This Lawsuit is a Scam

Debunk the Funk Dan Wilson's YouTube video on ICAN v-safe lawsuit

[Dr. Wilson]

Introduction and the Anti-Vaccine Industry

You might not know this, but there is an entire anti-vaccine industry out there. These are large networks that spread anti-vaccine misinformation and lies that can actively harm people, and they make huge profits off of it. One of the ways they make this money is by performing publicity stunts, where they file frivolous lawsuits, the results of which they misrepresent to their followers, and their followers then donate huge sums of cash to them so that they can continue filing frivolous lawsuits.

ICANN and Del Bigtree's Lawsuit

One of these biggest groups is the Informed Consent Action Network, abbreviated ICANN, and they're associated talk show with someone who I've talked a lot about on this channel before, Del Bigtree. And these groups have been flourishing since the COVID pandemic started. ICANN specifically has increased its revenue by 60% in 2020, bringing it to $5.5 million in revenue, and those profits have increased since then. Most of this money comes from private donors, but these profits don't include speaking fees and ad revenue that they make through their talk show.

[00:01:01]

Just a side note, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vaccine organization more than doubled its revenue in 2020, bringing in a total of $6.8 million. But this video is about ICANN and Del Bigtree, because they are currently misrepresenting the results of another frivolous lawsuit that they expect to make them big bucks. And the whole way they present the results of this lawsuit requires them to lie to you, and that's what I'm going to cover in this video. Hey, I'm Dr. Wilson. I'm a PhD molecular biologist, and welcome to another debunking video. So to start things off, let's talk about this lawsuit.

The V-Safe Vaccine Safety Database

This lawsuit is dealing with a vaccine safety reporting database that was designed specifically for COVID vaccines. It's called v-safe. And the way it works is that people sign up for it, they download a phone app, and through the phone app, they report adverse events that follow their COVID vaccinations. Just like any other passive reporting system, this reporting system does not necessarily capture events that were caused by COVID vaccines. It just captures events that followed COVID vaccines, regardless of causality.

[00:02:00]

v-safe is one of several vaccine safety databases that researchers use to assess the safety of a vaccine in the general population. Altogether, all of these safety databases, not just from the US, but from all over the world, show pretty much the same thing. That COVID vaccines are very safe, and that the rates of serious adverse events that can actually be attributed to the vaccine are really rare. And there have been several studies published from v-safe data specifically showing just that.

Del Bigtree's Misinterpretation of V-Safe Data

But Del Bigtree and his lawyer say no, no, no. We don't have the whole story. Because people sign up with this app and they share confidential patient information, not all of the information that was received by v-safe is public due to HIPAA laws. In case you don't know, HIPAA laws protect patients' confidential health and personal information. So what did ICANN do? They sued the CDC so that they could release redacted, full files on what the v-safe participants submitted. This includes a text box where they could add additional comments for whatever they're experiencing.

[00:03:01]

What do we expect to learn from reading these text boxes? Well, nothing. Since all of the research currently published about v-safe and all of the other vaccine safety reporting systems, again not just from America but from all over the world, include medical history, follow-up with physicians, autopsies, and epidemiological investigations, there's absolutely no good reason to expect that text boxes in a messaging app are going to teach you anything new. But it's very clear why ICANN wants the content of these text boxes. They want to find the absolute worst experience that anyone had, which may or may not be due to the vaccine, and blast that on the internet and to their followers and say, look at how bad these vaccines are, please donate more money to us so that we can continue filing frivolous lawsuits that are never going to actually do anything. So watch out for that in the coming months. Now for the rest of this video, I'm going to let Del Bigtree and his lawyer Aaron Seery talk about their claims surrounding this lawsuit and v-safe and see how much they get wrong.

[00:04:03]

So let's listen to them.

[Del Bigtree]

Examining the Lawsuit's Claims and V-Safe Data

Of the 10 million people in this system, 782,913 checked this box. They checked the box, I went to a doctor.

