The curious case of Dr Sharon Alroy-Preis and the claims of safety and effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine

14 Jan 2023: There is an astonishing update to this story here.

Summary:

• The world relied heavily on a major Israeli study in the Lancet which confirmed Pfizer vaccine efficiency, but the lead author failed to declare her conflict of interest in which she signed a contract not to release information detrimental to Pfizer's product without their permission.

• Israel could not have honestly confirmed vaccine safety at that time since they had no functioning safety system.

• The Lancet did not publish our letter highlighting flaws in the study simply because the lead author did not respond to it.

In May 2021 The Lancet (supposedly the most prestigious medical journal in the world) published an article describing the largest observational study (covering most of the population of Israel) into the effectiveness of the Pfizer covid vaccine.

Its claim of 95% effectiveness – which happened to be exactly the same figure claimed by Pfizer in its original Phase 3 randomised controlled trial – was widely used as the ultimate confirmation of how incredibly effective the vaccine was (the study did not consider safety at all, but more on that below). But the study was flawed in many ways and on 17 May 2021 we submitted a rapid response (just 250 words) to The Lancet explaining why the claim was exaggerated - see:

Is the Pfizer vaccine as effective as claimed?

There were additional fundamental flaws in the study, such as the fact that it ignored all the covid cases reported for people who had received either just a single dose or a second dose less than 7 days previously (such people were not considered ‘fully vaccinated’) - and this inevitably leads to a significant exaggeration of vaccine effectiveness. The consequence of this deliberate miscategorisation is reported in our analysis of official UK government data , and is explained here.

With hindsight our concerns, about the study have absolutely been borne out by events. We now have confirmation of how wildly exaggerated Pfizer’s 95% effectiveness claim was and evidence of manipulation of official statistics used to support claims of vaccine effectiveness, resulting in our formal complaint to the UK Statistics Regulator.

After 20 months (yes you read that right) on 8 January 2023 we finally got this response from The Lancet:

From: em.thelancet.0.808fa4.c60af167@editorialmanager.com <em.thelancet.0.808fa4.c60af167@editorialmanager.com> On Behalf Of The Lancet Team
Sent: 08 January 2023 13:30
To: Norman Fenton <n.fenton@qmul.ac.uk>
Subject: Your Submission THELANCET-D-21-03671

Manuscript number: THELANCET-D-21-03671
Title: Study on effectiveness of Pfizer vaccine overestimates its effectiveness

Dear Professor Fenton,

Happy new year. I hope you’ve had a good start to 2023 so far.

Here at The Lancet editorial office, we have begun the new year by sorting through dated submissions in our online manuscript management system, Editorial Manager. I am sorry to see that this submission of yours from 2021 is still open. 

We had invited Dr Sharon Alroy-Preis and co-authors of the published article to consider your letter, but I am sorry that we never received a formal reply from them and therefore have not been able to pursue an exchange. But I am even more sorry that I didn’t communicate a decision with you in a timely manner.

I will now close your submission, but I thank you for supporting post-publication debate in The Lancet.

Yours sincerely

Josefine Gibson
Senior Editor
The Lancet

But who exactly is the lead author Dr Sharon Alroy-Preis (SA-P) who refused to reply to our short (just 250-word) criticism of the article? Well, if you look at the Lancet paper authors’ declaration of interests you will find that, while 8 of the 15 authors hold stock and stock options in Pfizer, SA-P is not among them and, indeed declares no conflict of interest at all:

But it turns out that SA-P just happens to be the Head of Public Health Services at the Israeli Ministry of Health (IMOH).

It is also well known that, through the IMOH, Israel essentially became ‘the laboratory for Pfizer’*** as reported by the Times of Israel in September 2021:

Philip Dormitzer, the chief scientific officer at Pfizer, made the comments to a Zoom gathering of academics last week. They were first reported by Channel 12 news on Friday night.

“Early in the pandemic we established a relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Health where they used exclusively the Pfizer vaccine and then monitored it very closely,” Dormitzer told the gathering, “so we had a sort of laboratory where we could see the effect.”

