Is Omitting Data from a COVID-19 Study Conclusion a Lie?

or just an oversight? You decide...

“OpenSAFELY: Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccination in Children and Adolescents”

Epidemiology 37(1):p 141-151, January 2026

Every so often, a study comes along that is held up as proof of something big. Safety. Effectiveness. Consensus. “The science is settled,” as they like to say, right before quietly updating the footnotes.

The Study, the Fine Print, and the Part Nobody Talks About:

This one is a large OpenSAFELY cohort study out of England, looking at COVID-19 vaccination in children, published this year. Big dataset. Clean methods. Peer-reviewed. The kind of thing that gets cited with confidence and read… well… less carefully.¹

So let’s read it carefully.

Because like most things in modern medicine, the story isn’t in the headline. It’s in the middle. And sometimes, it’s hiding down near the bottom where the tables live.

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First, the Big Picture (and the Timeline That Matters)

The study evaluates children aged 5 to 11 and adolescents aged 12 to 15 who received the Pfizer vaccine, comparing them to unvaccinated peers across outcomes like infection, emergency visits, hospitalization, and safety signals.¹

But here’s the part that tends to get lost.

This data comes from an earlier phase of the pandemic.

A time when:

• Population immunity was lower

• Variants were different

• Public health systems were still operating under elevated concern

Even in that earlier window, the results were striking in their smallness.

Across all analyses:

• No COVID-19-related deaths

• Fewer than seven critical care admissions¹

In a national dataset, that’s not just low risk. That’s vanishingly rare, as in non-existent, given that critical care admissions are almost universally in children with severe pre-existing conditions.

Vaccination showed:

• Very modest, short-term protection against infection

• Some reduction in ER visits and hospitalizations¹

But these benefits are layered on top of outcomes that were already uncommon.

Now fast forward to today.

We have:

• Widespread prior infection

• Hybrid immunity across much of the population

• Variants that tend to produce less severe disease in children²

Which means the already low baseline risk seen in this study has likely declined even further.

So when we talk about benefit, we have to ask an uncomfortable but necessary question.

Benefit relative to what, and when?

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Now We Get to the Part That Lives in the Tables

This is where things get more interesting.

Because while the benefits are modest and contextual, the safety signal is concrete.

From the paper:

• Myocarditis and pericarditis occurred only in vaccinated individuals.

• Rates were:

  • 27 cases per million after the first dose

  • 10 cases per million after the second dose¹

These are rare events. No question. But they are measurable. And they are not randomly distributed.

All cases occurred in the vaccinated group.

In any other setting, that pattern would prompt deeper scrutiny, not quieter placement.

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The Broader Context They Don’t Emphasize

And importantly, this finding does not stand alone.

Across multiple studies and surveillance systems, a consistent pattern has emerged:

• Myocarditis is rare, but real

• Almost universally, it occurs after mRNA vaccination, but not in unvaccinated populations

• It is most common in younger males, particularly after the second dose³

So this paper isn’t introducing a new signal.

It is quietly confirming an existing one, in a population where the underlying disease risk is already very low.

Furthermore, there is also a subtle shift in tone when you move from the results into the discussion. The authors cite studies suggesting that children can experience illness as severe as adults, which is technically true in isolated cases, but sits awkwardly next to the vast numbers of studies that show differently, that they don’t cite, and their own data showing no deaths and almost no critical illness.

At the same time, cardiac inflammation following vaccination is described as “mostly mild,” which redirects attention away from the more basic observation that these events occurred in the vaccinated group.

We are repeatedly told that myocarditis following mRNA vaccination in children is “mild.” That word does a lot of work. Yes, many of these kids are discharged from the hospital within a few days, and yes, they generally survive the acute event. But when you actually read the recent peer-reviewed science, a different story emerges.

Recent peer-reviewed studies show that a substantial proportion of these children do not simply bounce back to baseline. In the MACiV multicenter cohort study, cardiac MRI evidence of myocardial injury was present in the vast majority at diagnosis and persisted in a significant fraction months later (4). The German MYKKE/PedMYCVAC study found that nearly half of pediatric patients still had objective cardiac abnormalities at follow-up, even when symptoms had resolved (5).

