Study on Long-Covid funded by Pfizer
Brought to you by Pfizer!
Recently, medRxiv published a pre-print of a study which is a literature review of existing studies on Long Covid / Post Covid Conditions (PCC). This review considers 97 studies and picked 56 of those for their “low risk of bias” and concludes that COVID-19 vaccines received prior to SARS-CoV-2 infection offers protection from Long Covid.
What a noble act to weed out biased studies and only pick those that have a “low risk of bias”, right?
The ironic thing is that the study itself was funded by Pfizer and was authored by Pfizer employees who may hold stocks and stock options in Pfizer. So what kind of bias were they looking for? Those that were biased against their paymasters?
There are numerous flaws and unanswered questions regarding the study. One of these is that the study is based on the false premise that the vaccines “prevent both symptomatic infection and the development of severe COVID-19 related outcomes”. What an oxymoron that phrase is! The only relationship between the vaccine and the diagnosis they considered was one that supported their predetermined conclusion. Is there any surprise?
Many people got a diagnosis of “COVID-19” based on the highly erroneous PCR test, lateral flow test or self-reporting, for the symptoms that they suffered following the vaccine. Many people did develop some sort of respiratory illness post-vaccine and it was diagnosed as COVID-19. Any symptom or symptom-complex that they developed subsequently was labelled as long-covid. None of these were considered by this study. The issue of Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) also was not considered.
This study prides itself as a “Systematic Literature Review”, but it does not take any of the above into consideration. The study fails to even consider if “long covid” was in fact “long vax”. It starts off with a false premise that the vaccine prevents (serious) illness and goes about finding evidence to prove that false premise.
Honest researchers and academics do not start out with a false premise. The purpose of science, academia and research is to seek the truth, even if it is bitter and uncomfortable. It is not for finding evidence to bolster a presupposed conclusion.
As for the Pfizer funding, yes, the authors declared this, but it is these kinds of studies that muddy the waters and get carried into further studies through cross-referencing that lend credibility to the false assumption.
Therefore, any study that later refers to this paper should be viewed with great suspicion.
Thank you for reading. If this or any of my previous work was useful to you, kindly consider supporting my work by buying me some coffees. Many thanks!
— The Solitary Reaper