#253 A Little Touch of Phenol

Author

Michael Eades
October 31, 2025

Hi everyone.

Thanks so much to all of you who wrote providing me with various points of contact with PayPal. I use several other payment options, but this vendor insisted on using PayPal to my detriment. I’ve been swarmed on with unexpected BS (such is life) over the past couple of days, so I haven’t had the chance to pursue all the various contact points. But I will. And, again, thanks so much to those who sent me the info.

Pneumonia Vaccine

I got an email a couple of days ago from JAMA telling me all about the latest pneumococcal vaccine. As you might imagine, it was all rainbows and glitter. Since, based on all the poll responses and comments I get from people telling me their age, I suspect most of the readers of The Arrow are in an age group that is prime for the pneumococcal vaccine, I figured this would be of interest to many of you.

Here is the graphic included in the email for doctors to provide to their patients about the vaccine.

Here is the key line in the graphic:

The pneumococcal vaccine lowers the risk of hospitalization or dying of serious pneumococcal infection by preparing the immune system to recognize and fight pneumococcus.

I’ll come back to this a little later, but just remember it for now.

After reading all the JAMA hype, I decided to do what Aaron Siri taught me and went to section 6.1 in the package insert. (Click here for a pdf download of the entire package insert.)

Section 6.1 is about the clinical testing of the drug or vaccine involved. So you can always go there to discover how any drug was tested.

After the long quote from Siri I posted a couple of weeks ago describing how the pneumococcal vaccine for children had not been tested against placebo, but against earlier versions of the same vaccine, I was curious to see how the adult pneumococcal vaccine was tested.

Here is the pertinent paragraph from Section 6.1 of the package insert.

If you read about how the trials were conducted, it is kind of a screwy way to do it. I’m sure the drug company came up with a way to do it that would provide maximum cover. Instead of a crossover trial with multiple cohorts, why not just do an RTC of the vaccine against placebo.

If you look at the definition of the placebo (which is underlined in red), you’ll see that it is not just saline (which it should be), but is saline with a bit of phenol thrown in. Why the phenol? I suspect they didn’t want to take a chance with a real placebo, i.e., saline without any additives. They wanted something that would run the adverse events up even in those getting the placebo.

I queried my favorite AI, Perplexity, with the following: “Are there adverse health consequences of using phenol in vaccines?” I was then provided with a long list of issues.

Here is the introductory paragraph:

The use of phenol as an adjuvant or preservative in vaccine placebos poses several health risks, particularly if used at concentrations that exceed established safety margins. Phenol is a protoplasmic poison capable of causing multisystem toxicity, and its inclusion in an injectable product—even as a low-dose preservative—can carry both local and systemic risks.

This introductory paragraph was followed by a long list of various toxicities elicited when phenol is used in vaccines. Following this long list was the following summary:

Context in Modern Vaccine Trials While phenol has historically been included as a preservative in some vaccine formulations, its use has been largely replaced by less toxic alternatives, particularly in the context of clinical trials using placebos, due to concerns about its toxicity profile.

Modern guidelines now emphasize the use of truly inert substances (like saline) for placebos in vaccine research unless justification is provided for the inclusion of additives.

In summary, phenol in vaccine placebos introduces unnecessary safety risks, both local and systemic, undermines the scientific value of the inert control, and is discouraged by current regulatory and ethical standards. [My bold]

So, I ask you, why is phenol in the placebo for this vaccine? It’s pretty obvious to me. They don’t want to compare the vaccine to a true saline placebo, because the serious adverse events in the treatment group would be too high compared to it to get approval.

They have a screwy way of reporting the serious adverse events that I can’t make heads or tails of.

Serious Adverse Experiences

In this study, 10 subjects had serious adverse experiences within 14 days of vaccination: 6 who received PNEUMOVAX 23 and 4 who received placebo. Serious adverse experiences within 14 days after PNEUMOVAX 23 included angina pectoris, heart failure, chest pain, ulcerative colitis, depression, and headache/tremor/stiffness/sweating. Serious adverse experiences within 14 days after placebo included myocardial infarction complicated with heart failure, alcohol intoxication, angina pectoris, and edema/urinary retention/heart failure/diabetes.

