Commentary: The Fire Service and COVID Data

Commentary by Gamaliel Baer

Importance of Data on Decision Making

You may have heard the phrase “data is the new oil.” ¹ You have probably heard of the phrase “data-driven decision making.” You have definitely heard the phrase “knowledge is power.” The notion that decision making should be informed by data is not new. But like raw oil, raw data is not useful. Data needs to be refined. The Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom (DIKW) pyramid is a model of how to gather and assess data, make sense of it, and eventually use it to navigate life.² If your fire department does gross decontamination on your turnout gear after a fire, thank Dr. Gavin Horn (and other researchers) for making sense of the data.³ Data helps to steer us in the right direction, and it also helps us to course correct as we learn more.   

Fire Service Guidance on Data Collection

The fire service has a few major organizations that provide guidance on how fire departments should operate, especially in regard to health and wellness. Four of those organizations are the National Fallen Firefighter Foundation (NFFF), the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC), and the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). Each of these organizations state that fire departments should collect data, specifically on health and wellness issues.

The NFFF includes “Research Agenda” as its 7^th of 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives.⁴ The IAFF/IAFC-Wellness Fitness Initiative includes “Data Collection” as its 7^th chapter. NFPA 1500 which is the Standard on Fire Department Occupational Safety, Health, and Wellness Program includes two chapters (Chapter 4, section 4.6 and Chapter 11, section 11.4) that cover data collection.⁶ Specifically, NFPA 1500 states:

4.6.1 The fire department shall establish a data collection system and maintain permanent records of all accidents, injuries, illnesses, exposures to infectious agents and communicable diseases, or deaths that are job related.

11.4.3 Health information shall be maintained as a confidential record for each individual member as well as a composite data base for the analysis of factors pertaining to the overall health and fitness of the member group.

11.4.4 If a member dies as a result of occupational injury or illness, autopsy results, if available, shall be recorded in the health data base.

What these sections are saying is that the standard of data collection includes collection on all injuries, illness, and death, both individually and as a department, so that data can be analyzed and used for making course corrections at the fire department level.

COVID Death Data

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic there were concerns that COVID-19 was going to be a deadlier virus than the flu. It turns out that wasn’t the case. From the beginning of the pandemic until now, the U.S. has documented roughly 1,087,373 deaths.⁷ However, those deaths are not all from COVID-19; they include people who died with COVID-19, and that is an important distinction. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) explain on their website that 95% of the roughly 1.09 million people who died had 4 or more comorbidities on average.⁸ The other 5% (roughly 54,368 over the course of two years) had no other causes of death on their death certificates.

Assuming all the 5% died directly from COVID-19, then each of the last two years roughly 27,000 people died from COVID-19. That happens to be almost exactly the number of people who died from the flu in the 2019-2020 flu season (25,000 deaths), and only half of the deaths from the flu in the 2018-2019 flu season (52,000 deaths).⁹ In other words, if you add up the flu (25,000) and COVID-19 deaths (~27,000) for the 2019-2020 season, it’s almost exactly the same deaths as the 2018-2019 flu season.The CDC includes flu data going back to 2010.Strangely, the CDC includes an estimate of only 5,000 deaths from the flu in the 2021-2022 flu season. Is it possible that some percentage of yearly flu deaths since the 2019-2020 flu season are being incorrectly attributed to COVID-19 deaths?

The top three comorbidities for COVID-19 have been hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes.¹⁰ We know that obesity increases the risk of all three of those comorbidities and obesity increases the risk of severe disease from COVID-19 by at least 52% (there are other data that suggest the number is much higher, but even a 52% increase is high).¹¹ The adult obesity rate in the U.S. is 42%.¹² Unfortunately, we also know that firefighters as a group are as obese, if not slightly more, than the general public.¹³ The deadliest part of the pandemic was with the first variant, before it mutated and became more virulent but less lethal. According to the CDC, during that time, people with 0 (zero) comorbidities made up .9% (.009) of all deaths.¹⁴ In other words, healthy individuals simply were not dying from, or with, COVID.