[Dr. Wilson]

So in that segment of the talk show, they're talking about a previous lawsuit as if they revealed any new information when this information was already public. So let's look at the actual published research and see if it matches what he just said. And would you look at that? No, it doesn't really match that. Of all the participants who responded to v-safe, about 9.7% said that they were unable to do normal activity following their first dose, and 26.5% said that they were unable to do normal activity after their second dose. This doesn't sound unusual. After my third dose, I felt like crap. I had aches and I just felt really crummy. But the next day I felt fine. It's normal to feel like that during an immune response. Your immune response gives you aches and pains and possibly fevers and headaches and things like that.

[00:05:01]

But the numbers who said they actually reported seeking medical care are much smaller. That was around 0.8% after the first dose and around 0.9% after the second dose. And medical care might just mean taking Tylenol or going to the pharmacy to pick up something to deal with your symptoms. Even smaller numbers reported seeking a telehealth consultation. Even smaller numbers reported visiting the clinic for their symptoms. And even smaller numbers than that reported going to the emergency room or actually being hospitalized because of whatever symptoms they were feeling. So when the research is done properly using this data and statistics are applied, let's see what the authors of this paper actually say about it. They say that reports about the measures of health impacts used in v-safe, although self-assessed and subjective, correlate with reports about reactogenicity. More health impacts were reported by female than male recipients, by participants younger than 65 years compared with older participants, and after dose 2 compared with dose 1. And by those who received the Moderna versus the Pfizer. So again, they're using v-safe in conjunction with other safety monitoring systems and seeing if they agree with each other.

[00:06:05]

This is what scientists do. They ask a question and then attack it from multiple angles to see if the evidence yielded from multiple angles are all consistent with each other. And in this case, they didn't find evidence of anything that was overtly concerning. In other words, they didn't find anything that was causing mass suffering or mass death that would be unexpected following a mass vaccination rollout.

[Aaron Siri]

The Importance of Free Text Fields in V-Safe

Yeah, they were withholding the free text fields. Those are fields in which individuals using the v-safe system, those 10 million individuals could write in whatever they wanted. And the reason that those free text fields and the data in those free text fields are so critical.

[Dr. Wilson]

So that's just him explaining the free text fields that I mentioned earlier. That was the whole point of this current lawsuit. And he doesn't explain what they expect to learn from it or why they are so important. Because really they're not. Unless you do some epidemiological statistics on them, which you're probably not going to be able to do with that kind of data, you're not going to learn anything.

[00:07:05]

But what he says next is just fantastic.

[Aaron Siri]

Adverse Events of Special Interest (AESIs)

All of the issues that we now know are concerning from the COVID-19 vaccines, they well knew that those were issues of concern before the first vaccine was rolled out in December 2020. The reason we know that is because we have a copy of the v-safe protocol. That is the 50 page document that the CDC used to design v-safe as far as we're aware. And on the last page of that protocol, it lists, as you can see on your screen there, the adverse events of special interest.

[Dr. Wilson]

I don't know why anti-vaxxers cannot get this right. Adverse events of special interest are not adverse events that are known to be associated with whatever medication or vaccine is being rolled out. Adverse events of special interest are predetermined adverse events that are required to be reported following the administration of any medication or vaccine. They are predetermined.

[00:08:00]

Let me give an example. If I'm running a clinical trial and I want to submit a list of all adverse events that I want immediately reported after the administration of whatever I'm studying, I submit an adverse events of special interest list. So before the drug or intervention goes into anybody at all, I have to submit a list that is usually as broad as possible of any adverse events that could follow the intervention. And these adverse events, again, don't have to be causal. One of the AESIs for COVID vaccines was COVID itself. Obviously, COVID vaccines do not cause COVID. But if we want to know how frequent a COVID infection is after administering a vaccine, that would be important to know when analyzing data. In no way, shape, or form does a list of AESIs imply that researchers knew that those events would happen because of the vaccine. This is now a very old anti-vaccine trope that just won't seem to die. And I'm not sure why anti-vaxxers can't seem to learn why they're wrong about this.