Other smaller series report the same pattern: clinically “recovered” children with lingering signs of myocardial injury on imaging (6). So while the initial presentation is often described as mild, the biology suggests something less reassuring.

Calling this uniformly mild glosses over persistent myocardial involvement that we do not yet fully understand, and it substitutes a short hospital stay for a long-term answer that, at this point, simply does not exist.

It is a familiar pattern. Potential harms are softened by language, while potential disease severity is emphasized through selective citation. Neither statement is false, but together they shape a narrative that feels more certain than the underlying data actually supports.

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So, Why Isn’t This in the Conclusion?

At this point, you start to see the difference between reporting data and telling a story.

There are a few reasons this doesn’t make the headline.

And this is the part you only notice after reading enough of these papers: the study is framed within a population-level benefit model rooted in an earlier pandemic context.

When that is your anchor, that these vaccines are “safe and effective,” the narrative naturally emphasizes even small reductions in disease and treats rare harms as secondary. When the peer-review process requires that you emphasize safety of the vaccine over data, you end up with results being buried - deep in the data tables.

So the myocarditis signal ends up exactly where you would expect:

In the data.
But not in the conclusion.

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What This Study Actually Tells Us (Then vs Now)

If you strip away the framing, the picture becomes clearer.

During the study period:

• Severe COVID outcomes in children were already extremely rare

• Vaccination offered modest, temporary protection

In today’s environment:

• Baseline risk is even lower

• Population immunity is higher

• The marginal benefit is likely smaller than what was measured

And across both periods:

• A measurable signal of cardiac inflammation appears in the vaccinated group only, consistent with broader literature

This is not a dramatic conclusion. It’s a balanced one.

Which may be why it doesn’t get emphasized.

But then, this is also a paper that manages to get the words “safely” and “Effectiveness” (you know the drill by now, (“safe and effective”) into the very title. That phrase is ingrained in the reader's brain from years of propaganda. Biasing them before they even read a single sentence.

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Conclusion

This study does not show what many in the medical and scientific communities assume it does.

It shows a pediatric population with an already low risk of COVID-19, a modest and very short-lived vaccine benefit when COVID-19 was at its most virulent, and a measurable rate of cardiac inflammation associated with vaccination.

It also shows how easily context can shift the interpretation.

When the baseline risk declines, the relative importance of rare adverse events increases. Because vaccines are given out universally - without question or hesitation by medical health professionals, pharmacies, and clinics, such adverse events change the risk/benefit ratio completely.

Because states all over the United States are still insisting that mRNA COVID-10 injections be injected into the arms of children universally. And they justify this by citing peer-reviewed literature such as this, which hides the data in plain sight.

The question, and I think we all know the answer, is no longer simply whether something works. But what are the real risks, and are they being evaluated correctly by public health officials, particularly in the “blue” states, where tribalism has been substituted for public health?

It is about whether it meaningfully changes outcomes in a population where serious results from the virus are almost nonexistent, and whether we are willing to discuss both sides of that equation with equal clarity.

Especially the parts that don’t make it into the conclusion.

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References

1. OpenSAFELY Collaborative. “Safety and Effectiveness of BNT162b2 COVID-19 Vaccination in Children and Adolescents.” PMC (2025). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12643559/

2. Zimmermann, Petra, and Nigel Curtis. “Why Is COVID-19 Less Severe in Children? A Review of the Evidence.” Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal 39, no. 12 (2020): 1103–1105. (and subsequent updates on variant severity trends)

3. Patone, Martina, et al. “Risks of Myocarditis Following COVID-19 Vaccination or SARS-CoV-2 Infection.” Nature Medicine 28 (2022): 410–422.

4. Truong DT, Dionne A, Muniz JC, et al. Clinically suspected myocarditis temporally related to COVID-19 vaccination in adolescents and young adults: the MACiV multicenter study. EClinicalMedicine. 2024; (details include persistent late gadolinium enhancement on follow-up cardiac MRI).

5. Knöchelmann A, et al. Course of myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination in children and adolescents: results from the MYKKE/PedMYCVAC study. American Heart Journal. 2024.

6. Dionisi-Vici C, et al. Short-term follow-up of myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination in pediatric patients. Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal. 2023.

By: JGM