Vaccine Adverse Side Effects Data

Throughout the pandemic, people in the general public, in the military, and in fire departments around the U.S. were being illegally mandated to take an experimental vaccine.¹⁵ No one has any long-term data on the safety of these experimental drugs. As of right now, there is no evidence that the mRNA even leaves the body!¹⁶ Interestingly, the CDC removed a part of their website that said the mRNA spike protein does not last long in the body.¹⁷ That is problematic because, as the Salk Institute (named after Jonas Salk the famous virologist) explained, the spike protein (which is what the mRNA shots tell your body to produce) is toxic, especially to your vascular system (e.g. heart attack and stroke).¹⁸

The U.S. has a system called the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), an online self-reporting mechanism for adverse events attributed to vaccines. You can find a dashboard online called OpenVaers that makes the data very easy to digest for the layperson.²⁰ The data for VAERS comes from both the U.S. and its territories, as well as from overseas, and OpenVaers lets you toggle between including all reports, or just the U.S. and its territories. Regardless, the VAERS system has been keeping track of safety signals from vaccines since 1990 and it appears that the COVID-19 vaccine is giving a very strong signal on adverse side effects. An astonishing number is that out of all the deaths reported to VAERS ever, 77% of those reports are from the COVID shots (32,828 out of 42,531). The OpenVaers site also shows that side effects from the COVID shots are higher than any other vaccine.

There is also a new database that the CDC created just for COVID called V-Safe.¹⁹ The V-Safe system works by having those who took the COVID shot report side effects through an app on their phone. The CDC initially did not want to release the data that it had collected, but it was ordered by a court to do so.²¹ It should be noted that back in February of 2022, the New York Times reported that the CDC was unwilling to release data that it collected on boosters, hospitalizations, and waste-water analysis because it was afraid that “the information might be misinterpreted [by Americans]”.²² The V-Safe data showed that 12% of people who took the COVID shots were unable to perform their normal activities, 13% missed work or school, and 7.7% required roughly three medical care visits due to side effects.²³ Over 265 million Americans have taken the COVID shots.

The World Health Organization also runs a data surveillance system for adverse events called VigiAccess.²⁴ If you go to the website and agree to their terms, you will be taken to a page where you can type the name of a drug or vaccine. If you type in “COVID-19 vaccine” (without the quotation marks, but otherwise exactly that way – all caps, hyphen 19, then no caps for vaccine), you will be brought to a page that shows 4,771,829 reports of side effects (in the last 2 years). If you search for “influenza vaccine” (all lowercase works fine), you’ll find 296,989 reports of side effects (going back to 1968).

Recently, Senator Ron Johnson has held several meetings where reports from DOD physicians, and experts from all different medical backgrounds, and even life-insurance professionals have all reported unusual data that correlates with the new mass vaccination campaign of experimental COVID shots.²⁵ In the UK, representatives are also having a discussion about the COVID shots, including issues around unknown excess deaths.²⁶ The MP, Andrew Bridgen (who is double vaccinated), gave a 20 minute speech outlining all of the issues that should be taken seriously by the UK government. Bridgen explains many important pieces of data and I highly encourage everyone to take a listen. He opens his speech by explaining that Dr. Aseem Malhotra, one of the most influential British cardiologists who initially pushed the COVID vaccines, has done a public about-face and is now calling for the suspension of the COVID vaccines.²⁷

COVID Vaccination Data and Tracking Firefighter Health and Wellness

On November 29, 2022, an article was published summarizing a study that showed a 3% decrease in VO2 max occurred in recreational endurance athletes after the COVID vaccines.²⁸ This study isn’t the end of the debate; it is simply another signal among all of the other safety signals. However, one thing is clear: any data that is collected going forward, by serious researchers (especially in the fire service), should include COVID vaccination status as a demographic in their research.

