if CDC knew of the finding before it advised kids to receive more mRNA Covid boosters last month.
The FDA did not quantify the risk or severity of the seizures in the paper. But the published data suggest the risk appears to be about 1 in 2,500 completed vaccinations within a week of a shot. Older kids also had increased risk, though it did not hit statistical significance.
The CDC’s push for more mRNA for young kids was already controversial, since most countries no longer make Covid boosters available to children (or most healthy adults). The seizure finding will only increase the scrutiny CDC faces.
The “signal” – as researchers call the finding of elevated seizure risk – occurred in children aged 2-4 who received the Pfizer mRNA Covid shot and 2-5 who received the Moderna jab. (The age difference comes because Pfizer and Moderna offer different regimens of shots with different age limits to young kids.)
The researchers reported 72 seizures and convulsions in children in those age ranges after the first two doses of either Pfizer of Moderna. Most seizures came along with fevers, they wrote.
They found the seizures occurred after mRNA shots from both companies, increasing the odds the finding is a real risk, not a chance artifact.
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(In the FDA’s own words: “Seizures/convulsions met the statistical threshold for a signal”)
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The data also show a trend towards more seizures in children who received the Moderna shots, which contain more mRNA than the Pfizer jabs. Epidemiologists call that a dose-response relationship, and it is also evidence the finding is real.
In addition, the risk appeared highest in the day after children received the shots and persisted for up to a week, as far as the researchers tracked it. The fact the risk was highest soonest after the shots is still more evidence that the link is real.
Young children sometimes have seizures spontaneously or while running high fevers.
But when the researchers compared the normal background number of seizures with the 72 they saw, they found a difference that was unlikely to be due to chance.
The researchers found another 40 seizures in children under age 2, and 161 more in children and teenagers 5-17, though far more older kids received shots, so the relative risk in them was was lower.
In a similar analysis released in May that did not cover the youngest kids, the researchers found an elevated seizure risk in older children and teenagers, with the risk especially notable in children 5-11. But the risk did not reach statistical significance, meaning it could have been a chance finding.
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(My questions to the FDA, asked Thursday before noon. Note that the paper also showed a signal for myo/pericarditis in teenagers, which is already known to be a risk from the mRNAs, thus the third question)
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The new analysis was published Sunday as a “preprint,” a non-peer-reviewed paper, or the Medrxiv server. It lacks certain crucial data.
Notably, the researchers did not include either the overall number of jabs or the number of completed vaccinations given to children 2-4 (or 2-5 for Moderna). They also did not include the background rates they used. So calculating either absolute or relative risk ratios with precision is impossible.
However, they did report the total number of jabs given to kids under 5, which was roughly 850,000, including about 140,000 second Moderna jabs and 100,000 third Pfizer jabs. Two Moderna jabs and three Pfizer shots are required for a complete mRNA regimen in young kids.
Thus the total number of completed vaccinations in all kids under five in the database was about 240,000. Most of those went to kids in the 2-5 range. The 72 seizures thus come off a base of 175,000 to 200,000 completed vaccinations, for a rate of 1 seizure per 2,500 vaccinations.
(Again, if and when FDA or CDC responds to my questions, I will update the article.)
This article has been archived for your research. The original version from The Burning Platform can be found here.