Preliminary new research indicates adenovirus-based COVID vaccines (like AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson) dramatically reduce all-cause mortality (that is, they reduce both COVID and non-COVID deaths), whereas mRNA COVID vaccines (like Pfizer and Moderna) may actually increase the risk of non-COVID death.
This comes from an interesting new Danish study (not yet peer-reviewed) about the COVID vaccines, by Professor Christine Stabell-Benn, details of which she nicely explains in this video.
Prof Stabell-Benn's study finds evidence that the mRNA COVID vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) actually increased all-cause mortality from non-COVID deaths, whereas the adenovirus COVID vaccines (like the Oxford/AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Sputnik V) dramatically decrease both COVID as well as non-COVID mortality (thus providing health benefits beyond just COVID death prevention).
Stabell-Benn found that the all-cause mortality in those getting the mRNA COVID vaccines was not much different to the mortality of the placebo group not given any vaccine. However, since these mRNA vaccines actually protect from COVID death, if you subtract the lives the vaccine saved from COVID, you end up with the conclusion that the mRNA vaccines may actually increase all-cause mortality from non-COVID deaths.
So the mRNA vaccines decrease COVID deaths, but might actually increase non-COVID deaths. Note that these mRNA vaccines are not increasing all-cause mortality overall. Your chances of death are not greater when you get an mRNA vaccine. But your chances of a non-COVID death might be greater.
By contrast, the adenovirus COVID vaccines can not only can save your life from COVID, but they also dramatically reduce you chances of dying from other non-COVID causes. That is to say, the adenovirus vaccines have a general very positive beneficial effect on your health (for reasons which are not yet understood).
Prof Stabell-Benn has spent 30 years studying the non-specific effects of vaccines. These non-specific effects are results, either beneficial or harmful, that vaccines have in addition to the beneficial effect of protecting against the disease or infection they target.
In general, her research over 3 decades has shown that live attenuated vaccines have excellent non-specific health benefits, in addition to protecting from the infection they target. Live vaccines seem to confer general health benefits like generally strengthened immunity to their recipients which greatly protects them from death.
Live attenuated vaccines of course contain a living but weakened version of the virus or bacterium. When given, these vaccines result in a mild but real infection in the body.
Stabell-Benn points out that when the live measles vaccine was introduced, it was observed that mortality in the population declined by much more than could be explained just by its specific effect of preventing measles deaths; the live measles vaccine was somehow offering human populations some highly beneficial non-specific health effects, which led to greatly decreased all-cause mortality in those populations.
Conversely, Prof Stabell-Benn found that inactivated vaccines (vaccine containing a killed version of the pathogen) do not provide these non-specific health benefits, and can actually increase all-cause mortality, in spite of protecting recipients from the infection the vaccine targets. See timecode 5:20 of the video.
So given a choice, a live vaccine seems a much better choice than an inactivated vaccine.
Although interestingly, she says that if you have had an inactivated vaccine, and you are later give a live vaccine, then you can benefit from the non-specific health effects of that live vaccine, since it is the last vaccine that you received which is the most important. See timecode 24:54.
Before Prof Stabell-Benn started her research on the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, as well as the AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Sputnik V adenovirus vaccines, she did not know whether these new vaccines would behave like live vaccines, or like inactivated vaccines. This is because both these mRNA and adenovirus COVID vaccines are new types of vaccines, which she had no experience with.
But from her research, it appears that the adenovirus COVID vaccines behave like live vaccines, offering highly beneficial non-specific effects on health; whereas the mRNA COVID vaccines act like inactivated vaccines, which have negative non-specific effects on health.
Both the mRNA vaccines and adenovirus vaccines greatly reduce your risk of dying from COVID; but only the adenovirus vaccines also greatly reduce your chances of dying from other causes of death unrelated to COVID.
Prof Christine Stabell-Benn says it is a flaw in our vaccine testing systems that we do not test for non-specific effects of vaccines; we only test for the specific effects against the targeted pathogen.
She says that the World Health Organisation (WHO) have been aware of the non-specific effects of vaccines for 20 years, but have shown little interest in pursuing this research. Neither have the pharmaceutical companies shown much interest in investigating non-specific effects.
A preprint of Professor Christine Stabell Benn's paper is here:
Randomised Clinical Trials of COVID-19 Vaccines: Do Adenovirus-Vector Vaccines Have Beneficial Non-Specific Effects?
Edited by Hip, 25 May 2022 - 04:37 PM.