There are many areas or events that data can be collected on such as illness, injury, and death for starters. Additionally, sick leave, FMLA leave, and worker’s compensation claims can offer data for analysis. When I worked in my fire department’s HQ in the Bureau of Occupational Safety and Health, I had access to a lot of data. Whether internal fire department data is publishable in a journal or not (due to IRB issues) should not stop fire departments from analyzing what data they do have, or collecting new types of data going forward. Fire departments should be doing everything they can to collect and analyze health and wellness data, and figure out if adverse events are occurring from the COVID-19 shots, and what the impact to fire departments and the fire service might be. 

Every year the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) releases a fatality report for firefighter line-of-duty deaths (LODD).²⁹ There appears to have been a huge jump in deaths from 2019 (48 LODDs total) to 2020 (140 LODDs with 78 classified as COVID deaths), and 2021 (135 LODDs with 65 classified as COVID deaths).^30,31 Do we have any data on how many firefighters from all LODDs in 2020, and 2021 were COVID vaccinated? Do we have any data on how many COVID-related LODDs were COVID vaccinated? These are important questions because we know that you can still die from COVID even if you are vaccinated. The Washington Post reported in November 2022 that vaccinated individuals now make up the majority of COVID deaths in the U.S.³²

Finally, we also have the National Firefighter Cancer Registry.³³ Besides station, departmental, or NFPA reporting, data can, and should, be collected on the vaccination status of firefighters that are reporting cancer claims. Senator Johnson received a whistleblower complaint from 1^st Lieutenant Mark Bashaw (Army) who was a preventive medical officer at the time. He claims to have analyzed data from 2016-2021 in the Department of Defense (DOD) Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) system, and found a 300% increase in cancer in 2021 compared to the other years.³⁴ According to the Reuters Fact Check team, the DOD spokesperson said that the numbers were just a glitch, and that there is really “nothing to see here” (my paraphrase and air-quotes).³⁵

Data-Driven Course Correction

The joke is that the fire service has existed for “200 years unimpeded by progress.” Of course, that isn’t true. We have progressed with equipment, we have progressed with strategies and tactics, and we have progressed in our ability to use data to solve problems. Whether or not your fire department mandated the COVID vaccines, or merely suggested them is not the point of this article–but I hope we learned from this experience that no one should be mandated to take experimental medical products. As much as we want to move forward and get back to doing the jobs we love, fire departments must not turn a blind eye to the issue of the COVID-19 shots and the safety signals that exist. The literature on COVID-19 injuries is growing. One person has compiled a list of more than 1,000 research articles on a multitude of inuries.³⁶ In December 2022, news broke about a study by the FDA that the Pfizer COVID-19 shots may cause clotting issues, specifically pulmonary embolisms. Three other issues were found that raise concerns: myocardial infarction, low blood platelet issues, and intravascular coagulation.³⁷

A new leaf must be turned in 2023. Fire departments must collect (or analyze if already collected) data on specifically whether their firefighters have been vaccinated or not, what associations with injuries, illness, or death exist if at all, and they must do so whether it is retrospective data (to the extent that they can) or at the very least, on all new data collection going forward. Fire service researchers must also include vaccination status as a demographic on all new research and if they refuse they need to list that as a limitation and be transparent that they did not collect that data. There is no excuse to ignore this opportunity to learn from the experiment that took place over the last two years.

We have entered a “brave new world” (although I’m not sure brave is the word I would use for mandating medical experiments on the entire world) of genetic engineering on humans, one that perhaps Aldous Huxley anticipated and tried to warn us about. But we are here now. To course correct from the last two years of mandated experimental COVID shots and learn from this experiment, we need to collect data. Right now we are swimming in tons of past and potential COVID data. But like oil we need to collect it first, refine it (into useable information), and then turn it into a product (knowledge), so that we can make decisions as a fire service with wisdom. Hopefully, the fire departments that did mandate the COVID shot or even suggested them will support their firefighters to address adverse events. The facts that something may have gone off course are growing rapidly. As Aldous Huxley said, “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

Dr. Gamaliel Baer, EdD, MSM, is a firefighter/EMT and special operator for Howard County (MD) Fire and Rescue. He currently still serves as a U.S. Coast Guard Reserve officer and is the Maryland State Lead for the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. Dr. Baer is the founder and chair of the International Academy of Fire and Emergency Services Scholars (IAFESS), a group of firefighters and EMTs who have terminal degrees and are dedicated to stewarding the profession through scholarship and mentorship.

