That said, I think it's important to separate personal experiences from what the larger body of evidence shows. Many vaccinated people still got COVID, especially once Omicron came along. The vaccines were never perfect at preventing infection. But the strongest data we have from randomized trials and real-world results show that vaccinated people were far less likely to end up in the ICU or die from COVID. That's what the vaccines were designed to do and that's where they consistently worked.
As for cancer, I understand why you'd connect your wife's diagnosis to the vaccine -- it's natural to search for causes -- our brains are wired to look for patterns especially when big events happen close together. But cancer registries and monitoring systems around the world haven't found an increase in cancer rates linked to COVID vaccines. The vaccines give a short-lived immune stimulus; they don't reprogram the immune system or permanently shut down T-cells. My family has a long history of cancer going back generations. Literally every other member of my family has had cancer long before COVID. The idea that there is a low probability of two people in the same family getting cancer in the same year is unfortunately not as unlikely as you want to believe. That is perhaps a cold comfort but doctors and scientists aren't seeing the pattern you're worried about.
That isn't to say there aren't side effects to the vaccine. Myocarditis and clotting problems are well documented but rare side-effects. In fact, someone I know about indirectly had a heart attack immediately after the COVID vaccine -- his family is genetically predisposed to this kind of heart attack but it was directly triggered by the shot (he survived). It's good to acknowledge those risks. But when you look at the big picture, health agencies estimate that the vaccines prevented millions of deaths. I sadly know of a few people who died from COVID prior to vaccine availability and have family members with permanent lung issues. They're currently struggling to get another COVID shot because they don't think they can survive getting it unprotected again.
People have become more anti-Vax because the Covid vaccines were at best ineffective and as you said anything contra-narrative is buried or ignored.
If you push a shitty product and force people to take it to keep their jobs it’s going to turn them into skeptics of all vaccines, even the very effective ones.
More harm than good was done there. The government should have approved them for voluntary use so the fallout would not have been so bad.
When they ignored my wife's medical allergy to vaccine ingredients while she was pregnant, and a medical friend in Europe warned me about people dying there due to the vaccine, I rethought my previous position.
Started crunching numbers.
Hearing of vaccine impurities and contamination w. SV40
Told by vet friends about side effects being suppressed from the DMED database
VAERS numbers seemed pretty bad
JHU numbers painted a very mixed story
Bioethics around informed consent disappeared
Read over vaccine production process and the filth it entails
Vaccine Mafia came out in force.
Am so thankful now that I did not get the vaccine and my eyes were opened by our Kleptocratic vaccine industry.... I always thought BigPharma was an issue, but didn't realize how tyrannical they could be via outsourcing enforcement to the federal, state, and local government in cahoots with Academia & Retail.
No Trust!
;)
The first paper seems to claim a very standard cohort study is subject to "immortal time bias", an effect whereby measuring outcomes can seem to change them.
The typical example of sampling time bias is that slow-growing cancers are more survivable than fast-growing ones, but also more likely to be measured by a screening, giving a correlation between screening and survivablility. So you get a time effect where more fast-acting cancers do not end up in the measurement, biasing the data. But in measurements such that one outcome or the other does not bias the odds of that outcome being sampled, there can be no measurement time effect, which is why it's not corrected for in studies like this. The authors do not explain why measurement time effects would have anything to do with detecting or not detecting death rates in the abstract, or anywhere else in the paper, and why such an adjustment unconventional in this case is necessary, because they are quacks who want to apply arbitrary math to get the outcome they want. As far as I can tell, that means taking people who had dramatically lower death rates after vaccination, and adding the time they spent unvaccinated to the unvaccinated cohort, for no clear reason.
As another commenter pointed out, randomized controlled trials -- which cannot possibly have this made-up time effect -- have clearly shown a strongly positive effect for vaccination.
I did not read the second paper.
A sibling read the your first link and noted the problems with it. I read just the abstract of the second link, and it's clear their methodology and description of what they're measuring can't actually support their conclusions.
The only reason you believe that is because all information to the contrary was systematically censored and removed from the media you consume. The actual data doesn't support that, there are even cases where it increased mortality, like https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11278956/ and increased the chance of future covid infections, like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39803093/ .