Indeed, the collaboration between Pfizer and the IMOH (which started 6 Jan 2021, i.e. 4 months before the SA-P article in which she declared no conflict of interest was published) is clearly laid out in this (partially redacted) collaboration agreement. Section 9.1 of this Israel-Pfizer agreement provided for the parties to jointly approve any publication, and SAP is explicitly named as the IMOH’s representative in resolving any differences:

So, SA-P was leading the IMOH’s collaboration with Pfizer all along.

The Lancet article provided no information at all about the number of covid-19 vaccine adverse reactions which we now know are substantial [11, 12], and so it is also relevant and timely to point out SA-P’s role in the emerging IMOH scandal relating to the system for monitoring serious adverse reactions to the Pfizer vaccine. in her presentation to the FDA expert committee about the booster, SA-P claimed Israel monitors safety closely, whereas we now know they did not in fact have a functioning system until the end of 2021 - as was exposed in a leaked video from an internal meeting of the IMOH that they do not want anybody to see:

And, it is also worth pointing out that SA-P has called doctors who dare to question the IMOH policies on covid and the vaccines ‘covid deniers’.

References

[1] Haas et al: “Impact and effectiveness of mRNA BNT162b2 vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations, and deaths following a nationwide vaccination campaign in Israel: an observational study using national surveillance data” https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00947-8

[2] Fenton NE and Neil M “Is the Pfizer vaccine as effective as claimed?”, 17 May 2021,  https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/important-caveats-to-pfizer-vaccine?

[3] Jones: “Study Claims Pfizer Vaccine is 95% Effective in Over 65s. But Should That Be 74%?” https://lockdownsceptics.org/2021/05/07/study-claims-pfizer-vaccine-is-95-effective-in-over-65s-but-should-that-be-74/

[4] Neil M, Fenton N, Smalley J., Craig C., Guetzkow J., McLachlan S., Rose, J. Latest statistics on England mortality data suggest systematic mis-categorisation of vaccine status and uncertain effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccination, December 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.14176.20483

[5] Fenton NE and Neil M, “More on the illusions of vaccine efficacy”, 22 Oct 2022, wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/more-on-the-illusions-of-vaccine-efficacy

[6] Chemaitelly, Hiam, and Laith J Abu-Raddad. “Waning Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines.” Lancet (London, England) 399, no. 10327 (February 26, 2022): 771. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00277-X.

[7] Fenton, N.E, Neil M, Craig C,McLachlan S. “What the ONS Mortality Covid-19 Surveillance Data Can Tell Us about Vaccine Safety and Efficacy,” 2022. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.30898.07362

[8] Fenton, N.E, Neil Ml, Craig C,McLachlan S. “The ONS data on vaccine mortality is not fit for purpose”. https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-ons-data-on-vaccine-mortality-is

[9] Times of Israel, “Pfizer exec calls Israel ‘a sort of laboratory’ for COVID vaccines”, 12 Sept 2021, https://www.timesofisrael.com/pfizer-exec-calls-israel-a-sort-of-laboratory-for-covid-vaccines/

[10] Real-world epidemiological evidence collaboration agreement between the Israeli Ministry of Health, acting on behalf of the State of Israel and Pfizer Inc, 6 Jan 2021. https://govextra.gov.il/media/30806/11221-moh-pfizer-collaboration-agreement-redacted.pdf

[11] Rancourt, Denis G, Marine Baudin, and Jérémie Mercier. “COVID-Period Mass Vaccination Campaign and Public Health Disaster in the USA From Age/State-Resolved All-Cause Mortality by Time, Age-Resolved Vaccine Delivery by Time, and Socio-Geo-Economic Data,” 2022. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.12688.28164.

[12] Guetzkow, Josh, “CDC Finally Released Its VAERS Safety Monitoring Analyses for COVID Vaccines via FOIA”, Jan 2023,  https://jackanapes.substack.com/p/cdc-finally-released-its-vaers-safety

[13] Sherman, Yudi, “Israel Health Ministry concealed, manipulated vaccine injury data, say leaked documents”, https://www.frontline.news/post/israel-health-ministry-concealed-manipulated-vaccine-injury-data-say-leaked-documents

[14] PECC Israel “IsraeLeak tape exposure event”, Jan 2023, youtu.be/8ibKpyKeVEc

*** In a recent video PM Benjamin Netanyahu also made exactly this boast (and more about collection and use of people’s DNA). While there was some suspicion that this video may have been a deep fake, reader Hannah (see comments) has provided information to suggest it is real.