Some of you may have seen a meme or an article from SlayNews being passed around claiming Korean researchers have found a link between COVID-19 vaccination and vastly increased (141% higher) rates of Acute Transverse Myelitis (ATM), with up to a 233% higher rate of spinal cord inflammation in those vaccinated compared with those who were not vaccinated.
Shocking! Another cover-up by big pharma and the medical establishment…. Or maybe not.
Frank Bergman, whoever he is, is the author of that article. And lots of others on similar subjects. The trouble is, in every case, the studies Mr Bergman refers to do not say what he claims they do. In some cases, the original studies have no relation to the claims he makes at all – they are on completely different subjects. Either Mr Bergman does not understand what he reading, or he is deliberately misrepresenting the results.
Let’s look at the Korean paper on ATM and COVID-19 vaccination.
The study referred to can be found in the European Journal Of Neurology: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ene.70020
If you read the original per you may notice that it doesn’t mention the figure 141% at all. And while it does mention spinal cord inflammation, it does not do so in relation to COVID-19 vaccination.
The rate of diagnosis of ATM is about 3 per million population per year. This results in average figure of 1400 new cases per year in the USA, and about 90 per year in Australia.
What does the paper actually report? Here is what they say, word for word: “The total number of COVID‐19 vaccinations between February 26, 2021, and August 31, 2022 was 128,223,471. We identified a total of 368 individuals aged 18 or older who received their first COVID‐19 vaccination and were diagnosed with ATM during the study period.”
But hang on. Out of just over 128 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in an eighteen month period, 368 people were diagnosed with ATM sometime in the following eighteen months. The normal figure is about 3 per million per year; about 4.5 per million over an eighteen month period. 4.5 x 128 is 576.
But doesn’t that mean the incidence of ATM for this group of vaccinated people was LOWER than might be expected? Yes, it does.
More from the study itself: “There was no clear evidence of an association between the respective ChAdOx1 and BNT162b2 vaccinations and ATM. The incidence and relative risk of ATM are too low to detect an association in the general adult population. In a population‐based study that compared historical rates with the SCCS analysis based on the data from primary care records in both the UK and Spain, the incidence of TM, defined as occurring within 21 days after the first vaccination, was less than five events.”
And a little more: “Additionally, the possibility that TM cases are related to SARS‐CoV‐2 infection itself cannot be ruled out.” .. “Compared with the influenza vaccine, the mRNA COVID‐19 vaccine did not show a significant difference in the incidence of myelitis. Our literature review found limited conclusive evidence directly linking vaccines to ATM.”
The paper does note that there have been reports of diagnoses of ATM following COVID-19 vaccination. This is unsurprising. Out of a million people, vaccinated or not, you would expect 4.5 diagnoses of ATM in an eighteen month period. The paper also suggests that it may be possible that there is an increased risk, but that the rarity of the disease and confounding factors including the effect of COVID infection itself, make it difficult to identify.
The question is, is the rate of incidence/diagnosis higher amongst vaccinated people? On figures so far, the answer, according to the paper so egregiously and so typically misrepresented by Mr Bergman, is no.
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