Five subjects reported serious adverse experiences that occurred outside the 14-day follow-up window: 3 who received PNEUMOVAX 23 and 2 who received placebo. Serious adverse experiences after PNEUMOVAX 23 included cerebrovascular accident, lumbar radiculopathy, and pancreatitis/myocardial infarction resulting in death. Serious adverse experiences after placebo included heart failure and motor vehicle accident resulting in death.

Then they summarize the adverse events as follows:

Serious Adverse Reactions 

There were 24 SAEs reported in 20 subjects (n=9 [4.5%] Group 1; n=11 [5.5%] Group 2). No SAEs were considered related to vaccination.

Given what they wrote before, I’m not sure how they can make the claim they do in the last sentence above.

But there are bigger issues than this.

A population-based study of 2,234,003 subjects in a giant hospital system in Catalonia, Spain revealed that those receiving the current and previous versions of the pneumococcal vaccine were “significantly more likely to be hospitalized for pneumonia and more likely to die from pneumonia-related causes compared to their unvaccinated counterparts—even after adjusting for age, sex, co-morbidities, and influenza vaccination status.”

Here is a graphical view of the findings as presented by Nicolas Hulscher, MPH on the Focal Points Substack.

The above study is similar to the study I wrote about recently at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. The difference is there are orders of magnitude more subjects involved in this one. Still, it is an observational study.

But sometimes that’s all the study you can get.

All the studies showing smoking causing lung cancer and other health issues came from observational studies. In order to do a true RCT on smoking would require researchers to gather a large group of non-smokers and randomize them into two groups. Then one group would be told to start smoking while the other would continue their non-smoking status.

Due to the precautionary principle this would have been considered unethical. Which is one of the reasons seed oils aren’t being tested more in RCTs. Once something is deemed possibly harmful, it’s unethical to randomize subjects into the arm of the study in which they have to take the perhaps harmful product. Seed oils have certainly been bashed by everyone and his brother, which makes it difficult to ethically feed a bunch of the stuff to a study group, despite the fact they probably consume plenty of it already in their daily lives.

It’s the same with vaccines, though in the other direction. Most people believe vaccines are good, major life-saving products—I did myself until I started studying it during Covid—so they believe it unethical to deny folks the vaccine in any study. Instead, they usually use a previous version of the vaccine in question as a placebo so even the placebo group gets ‘some protection’.

Yesterday, Jeff Childers of Coffee & Covid wrote an excellent overview of this study. If you want to read the more technical description, read the Hulscher version linked above. If you’re looking for more of a layman’s take, read Childers below.

The study researchers reviewed the 2019 health records of over 2.23 million ‘senior’ (50+) patients in Catalonia—a largely autonomous mini-country within Spain that has its own government. It even has its own president. The region includes Barcelona and has a distinct language (Catalan). The study’s scientists work for the Catalonian Health Institute, one of Spain’s largest healthcare systems.

The study was pretty simple and hard to argue with. They compared electronic vaccination records (jabbed versus unjabbed) against subsequent admissions for pneumonia as well as death records. They found: (1) people given the jabs were +80% more likely to wind up hospitalized for pneumonia, and (2) there was no measurable improvement in risk of either hospitalization or death among the vaccinated group, which you would hope to see if the stupid shots worked.

The researchers explained they did the study because they couldn’t find where anyone had ever tested the shots for real-world efficacy. “Several randomised-controlled trials and observational studies have demonstrated vaccines’ immunogenicity,” the researchers wrote, “but vaccination effectiveness and impact to prevent pneumonia among adults was uncertain.”

“Immunogenicity” is the great trick, the way big pharma has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes for decades. In vaccines, “immunogenicity” means having the ability to stimulate an immune response, usually in the form of measurable antibodies to a particular undesirable bug like Streptococcus pneumoniae. Somehow, pharma convinced regulators to allow them to test for “immunogenicity” (antibody levels) rather than testing whether the jabs actually prevent the intended disease.

