book review

The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer's Crimes Against Humanity
by Naomi Wolf with Amy Kelly
War Room Books, 2024, 386 pages

Reviewed by T. Nelson

I've been vaccinated against two kinds of hepatitis. I took those ineffectual flu vaccines my employer forced me to take, despite never having had the flu in my life or a cold in longer than I can remember.* And even though I never got Covid before or since, I was forced to take the Pfizer vax. Two days after the second dose, I got terrible debilitating symptoms. I also got cardiac arrhythmia that was so bad it was impossible to measure my blood pressure (my BP machine would just crash, saying “Error”). My healthcare provider just dismissed it as “anxiety,” which is the standard answer doctors give when they have no idea how to treat something. I ended up with a lifelong chronic condition.

I say all this to prove I have no bias against Naomi Wolf or the ideas in this book. The editor and writers deserve praise for helping people get interested in topics like clinical trial design, autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular pathology, reproductive toxicity, and other important topics. It's tough to get laymen to read this stuff.

But what we needed was a factual, unsparing analysis of what was good and what was bad about the vax and Pfizer's role in it. Instead what we get is some criticism of the clinical trial and a collection of reports from doctors. The doctors mean well, but their skills are clearly not at the level needed for the task at hand. Moreover, the overall theme is conspira­torial, not scientific. The conclusions after each chapter, shown in green “Document Analysis” blurbs from the Daily Clout, are all the same and dispel any pretense of dispassionate scientific analysis:

Post-Marketing Team's CONCLUSION:
RECALL this unsafe “vaccine.”

(Quotation marks, caps lock, and boldface red and green font in the original).

Recalling the vaccine might have been a reasonable demand four years ago (though probably unpopular in the midst of the hysteria), but, like . . . dudes . . . Covid has been over for three years. Vaccine produc­tion for the original strain has shut down, and it hasn't worked in years, if it ever did. All the doses expired long ago. There's nothing to recall.

The most useful chapter is Chapter 19, on the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA 2020) the FDA granted to the company.

Efficacy

That the FDA granted Pfizer an EUA shows how cooperation with big Pharma takes precedence over patient safety at the FDA. When I was involved in clinical drug trials, if we got an EUA for our drug, it was only for patients who were certain to die if untreated. Not in a million years would we have given it to a healthy patient. It was tacitly understood that it might kill the patient. I wasn't involved in the consenting or screening, so whether the subjects fully understood this is hard for me to say. But at least they got informed consent; we did not. When the Covid vax came along, we would have been fired for refusing the treatment, and every corporation I looked at made full vax + booster a requirement for hiring consideration. So if you declined the vax, your career was over.

EUA 2020 was approved on October 6, 2020. Pfizer unblinded their drug trial on March 12, 2021, when they vaxxed the entire placebo cohort, so it was not the two-year trial they planned. The author reasonably says “This brings serious questions to the legitimacy of the clinical trial.”

Pfizer had 17,411 subjects in the vaccine arm and 17,511 in the placebo arm. They reported 162 Covid cases in the placebo and 8 in the vaxxed. (Chi-square p-value <0.00001). However, the FDA report reprinted in the book says there were also 1594 more cases of suspected covid plus 409 more delayed cases within 7 days in the vax group and 1816 plus 287 delayed ones in the control group. Due to the enormous number of patients, this is still statistically significant, but the efficacy drops from 95% to 12%. If the FDA is right, this means it was clinically almost useless.

According to the authors, Pfizer did not measure efficacy, only antibody titer. If true, this makes any efficacy data meaningless. The goal of a vaccine isn't to make high antibody levels. The goal is to prevent disease. They aren't the same: with mRNA technology you could get the body to manufacture huge quantities of an antibody that's useless or even harmful.

Safety

Being clinically useless doesn't mean it's not doing something. My observation is that the number of boosters a patient got correlates quite well with the number of times they got Covid. At the end of the trial there were 42,086 cases reporting 158,895 AEs and 1223 deaths that providers thought were product-related. The author concludes “Pfizer confirmed that its product caused significant, severe AEs across all organ systems.”

But in the real world nothing is perfectly safe. Vaccine apologists always say the AEs are “rare.” Is this really true?

This is where the book fails. What I hoped to find was something to convince me whether the adverse effects were rare or widespread. Although the authors find pathological changes from the vax, there's almost no information on their prevalence. The writing is entirely descriptive. This hasn't been adequate in biology in fifty years. You have to explain on a molecular basis why something happens. There are many scientific papers out there on the vax that do this, but the authors seem to have missed them. Instead we get weak criticisms of the methodology, like this:

The data presented by Pfizer [on liver toxicity] largely consists of laboratory abnorm­al­ities, rather than clinical disease descriptions. . . . No justification is offered to explain this inconsistency.

Liver enzyme measurements are the standard test for liver function. We can't fault Pfizer for that.

Everybody seems to want absolute answers: people would say “masks work” or “masks don't work” as if they're meaningful statements. They're not. No technology is one hundred percent efficient.

The immunohistochemistry images shown are good, and they're in color. Some are done with two antibodies: one to Spike and one to the nucleocapsid protein. This is a good idea. If only Spike is present, it's a clear signature of the vax. If both, it must be from the virus. But why are the two antibodies used on different slices? You can't demonstrate anything by staining two different sections with the same stain (DAB, a brown dye). The standard procedure for over twenty years has been to take two antibodies that fluoresce with different colors and put them together on the same slice. The results with DAB would be unpub­lish­able because reviewers would say the two images could be from different areas or maybe even different patients.