[00:09:02]

[Aaron Siri]

The CDC's Response to Data Requests

Yeah, and you know, I mean, we live in an age where people don't like to read and write so much.

[Dr. Wilson]

Yeah, that's probably why. I can more like I can't read. Am I right?

[Aaron Siri]

Boom. Roasted.

[Dr. Wilson]

Oh, God. Okay, let's move on.

[Del Bigtree]

Look, I don't want to make light of it because I know we're about to start reading some really horrific stories. And I remember when we were talking about this, the CDC was pushing back. They were trying to say things like, well, you shouldn't have to. You can't read all of those fields. We're going to categorize them. We'll just categorize them and give them a code and put the different things. And they didn't want to let us read the writing.

[Dr. Wilson]

Yeah, it's almost like they just don't want you misrepresenting data. Again, people could have written whatever they want in these fields. It could have been a complete lie. It could have been not related to the vaccine. It could just be something that they think is related to the vaccine. But really, it wasn't. If you want to be scientific about it, you have to have a way of determining whether or not what you're reading is actually significant or reflective of a real experience that is going to affect the rest of the population in any meaningful way.

[00:10:03]

That's why scientists do epidemiology and statistics with these data. We don't just read one experience and say, oh my gosh, look at this. This must mean something. Del Bigtree and Aaron Seery don't care about evidence. They just want to get an emotional response out of their viewers so that they keep giving them money. That's what all this is about.

[Del Bigtree]

The Judge's Questioning of the CDC

Well, the judge is saying, are you telling me that the CDC has all this data and the only thing you've looked at is the first two weeks when the entire question with an emergency use authorization is what about the long term side effects? What about two years down the road? What about six months? What about all these issues of blood clotting we're seeing? And they only look two weeks. This judge, I mean, anybody with blood moving their brain would be happy saying, oh my God, this is insane.

[Dr. Wilson]

Oh my God, this this is insane. That's a classic Del Bigtree rant for you. So if you look at the V-safe data, the greatest number of reported events occurred on day one following the dose of vaccine being given.

[00:11:01]

From there, the average number of reported events declines each day.

V-Safe Data and Long-Term Side Effects

So even if they're just looking at the first seven days, you're capturing most of the reactogenicity that is happening with these vaccines. But again, V-safe is not the only database we use to assess vaccine safety. It's there to supplement the many other vaccine safety reporting databases that we use. There are many studies reporting on the results of such adverse event reporting systems. This is how we do what's called phase four safety surveillance. It's when a vaccine or medication gets rolled out to the general public. It is surveilled constantly for adverse events. That's how we determined that myocarditis is a rare side effect of COVID mRNA vaccines. It's how we determined that vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia is a rare adverse event of the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines. And regulatory action and recommendations were taken in both of those situations. These systems work, and to show that these systems are still working and still providing results that show that these vaccines have a very good safety profile, I'm going to be linking a lot of studies in the description showing just that.

[00:12:12]

Studies that look beyond the first seven days and at millions and millions of doses of vaccines given from all over the world. There are studies from Japan, Korea, India, Sweden, the UK, America, etc. All of them show the same thing. So for what Aaron, Siri, and Del Bigtree are saying to be true, all of these sources, all of these organizations from all over the world need to be lying. And if their best argument is that, just that everybody else is lying except me, do you want to trust them?

[Aaron Siri]

The Usefulness of VAERS Data

But, and one of the main data points they use, they use theirs for the most part and v-safe. Well, they say theirs is useless.

[Dr. Wilson]

No, we do not say theirs is useless. We just say that people like you, Aaron, Siri, don't know how to use it, and your interpretations of theirs are useless.

[00:13:03]

For example, people like Aaron, Siri, and Del Bigtree will often use this graph, which has also appeared in Congress, presented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, as evidence that COVID vaccines are harmful. This is a graph showing the number of adverse events reported from COVID vaccines, and often they compare it to the number of events reported following other vaccines. But what all of these people don't understand is that in order to use this data properly, you have to take these numbers and compare them to the rates of adverse events you would expect generally in the background of the population. And when actual studies do that, they find that no unusual patterns of most adverse events can be found. But Del Bigtree knows this about theirs and other adverse event reporting systems. Watch him get caught in a lie in this fantastic interview.