So this study is much more than just a hit on the pneumonia jab. The Catalonian study (and others) are cementing concerns that antibody response might not after all translate into meaningful protection against common and deadly outcomes. Sometimes they might not translate at all, or as here, show antibodies but still produce negative effectiveness. (Immunogenicity was how they tested the covid jabs, too.)

If regulators were ever finally convinced to reject antibody evidence without broad clinical effectiveness, it would change the whole game.

This study is shocking, but don’t expect anything terrific. Pharma has entire teams, departments, staffed with ex-regulators who are dedicated to damage control, and they’ve probably been working on a response to these results since well before the study finished peer review. Indeed, the study noted that this year, new versions of the vaccines are expected, giving Pfizer cover to issue a vague statement of regret over the inefficiencies of past years, and then keep right on pushing the newest generation of pneumonia shots on vulnerable patients.

In other words, it’s whack-a-mole. While scientists wait for data and conduct studies, jabmakers keep tweaking their formulae to evade scrutiny and provide plausible deniability. The only permanent solution is to stop letting them use surrogate markers of response rather than provable results, and to restore legal liability for ineffective and harmful products.

💉 But there is some good news. This study feels different. Major research groups (like this big hospital system) usually avoid tackling massive pharma profit centers like pneumonia jabs— but Catalonia did it anyway. These particular scientists, at least, are obviously growing skeptical about using antibody levels to intuit efficacy. And then, it was actually prominently published: Historically, even when negative results about major vaccines have been published, they usually pop up in lower-impact journals, are hidden behind paywalls, or are published as brief “Technical Notes.”

But this study was big, population-based, peer-reviewed, open access, well-written, and from a reputable European institution.

I can’t escape feeling like the tide might be going out on the vaccine industry’s salad years. There might be a sea change swelling in vaccine skepticism (don’t call it ‘hesitancy’) from institutions and researchers around the world. People are getting sick and tired of the vaccine shell game.

Maybe we should just pull the plug on the whole damnable thing. What do you say?

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Big Pharma Never Sleeps. Neither Does Amazon

I got a hilarious email from Gary Taubes a couple of days ago. He had ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon Fresh (which I believe is their grocery store, i.e., Whole Foods). Among the products he ordered were Kerrygold butter, Kerrygold cheese, Primal Kitchen mayonnaise (siracha flavor!) and coconut butter.

As per usual, Amazon fed him a list of other products he might be interested in based on his purchases. Here is what they had on offer.

Amazon now has a pharmacy, so up pops the above. I have no idea if this is done with AI, or if it just follows any order filled with products full of saturated fat.

We both found it somewhat creepy and funny at the same time.

A Plea for Help

You guys were so great in coming up with all the numbers to help me with PayPal, that I’m going to lean on you again to help me find something.

I can search the medical literature for hours and root out pretty much anything I need to find. But I have no patience with the search functions of most websites. I get frustrated and give up.

Here is a video of RFK talking about, among other things, a lawsuit he and Aaron Siri filed against Anthony Fauci.

According to RFK, Fauci told him (RFK) that he had safety records of all the childhood vaccines. RFK requested them; Fauci never sent them. So RFK and Aaron Siri sued for them. After dragging along forever—as lawsuits do—Fauci’s lawyers—according to RFK—met them on the court house steps and settled. Fauci’s lawyers admitted that there were no such documents. RFK asked for a letter stating that there were no such documents. Then he (RFK) says that the letter they finally provided is on his Childrens Health Defense website.

I have searched high and low and cannot find the letter. I’ve heard RFK talk about this letter in at least four talks he’s given. But I cannot find it. If any of you can find this letter in the site linked above, I will be eternally grateful.

A bit of timely news…

Our online Power of Protein course is opening again for enrollment in November through Adapt Your Life Academy.

Enrollment only opens once a year and will only be open for 3 days, so if you don't want to miss it, you can join the waitlist here.

In this course, you'll learn the science-based facts, not only of how important protein is in your daily diet, but also how eating the right amount of protein can help you lose weight, boost your health ,and feel fit in just weeks.