On page 80 they say:

Among the 51 cases that had previously been autopsied, . . . the subsequent detailed examinations at Reutlingen found a causation of death by the vaccine to be highly likely/likely in 80%.

Okay, but what did the original pathologists have to say when confronted with their error when they said the cause was “natural”? It looks like no attempt was made, so we have only the author's word on which pathologist is correct. Science isn't like Amazon book reviews, where you can just make assertions to question somebody's integrity and not allow them to reply.

Blood clots

Then we get descriptions and pictures of those strange clots we keep hearing about. Here again it's as if the authors did these experiments in their basement. On page 94 they show a sample of blood with a clot that formed after centrifug­ation. There are no details. Was EDTA or heparin added? If not, you'd definitely get a clot no matter what. They ran a gel and did LCMS to identify the proteins, and claim to have found endothelial proteins. They say this means they're not ordinary everyday clots but degeneration of the vessel walls. But what were the abundances on these mass spec peaks, what is the coverage, how many PSMs (peptide-spectrum matches), or the score, or something? It's not as though including it would be extra work; the software gives you all that statistical information automatically. On a modern machine, you can find hundreds of matches from a gel slice. Without statistics, you could have just picked out the ones you wanted to see. I got the impression the authors know this but assume they can fool the reader who's unfamiliar with the technology.

Then on page 96 they use Congo red to detect amyloid in the vessel walls and say it could be composed of Spike protein. Great! . . . but where are the mass spec data to prove it? Then they say we have amyloid deposits in the brain. Sigh . . . they must know better than this. How many times do I have to explain the different kinds of amyloid . . .

Many of the figures in Chapter 7, including the mass spec table and the IHC of the spike proteins and brain inflam­mation, are duplicated in Chapter 27. One possible reason is that the late Arne Burkhardt was the author of both chapters. I guess it's not really plagiarism if you steal all your images from yourself in the same book, but it makes it look like the editor was in such a hurry with The Moderna Papers or The Astra-Zeneca Papers or whatever other book she's writing that she didn't notice she got two nearly identical chapters. Question: did this guy get paid twice?

Turbo cancer and cholesterol

On page 131 practicing oncologist Ute Krüger says “Relatively soon after the vaccination against COVID-19, the tumor growth explodes, and there is a pronounced spread of the tumor in the body. And some of the patients die within a few months.” These reports of “turbo cancer” are very disturbing. They fit with my idea that the vax is either too antigenic or too concen­trated and so it diverts the immune system from its primary task of suppressing cancer. But as the author admits, it's impossible to be sure without numbers; and she doesn't even speculate on the possible mechanism. A mechanism is essential if we're going to attribute it to the vax. Surely she's allowed to speculate here.

On page 91, Burkhardt finds cholesterol crystals and says they're released from the wall of the aorta and athero­scler­otic vessels when the Spike protein attacks the endothelium. This is an interesting idea, because it would mean the vax causes atheroembolic disease. Indeed, Vellanki et al. (PMID 35371674) talk about blue toe syndrome (the sign of a cholesterol shower) in Covid but say it's “rare.”

Some of my criticisms might sound like nitpicking. But science depends on details and careful measure­ment. I expected the authors to tear apart Pfizer's clinical trial, and some did. But we also get a lot of half-finished, descriptive science that uses out-of-date methods. It couldn't have been peer-reviewed. I could ignore the unreadably blurry tables and those tendent­ious green summary boxes, but if you put science in a book you either have to cite the published results so the reader can look them up, or you have to provide all the gory scientific details yourself.

If the authors are right, why criticize them?

The authors mean well, and I'm sure their findings are probably correct, but overall this book does more harm than good. The problem is: if you want to be believed, you have to be more rigorous than the guy you're criticizing. Of course that limits your readership, but the alternative—filling it with exclamation points, adding links to some political website, and using red CapsLock font—gives ammunition to doubters who will say your conclusion is wrong because you're using flawed science and you have an axe to grind. You lose potential allies who will remain silent to protect themselves from association with it. If a finding is based on weak or flawed science, it isn't a finding at all.

Is Pfizer liable?

Corporations made unsafe products for years until they were legally required to make safe ones. Take that requirement away, and they'll do it again. Corporations will say or do anything if they think it will increase their profits, which is why the left and right both now hate them.

It is also why legal immunity for future vaccines, especially ones with new, untested technology, should be permanently revoked. And this business of allowing drug companies to test the safety and efficacy of their own products must end.

Maybe we should create a new government agency dedicated to ensuring that the drugs companies make are safe. We could call it the “Food and Drug Administration.” Oh darn, that name's already taken.

Vax apologists remind us that neither Pfizer nor the government forced us to take this drug, so holding them liable would be difficult. But employers did, and they aren't protected by immunity. For an employer to force its employees to take a drug under an EUA is not only unethical but arguably illegal. Every corporate manager who did this should be thrown in prison and the doctors who pressured patients to get vaxed should have their judgment questioned, and maybe even have their licenses revoked.

The problem is this: Covid vax apologists will readily admit that problems like myocarditis exist, but they invariably say they're “rare.” If you're Naomi Wolf or Steve Bannon or whoever's commissioning these books, that is the point you have to prove. Otherwise, you've taken almost 400 pages to say almost nothing.

* The reason, as far as I can tell, is that I have a big nose, which scientists have proved means you're smarter protected from respiratory infection.

oct 22, 2024, 5:46 am. edited for clarity oct 24 2024, 4:36 am and oct 28, 2024. last updated oct 31 2024 5:44 am