A couple weeks after its innocuous release, a good friend sent me a pre-print from Denmark up on the Lancet server, with the fairly banal title, Randomised Clinical Trials of COVID-19 Vaccines: Do Adenovirus-Vector Vaccines Have Beneficial Non-Specific Effects? His message was not all that friendly, more like, “Did you tell us to get the wrong vaccine, you dumb $%^&?” I was, therefore, not all that kindly disposed towards the research, which essentially advocates for the possibility that the adenovirus-vector vaccines, namely the offerings from J&J, Astra-Zeneca, and Russia’s Sputnik, might have life-saving effects beyond their protection vs Covid. It’s a rather bizarre assertion — one that was swiftly taken up by the very influential Martin Kuldorff in a piece run by the Brownstone Institute.
“Have people been given the wrong vaccine,” as per the title of Kuldorff’s article? Did I err in recommending Pfizer and Moderna instead of the J&J/Janssen vaccine? These are important questions, and it’s worth a closer look at the claims. If nothing else, the issue is a healthy case study in how to pose a question in medicine.
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