Antidote to Kelly Lane's COVID vaccine scaremongering

German man jabbed 217 times without injury; local medical community should rally against health board chair's distortions, oppose his reappointment

Note to Cowlitz Health Board Chair Kelly Lane and all other COVID vaccine alarmists:

The Washington Post reported recently that a man from Germany has been jabbed 217 times without injury to his health or immune system.

German researchers, writing in the medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases,  noted that coronavirus vaccines have “a good degree of tolerability, even in such a case of 'hyper-vaccination,' ” The Post reported.

The 62-year-old man, who was not named, told German authorities that he had so many shots “for private reasons.” The story did not report how the man managed to get vaccinated so many times. Nor did it state the type of vaccines he received, though it seems like many were the RNA vaccines of Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech.

Eleven COVID vaccines are currently approved for use in Germany, including the RNA messenger innoculations. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which no longer is approved for use in the U.S., also still is given in Germany.

Under U.S. public health recommendations, an adult the age of the German patient would typically have had just several doses since the first vaccines were made available in the winter of 2020-21.

German prosecutors opened a fraud investigation but did not file charges against the man, according to The Post.

The case, nevertheless, attracted the attention of researchers. They were concerned that so many doses of the RNA vaccines, which create immune memory cells that are on standby to attack the COVID virus, would fatigue his immune system.  Yet the man’s immune system was as robust as those of people who received the typical number of shots.

This is further evidence the Moderna and Pfizer COVID vaccines are safe. 

Unfortunately,  Cowlitz County Health Board Chair Kelly Lane is among those who have perpetuated the myth that vaccines are unsafe. Back in November he made the claim that 318 people in the U.S. had died from vaccines, 222 of them from the COVID injections.

“There is a problem with the vaccine. We need to inform the public,” Lane said at the November Cowlitz Board of Health meeting during discussions of his controversial “Medical Freedom” Resolution. 

“That statement is untrue and you had to know it was an untrue statement when you made it,” former Longview doctor Tom Hickey, now of Ariel, told Lane in an email.

Like many vaccine skeptics, Lane based his statement on a distorted use of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a national early warning system established in 1990 to detect possible safety problems in U.S.-licensed vaccines.  It is administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Cowlitz County has not had a single death attributable to a COVID vaccine. And the Cowlitz County Health and Human Services Department has not received a single substantiated VAERS system report of a bad reaction to the vaccines — spokeswoman Kristen Young.

VAERS is a passive reporting system. It relies on individuals to send in reports of their experiences to CDC and FDA and is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem. It is useful mainly for detecting possible trends and alert health authorities to possible safety problems with a vaccine.

“While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness,” the VAERS system website states at its very top.

In fact, the CDC has confirmed just nine nationwide deaths caused by COVID-19 vaccines. Those cases were linked with rare blood clots caused by the Johnson & Johnson shot.

The CDC also reports that rate of death among people who received COVID 19 vaccines is lower than those people who did not receive the vaccines.

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have been vaccinated, and the “benefits of COVID vaccination continue to outweigh any potential risks. Severe reactions after  COVID-19 vaccines are rare,”  according to the CDC , which calls its vaccination tracking effort “the most intense safety monitoring program in U.S. history.”

”Fewer than 0.001% of people who have received a dose experienced a severe adverse reaction,” according to COVID tracker web site COVID Act Now.

In Cowlitz County, 67% of the population has received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, 61% has obtained at least two doses, 33% has acquired a booster and 18.6% received the bivalent booster dose.

Cowlitz County has not had a single death attributable to a COVID vaccine. And the Cowlitz County Health and Human Services has not received a single substantiated VAERS system report of a bad reaction to the vaccine, department spokeswoman Kristin Young said Monday. Doctors were mandated to make such reports while the vaccines were given under the early emergency use authorization, she added.

Risks of complications such as allergic reactions and myocardis and pericardis —  inflammations of the heart muscle or outer lining the heart — are rare and treatable, according to the CDC. 

“Your statement was wrong, and it was unethical to make such a statement,” Hickey wrote, calling on Lane to resign as health board chairman. “The citizens of Cowlitz County have a right to expect ethical, fact-based statements from the Chair of the County Board of Health.”

It’s reckless for Lane, who is not a scientist, to question the work of dozens of infectious disease experts. The job of the Heath Board is to make policy based on facts. It  should not let ideological/libertarian biases against public health restrictions distort the truth. Facts matter. Lane is guilty of gross dereliction of duty.

Lane never returns my requests for comment.

His term as an appointed citizen member of the health board expires on June 21, as do those of Mary Jane Melink and Lindy Campbell. It’s up to the three county commissioners whether to renew those terms. 

My guess is that county commissioners Rick Dahl and Arne Mortensen will try to reappoint Lane and Campbell, who have voted with them in opposition to COVID mandates. There seems little chance that they will reappoint Melink, who has bucked others’ distortion of the facts. 

Rather, they’ll look for a conservative/libertarian crony to further slant the decisions of a public body. (The cabal of conservatives in this county is intent on absorbing power, but that’s a longer story for another time.)

For now, the medical community and the public need to stand up to this abuse of authority. Health care organizations should start developing a field of independent, qualified candidates to replace Lane. Nominees need not be doctors, but they must respect science — and  the truth.