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nishatalagala/2022/03/02/data-as-the-new-oil-is-not-enough-four-principles-for-avoiding-data-fires/?sh=6bd5648ec208
2. https://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm
3. Horn GP, Kerber S, Fent KW, Smith DL. Management of Firefighters’ Chemical & Cardiovascular Exposure Risks on the Fireground. Int Fire Serv J Leadersh Manag.
4. https://www.everyonegoeshome.com/16-initiatives/7-research-agenda/
5. https://www.iafc.org/docs/default-source/1safehealthshs/wfi-manual.pdf
6. https://www.nfpa.org/codes-and-standards/all-codes-and-standards/list-of-codes-and-standards/detail?code=1500
7. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
8. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
9. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
10. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8677356/
11. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9205425/
12. https://www.tfah.org/report-details/state-of-obesity-2022/#:~:text=Nationally%2C%2041.9%20percent%20of%20adults,obesity%20rate%20of%2041.4%20percent
13. Poston, W. S., Haddock, C. K., Jahnke, S. A., Jitnarin, N., Tuley, B. C., & Kales, S. N. (2011). The prevalence of overweight, obesity, and substandard fitness in a population-based firefighter cohort. Journal of occupational and environmental medicine, 53(3), 266.
14. https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2021/pdf/21_0123.pdf
15. https://emberly.fireengineering.com/commentary/commentary-covid-19-vaccine-mandate-issues-fire-department-leaders/
16. https://twitter.com/Arwenstar/status/1594094418570579968?s=20&t=AMbMp7gwHGdNIKgldNTJUw
17. https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1564243473234100225?s=20&t=VI_jtOZZdLu1Lv-kgR7Izw
18. https://www.salk.edu/news-release/the-novel-coronavirus-spike-protein-plays-additional-key-role-in-illness/
19. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/vsafe.html
20. https://openvaers.com/covid-data
21. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cdcs-covid-19-vaccine-v-safe-data-released-pursuant-to-court-order-301639584.html
22. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/health/covid-cdc-data.html
23. https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/we-now-have-clear-proof-the-vaccine
24. https://www.vigiaccess.org/
25. https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/vaccine-side-effects-and-mandates
26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5hb_8T5GQs
27. https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/top-doctor-who-once-promoted-covid
28. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20221129/The-impact-of-Pfizere28090BioNTeche28099s-BNT162b2-mRNA-vaccine-booster-on-the-maximum-oxygen-uptake-capacity-among-recreational-endurance-athletes.aspx
29. https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-statistics-and-reports/Emergency-responders/osFFF.pdf
30. https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-statistics-and-reports/Emergency-responders/FFF-2021.ashx
31. https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-statistics-and-reports/Emergency-responders/osFFF.pdf
32. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinated-people-now-make-up-majority-covid-deaths/
33. https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/firefighters/registry.html
34. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21967089-1lt-mark-bashaw-whistleblower-declaration
35. https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-militarydatabase-error/fact-check-dod-says-data-error-caused-spike-in-numbers-of-medical-diagnoses-in-their-medical-database-for-2021-idUSL1N2UY1S2
36. https://community.covidvaccineinjuries.com/compilation-peer-reviewed-medical-papers-of-covid-vaccine-injuries/
37. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22014931

This commentary reflects the views of the author and not necessarily the views of Fire Engineering. It has not undergone the standard peer-review process.