57% of Americans want Congress to investigate how the CDC handled COVID-19 vaccine safety, as a poll suggests that “major side effects” are now “common.”
A new poll from Rasmussen Reports has revealed that 57% of all American voters have enough concerns about the risks from the COVID-19 vaccine, that Congress should be investigating the CDC’s response to it. 70% of Republican voters agree, with Independents at 54%, and just under half of all Democrat voters also in favour, at 48%.
This follows a poll in December last year by Rasmussen that asked around 1000 voters if they had experienced any side effects from taking the COVID-19 vaccine. A majority of vaccinated respondents, 56%, reported no side effects at all. 34% claimed that they had experienced “minor” side effects, with 7% reporting “major” side effects from the vaccine.
Rasmussen did not specify in their questions what constituted either a major or a minor side effect, allowing respondents to self-define any side effects they may have experienced. A poll earlier this month revealed that around 28% of all American adults think they know someone whose death was caused by vaccine side effects.
According to the European Medicines Agency, the pharmaceutical regulator for the European Union, “rare” side effects impact between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 1,000 people, between 0.01% and 0.1%. The CDC currently defines “major” side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine as being rare, which one would expect to fall into this category.
However, if around 7% of all vaccinated Americans experienced a major side effect, which Rasmussen calculated to be approximately 12 million people, such side effects would not be “rare,” but instead “common,” according to the EMA’s definitions.
Mark Mitchell, the Head Pollster at Rasmussen, noted that while the polling group had attempted to locate an official US government definition of what numbers quantified a “rare” side effect, they were unable to find one.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo noted last year that for men aged 18-39, the COVID-19 vaccine showed an 84% increase of cardiac-related death. In October, a study promoted by CNN claimed that experiencing minor side effects was a good thing, because they were “associated with greater antibody responses.”
This news and commentary by Jack Hadfield originally appeared on Valiant News.