[Del Bigtree]

Del Bigtree Caught in a Lie About VAERS Data

So, in 2018 alone, the theirs reports had over 58,000 reported vaccine injuries. Over 400 reported vaccine deaths in the United States alone, in one year alone.

[00:14:05]

[Interviewer]

The numbers the way you're using them though, it's explicitly warrants against using them that way.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

You're saying that there were 412 deaths last year.

[Del Bigtree]

I know. What I'm saying is there's 412 reported deaths. I've never said there were 412 confirmed deaths reported.

[Interviewer]

So some of those causes of death on theirs, one was a drowning, one was from co-sleeping, one was a pre-existing heart condition. Because a death is reported in theirs, there's no way to show causation to the vaccine. But in watching your speech and watching your show, man, you would come away thinking 400 people died from vaccines last year. And then I can start to see where they get the number. And then I go to the source and the source says, don't use the number that way.

[Dr. Wilson]

The Importance of Multiple Data Sources in Vaccine Safety

An important concept that I want to drive home again here is that scientists use multiple different tools in order to challenge or interrogate whatever questions they might be trying to ask with their data. So when it comes to the question of, say, COVID vaccine safety, there are several different tools we can use to ask whether or not these vaccines are safe.

[00:15:05]

We can use randomized controlled trials. We can use these adverse event reporting systems like VAERS, v-safe, vaccine safety data link, etc. We can look at rates of all-cause mortality between the unvaccinated and the vaccinated. We can look at cohort studies that compare vaccinated versus unvaccinated. And we can do all of these kinds of studies across multiple institutions that span several different countries, which span several different governing bodies. And they can all say the same thing. And that's exactly what we see.

ICANN's Focus on Profit Over Science

But these people like Aaron Seery and Del Bigtree at ICANN, they don't care about that. They don't care about doing actual good science. They care about just blasting out a specific message that is going to scare or enrage their viewers so that they can continue to make money. And they will continue enraging and scaring their audience, even if they have to make things up about vaccines to do it.

[Del Bigtree]

The Myth of "Hot Lots" of Vaccines

Another legal victory, right?

[00:16:00]

You were able to sort of run down the hot lots. This is a conversation a lot of people watching the high wire have asked about. Are some of the vaccines, you know, lots worse than others? Just like that.

[Dr. Wilson]

Yeah. Hot lots are not a thing. I have this rule of thumb in science where if you're asking a question, it's a good bet that scientists somewhere in the world have already asked that question and probably already published a paper investigating that question and showing their results.

Debunking the "Hot Lots" Theory

And that's true with this bogus hot lots idea. It was shown conclusively that lots that were said to be hot were actually just lots corresponding to ones that were rolled out very early in the vaccine rollout. And very early in the vaccine rollout, all of those doses were going to the most at risk people, including people who are in nursing homes or are just very vulnerable or otherwise towards the end of life stages. And in these populations, you would already expect a high mortality rate within a certain amount of time. And the mortality rate that was observed was actually lower than what we would expect.

[00:17:03]

So yeah, they're just making things up in order to make money.

Conclusion and Call to Action

And they don't care who they hurt along the way. No matter how many friends you lose or people you leave dead and bloodied along the way, just so long as you can make a name for yourself as an investigatory journalist, who knew that you could find more wisdom in Derek Zoolander than you can in an anti-vaccine video. But seriously, these people don't care about science, they don't care about evidence, and they don't care about the health of their viewers. They just want to make money. Well, that's going to do it for this week's video. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, all the links to all of the science and studies mentioned in this video are going to be in the description below so that you can read them for yourself. And again, thank you so much for watching. I really do appreciate it. And if you enjoyed this video, don't forget to like and subscribe so that you can catch me next week, where I'll be debunking some more funky stuff. See you then.