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A new analysis of over 200,000 U.S. children’s health records suggests that mRNA COVID-19 vaccination increases children’s risk of asthma, Alex Berenson reported Tuesday.
Berenson, a former New York Times reporter who now reports on his Unreported Truths Substack, revealed communications with Taiwanese researchers showing they found “striking evidence” that the shots themselves may cause asthma, which leads to lung damage.
Asthma is a chronic lung disease affecting nearly 5 million U.S. children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While usually not fatal, severe asthma attacks can be life-threatening in children, according to the Mayo Clinic.
The Taiwanese researchers’ analysis — which the researchers are still reviewing — used electronic medical records from TriNetX, which touts itself as the “largest global source of real-world data.”
The study authors looked at TriNetX’s health data from over 200,000 U.S. kids ages 5 to 18 between Jan. 1, 2021, and Dec. 31, 2022.
According to Berenson, they found that children who received a COVID-19 mRNA shot and who had not had a natural COVID-19 infection had a 13% higher risk of receiving a new asthma diagnosis in the year after their vaccination when compared to a matched group of children who didn’t get a COVID-19 shot or infection.
“That increased risk cannot be due to Covid, since neither group was infected,” Berenson wrote.
When the researchers compared vaccinated versus unvaccinated children — all of whom also were diagnosed with a COVID-19 infection — they found an even higher risk.
Berenson reported that children who had both a COVID-19 mRNA shot and a COVID-19 infection had a 20% higher risk of a new asthma diagnosis than a similar group of unvaccinated kids who had a COVID-19 infection.
Because the study is not a randomized prospective trial it does not prove that the mRNA COVID-19 shots caused the extra asthma cases, Berenson said.
“But the researchers closely matched two very large groups,” he wrote, “and the association they found is almost certainly not due to chance.”
‘They may have some trouble getting a major or even minor journal to accept their results’
The researchers disclosed their results to Berenson in an email — which he posted on his Oct. 1 Substack post — in response to his questions about a study they published June 21 in the peer-reviewed journal Infection.
In the June study, the Taiwanese authors looked at TriNetX data records from 304,500 U.S. children and found a “strong link between COVID-19 infection and an increased risk of new-onset asthma in children.”
Though they hadn’t hypothesized that vaccination would be linked to an increase in asthma, the study authors found that the increased risk was “more marked in those vaccinated.”
Berenson wrote on Substack:
“But because the researchers had not matched the groups by vaccine status in the initial study, the vaccinated group was notably less healthy than the unvaccinated group at baseline. …So the jabbed and unjabbed cohorts could not be directly compared.”
Berenson asked the researchers in an email if they had run a parallel version of the study that directly compared outcomes by vaccination status and, if so, could they disclose the results.
“To my surprise, they responded,” Berenson told The Defender. They didn’t say when they would publish the results.
“If history is any guide,” Berenson said, “they may have some trouble getting a major or even minor journal to accept their results — journals have been very wary of publishing negative research on the mRNAs outside of myocarditis, which is an acceptable topic to discuss.”
Pediatrician: Asthma symptoms similar to anaphylaxis
Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a pediatrician, told The Defender that many asthma symptoms are the same as those associated with anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction.
Coughing, wheezing, bronchospasm, shortness of breath, rapid breathing/dyspnea and hypoxia — these airway symptoms occur when the immune and nervous systems are significantly activated in response to exposure to one or more allergens the body perceives as a threat.
“If COVID injections seem to increase children’s risks of developing asthma, or anaphylaxis, this signifies there may be one or more ingredients in these injections that pose a threat to the health and safety of their immune and nervous systems,” Palevsky said. “It would make sense to avoid instigating anaphylaxis in children, no?”
Berenson criticized the CDC for continuing to recommend the COVID-19 shots for kids:
“I am stunned that the Centers for Disease Control will not admit defeat and drop its recommendation for them — though as a practical matter almost no one under 18 is getting them now.
“But in continuing to press them, the CDC is further damaging its credibility, if it has any left at this point.”
First study finds ‘strong link’ between COVID infection and asthma in kids — especially for the vaccinated
Berenson said the Taiwanese researchers’ finding about a possible link between COVID-19 vaccines and asthma was “particularly striking” because they weren’t looking for it.
They conducted the June 21 study using children’s health data from TriNetX to determine if there might be a link between COVID-19 infection and asthma.
In their report, they explained that they used a cohort-matching technique before doing their analysis to minimize the likelihood of getting biased results due to confounding factors.
Using the matching technique, they created an unvaccinated cohort and a vaccinated cohort that each had equal numbers of kids who had and hadn’t had a COVID-19 infection.
They compared the asthma diagnosis outcomes of kids who had a COVID-19 infection with the asthma diagnosis outcomes of kids who hadn’t in both the unvaccinated and vaccinated cohorts.
They found that the children infected with COVID-19 showed a significantly increased incidence of new-onset asthma during the year after the infection compared with kids who hadn’t had a COVID-19 infection — and the finding was consistent across gender, age and racial groups.
They also found that the increased risk of new-onset asthma was “more marked” in those children who had COVID-19 and also received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
Berenson noted in his Oct. 2 Substack post that the Taiwanese authors’ June study has received little attention, despite the vaccine safety signals it contains.
In addition to finding that the link between COVID-19 infection and asthma was stronger in kids who got a COVID-19 shot, the study authors found that children who received a COVID-19 shot were 6 times more likely to die during the next year than kids who didn’t get a COVID-19 shot.
The most likely explanation for the difference is that the kids in the vaccinated cohort were sicker to begin with, compared to the unvaccinated. For instance, the kids in the vaccinated cohort had higher rates of diabetes and psychiatric disorders, according to Berenson who reviewed the study.
“Nonetheless,” Berenson wrote, “the gap is large enough that in any sane world researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and elsewhere would be following it up, if only to rule it out and figure out if other databases have any similar signals.”
The Taiwanese authors noted in their June study that other recent studies have also found a link between viral infections — including COVID-19 — and asthma.
However, there is still scientific debate about the degree to which that may occur in children.
A 2022 study published in BMC Infectious Diseases that analyzed roughly 70 kids hospitalized for COVID-19 reported that 41.5% had asthma-like symptoms when discharged. Less than 16% of those children had a history of asthma when admitted to the hospital. The study did not report vaccination status.
However, an April study published in Pediatrics involving almost 30,000 children concluded that testing positive for COVID-19 wasn’t associated with a new asthma diagnosis within 18 months of the infection.
The Defender reached out to the Taiwanese study’s corresponding author but did not receive a response by the deadline.
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