Fact Checking the Claim that 44% of Pregnancies in the Pfizer Study ended in Miscarriage
What is the truth behind the claims made by Naomi Wolf
When debating issues or trying to get someone from an opposing view to see your side, it is important to use accurate facts. Otherwise, if those facts are easily disproven, your opponent will brush you off as uninformed or a conspiracy theorist and likely never listen to your viewpoint again. If the facts are correct then the person you are debating with will subconsciously elevate you in their list of trusted sources and maybe even gradually understand where you are coming from.
I have heard a lot of untrue claims about pregnancies in the Pfizer trials. For example the claim that there were 274 pregnancy cases (including 23 spontaneous abortions) during the Pfizer trial of approximately 44,000 people is incorrect. The number of cases and abortions is correct but this was not from the official Pfizer trial, these were case reports from around the world once over 126 million doses had been shipped.
So when I heard the latest claim from Naomi Wolf, that 44% of pregnancies during the Pfizer study ended in miscarriages, I thought I’d take a look.
The rest of this article is available as an early read for paid subscribers only. My articles take a lot of time to research and write so your support is very much appreciated and will ensure that I can continue to produce the same quality and quantity of articles going forwards.
The claim on her website, the Daily Clout, says:
A Pfizer adverse events document released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on July 1, 2022, reveals chilling data showing 44 percent of pregnant women participating in Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine trial suffered miscarriages. [125742_S1_M5_5351_c4591001-interim-mth6-adverse-events.pdf, https://pdata0916.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/pdocs/070122/125742_S1_M5_5351_c4591001-interim-mth6-adverse-events.zip] A section of the document, on page 3643, called Listing of Subjects Reporting Pregnancy After Dose 1, shows that 50 women became pregnant during the trial. However, one must dig through the rest of the large document to learn that 22 of the 50 women suffered “Abortion Spontaneous,” “Abortion Spontaneous Complete,” “Abortion Spontaneous Incomplete,” or “Miscarriage.” [pp. 219, 561, 708, 1071, 1146, 1179, 1349, 1749, 1758, 1806, 1809, 3519, 3526, 3560, 3536, 3537, 3538, 3536, 3547, and 3551.] The adverse events report cut-off date was March 13, 2021, and the FDA received the report from Pfizer on April 1, 2021. Thus, the FDA was aware of the horrifying rate of fetal death by the start of April 2021.
The women listed in Listing of Subjects Reporting Pregnancy After Dose 1 received between one and four injections each. 42 of the women received the trial drug right away. Eight received the placebo and were then unblinded and given the vaccine. So, by March 31, 2021, all the pregnant women in the trial had received Pfizer’s BNT162b2 version of the vaccine.
I decided to put all the pregnancy information from the Pfizer document, linked to above, into a spreadsheet to analyse the claims made.
Firstly, there is a section of the document called “Listing of Subjects Reporting Pregnancy After Dose 1”, which does show that 50 women became pregnant during the trial. (On closer inspection 8 of these may be related to partners being exposed and 1 is maternal exposure before pregnancy. But Pfizer includes them in the list so without further explanation as to why they are there, I will leave them on the list.)
Next, digging through the rest of the 3645 page document, there are only four miscarriages/ spontaneous abortions or molar pregnancies linked to these 50 pregnancies. Four out of 50 pregnancies equals 8% so it seems that Naomi’s 44% claim is wildly off.
So where did she go so wrong? The article on her website says 22 women suffered “Abortion Spontaneous,” “Abortion Spontaneous Complete,” “Abortion Spontaneous Incomplete,” or “Miscarriage.”
There are actually 22 listings of abortions/miscarriages in the Pfizer document but only 15 of these are unique (the others are duplications in other sections of the document). But above, I said only 4 pregnancies miscarried so where do the additional 11 come from?
Going methodically through the 3645 pages reveals that there are another 49 pregnancies reported that aren’t listed in the section called “Listing of Subjects Reporting Pregnancy After Dose 1”. This means, of the missing entries, 22% (11/49) ended up in miscarriage or spontaneous abortion.
Overall, this would mean a 15% miscarriage/abortion rate when looking at all the pregnancies (15/99). Time between injection and miscarriage ranged from 20 days and 174 days with the average being 82 days.
19 participants withdrew from the trial after finding out they were pregnant. Time between finding out they were pregnant and withdrawal ranged from 0 days and 164 days with the average being 46 days.
The average of 46 days makes me question whether the decision to withdraw was finding out about the pregnancy or something else. If it were to do with the pregnancy you would expect that decision to be made sooner?
If we remove all the withdrawn participants and pregnancies connected with participants partners (instead of the participants themselves) we are left with 66 pregnancies and 12 miscarriages/abortions, giving a total of 18%.
Still nowhere near the 44% claim.
Questions that do need answering, however, are:
Why were so many pregnancies missed off the official list?
UPDATE - Using another document to cross reference participants, the missing pregnancies from the list are those that were in the placebo group. Therefore, the 8% figure (4/50) should be used.
The document is a snapshot up to March 2021 so none of the mothers would have given birth at that point. Follow up information is required to ascertain how many more miscarriages/abortions there were and how many pregnancies resulted in healthy live births? (Including those women who withdrew from the trial).
I’m not saying Naomi’s claim was misinformation because we all make mistakes. But when mistakes are made and identified, they need to be publicly amended. There is plenty of real dodgy data to report on so repeating false claims only weakens those reports and gives ammunition to those on the other side of the debate.
Nice job N.E.! I really like someone who tries to take a neutral objective follow the facts approach. The establishment is looking to take down its critics so there is a strong need to be as accurate as possible. Thanks for trying to make that happen.
Nice work as usual!