PS: When you join the waitlist, you'll get reminders via email from Adapt Your Life Academy when enrollment opens on November 18 and you can opt in for the course.

Speaking of Protein…

I received one of the many online medical newsletters I subscribe to that discussed how to increase your muscle mass by taking a walk or doing squats. The gist of the newsletter was that being sedentary takes a toll and probably shortens life. Which I suspect is true.

It discusses a study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology by a group from Canada. The MedScape description of the findings are a little concerning to me. I don’t know if this has made it into the lay literature or not, but if it does, you need to be aware of certain issues.

Says MedScape:

Lack of Movement Overshadows Lack of Fuel Daniel Moore, PhD, associate professor in muscle physiology at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, jokes that he essentially studies an old adage: Use it or lose it.

In 2022, Moore published the first study on prolonged sitting and amino acid utilization, in which he found that taking regular, short walking or squatting breaks in the hours after eating improved the body’s ability to turn dietary proteins into the building blocks of muscle. Though his results were based on a small group of just 12 people, the effect was consistent and large, and also lines up with 2019 findings that showed a 27% decrease in this muscle fueling when people were forced to reduce their daily steps by 90%. [My bold]

I pulled the study and discovered that the small study group comprised 7 males and 5 females with an average age of 25 and an average BMI of ~25.1.

As I mentioned earlier, I suspect most of the readers of this newsletter are older than 25. If so, the recommendations based on the results of 25-year-old subjects may not be that meaningful.

Up until age 30 or so, protein deposition is mainly under hormonal control, primarily insulin. Kids can scavenge every little bit of protein they eat and convert it to muscle, especially during growth spurts. Once the age of ~30 is passed, creating muscle mass falls under the control of a different system dominated my mTOR.

Unlike the hormonal system that Hoovers up every scrap of protein in the diet, mTOR requires much more effort to stimulate. It requires a lot of protein and a lot of strength training. The more one is past 30 years old, the more this is true. And the more difficult it is to build muscle mass.

I don’t want folks over 30-years-old reading about this study in the lay press and thinking they can take a little walk every 30 minutes or do some squats and preserve or grow their muscle mass. As I’ve written in the pages before, it takes a lot more work than that both in terms of protein intake and strength training. Don’t be fooled.

Of course taking a brief walk every 30 minutes or doing squats is better than nothing, but it isn’t going to save your muscle mass if you sit on your rear 7-8 hours per day and you’re over 30.

So, just a warning in case this study shows up in the popular press.

Odds and Ends

Newsletter Recommendations

OutlanderMD | Mary Dan Eades | Substack

An examination of the many medical interludes of STARZ Outlander as seen through the eyes of a physician and scientist--and true Outlander fan. Where they hit the mark and where they miss. And why. Click to read OutlanderMD, by Mary Dan Eades, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

outlandermd.substack.com

Video of the Week

Okay, MD thinks this video is hilarious, but warned me not to put it up as the VOTW. She is afraid many will be horrified and offended at the language. I’m posting it anyway, because as STARZ says, “We’re all adults here.”

If you’re easily offended, please don’t click. Just go down to the more wholesome video at the bottom.

I marvel at the creativity. I stumbled into this video years ago and for some reason it just sprang to mind a day or two ago. When I first came across it way back when, I had no idea who the rapper Sir Mix-a-lot is (was?). Nor had I ever heard the song Baby Got Back. Nor do I like big butts myself. Some do, I’m sure, just not me.

After I had watched it a few times, I began to marvel at the time and talent it took to put this thing together. Converting the song Baby Got Back to something tune-wise Gilbert and Sullivan could have come up with. Then, dropping the music and words in in a way that matched with the singers mouths and movement had to have taken forever. Who has time for this?

Anyway, here is the BGB G&S version for your enjoyment. Or disgust.

Sorry for the lousy resolution, but it was the only one I could find.

Here is the actual version of the segment. It is Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance starring Linda Ronstadt, Kevin Kline, and others. The number is one of my all time G&S favorites: Modern Major General.

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That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back in a day or two.

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