And it begins.

Two medical doctors—and, purportedly, disgruntled former Pfizer employees—have filed a petition to the EMA to halt Pfizer’s testing of its COVID-19 vaccine. While they primarily take issue with the study design and its endpoints, they throw in some additional tidbits about unintended side effects to really pack a punch in establishing potential for “irreparable harm.” Of these, they detail concern about the vaccine inducing non-neutralizing antibodies, which, as you can gather, are antibodies that fail to actually stop the virus and, in fact, can make an illness after exposure to SARS-CoV-2 even worse than it would be otherwise. They also predict “potentially deadly” reactions to the polyethylene glycol in the lipid nanoparticle coating designed for vaccine stability. Finally, and most likely to reach fake news headlines near you, is their stated fear of vaccine-induced antibodies to spike proteins (found on SARS-CoV-2) cross-reacting with Syncytin-1, a protein that plays a role in mammalian placental development. While they concede “there is no indication whether antibodies against spike proteins of SARS viruses would also act like anti-Syncytin-1 antibodies,” that doesn’t stop them from postulating it may “result in vaccinated women essentially becoming infertile.” TBL: Whatever wild claims are posited about emerging COVID-19 vaccines, the proof is in the pudding (i.e., real-world randomized trials of tens of thousands of people). | Wodarg & Yeadon 2020