Now would be a good time to review the hierarchy of evidence. Using the hierarchy of evidence, where do you think this lies, and where do you think the evidence that vaccines do in fact save lives lies?
You can't control for mortality here, that doesn't make sense, because mortality is the variable under investigation.
He does control for the most obvious confounder (age). Some people - like the UK HSA and ONS - have tried to argue there must be other confounders like vaccines being given preferentially to unhealthy people, but they're self-contradicting on this point. I've seen them argue for both a healthy vaccinee effect and also an unhealthy vaccinee effect, both times with no direct evidence. They're shooting in the dark to try and avoid the obvious inference.
The bandage analogy is illogical. Injuries cause bandages so of course there's a correlation. Vaccines are not meant to cause death, so there should be no correlation. They're meant to prevent death, so the ratio should run in the opposite direction - the unvaccinated should die more often then the vaccinated.
It's unfortunately legit, one of the many stories that should be highly important but gets buried because it doesn't line up with the nice optimistic story about human ingenuity and success we'd all like to believe.
The problem is that COVID vaccine effectiveness started dropping almost immediately after the rollout began and never stopped falling. It dropped below zero quite some time ago, according to UK data. That is, vaccinated people get COVID at higher rates than the unvaccinated do. And this is not a tiny effect but a massive one - by the time they stopped publishing the data the UK rates were something like COVID being 4x-5x more frequent in the vaccinated population (per 100k). This also shows up in data from New Zealand, Denmark, it was showing up in Scottish data until that was hidden and a few other places iirc.
If effectiveness is below zero, then give that vaccines have side effects which are sometimes deadly, it's impossible for vaccines to save more than they kill. Even if they did so originally, with time that will be cancelled out unless the fall in effectiveness goes into reverse.
This is obviously very difficult to believe. I was astonished when I first learned about this. Some countries report very different statistics so the obvious question is why do e.g. US authorities report great effectiveness when other places report negative effectiveness. A word of advice: only investigate this question if you're ready to have your confidence in public health and government destroyed. The amount of mendacious statistical game playing that goes on around vaccine effectiveness is appalling. The average public health agency won't even think twice before redefining basic terms to ensure the outcomes they want. It seems to be a basic structural issue with public health because the same agencies that are tasked with collecting and reporting effectiveness data are also tasked with getting everyone to take vaccines. They see data as a way to create compliance, not objectively reflect reality.
The underlying biological problem appears to be a form of immune system over-fitting. It learns to respond to the spike protein it was trained with via the vaccine, which is the long since extinct 2019 Wuhan strain. Then it misfires when challenged with the real virus because it can't tell the difference, so you make antibodies designed to dock with the extinct strain and the newer virus isn't stopped by it. People who aren't vaccinated have fresh immune systems that haven't been over-trained and generate more accurate antibodies, so the infection is stopped quicker and they don't get sick as much.
The existence of this effect (with the odd name of OAS) has now been proven in various scientific studies. In particular, it's been proven in studies of new mRNA vaccines targeting the Omicron spike. One reason we don't have new vaccines for Omicron is that they don't work. People who were already vaccinated with the original vaccine just produce antibodies for the old antigens in response to the new vaccine. The ability to differentiate is somehow lost.
Fails the sniff test because the harms would have to be pretty massive to exceed the increased mortality of Covid given its prevalence.
It appears that this analysis hinges entirely on assuming the all cause mortality of vaccinated and unvaccinated groups should be the same and the only differences would be due to the vaccine. This is ridiculous because the vaccinated set is preferentially less healthy and excludes children.
I get what you're saying, that the vaccinated set of people are less healthy. But is that true?
He is breaking it up by age too. He actually excludes older age group for that reason:
> Above 80, the UK data was too confounded to be useful.
We know that the stats definition, collection, etc have been politicised, and that it's hard to get straightforward data. Given that what we are provided is murky, I can't think of a better/simpler way to evaluate statistics than a simple death tally, where the only differentiating factor he is accounting for is vaccination.
"would have to be pretty massive to exceed the increased mortality of Covid given its prevalence."
Well, no, not really? COVID is not actually very deadly in the grand scheme of things. In the UK the first wave caused death rates to increase to the same levels they were at in 2008, which was an unremarkable year. Later waves didn't even do that. Winter 2021 had no excess mortality I think.
This is one of the problems the vaccines face, COVID just isn't that deadly. That's why the vaccine trials were unable to demonstrate any impact on mortality. Actually, in the Pfizer trial more vaccinated died than unvaccinated because they didn't recruit enough of the very very elderly for mortality to show up. The vaccines were declared a success purely on the basis of reduced PCR positives. It's really an issue because now the vaccinated test positive at much greater rates than the unvaccinated do. Effectiveness fell from strongly positive to strongly negative.
I think "COVID is not that deadly" is literally true, in the sense that it is not likely to kill you in any age group, but is understating the net harm.
Really a lot of people have died who would not have otherwise died. Arguably some of that is "pulling deaths forward" and we might see improvements to all cause mortality over the next few years but overall COVID has had a pretty big impact on mortality. In the US for instance life expectancy has fallen from 78.9 to 76.6 over the course of the pandemic.
That's for the USA. The USA seems to have suffered much more than many other countries, for reasons that real epidemiologists would be keen to investigate but the ones we're stuck with are remarkably incurious about. It's not to do with their own measures (Sweden has had lower than average mortality impact from COVID), so is more likely related to lifestyles, racial makeups, or something else that isn't understood.
Definitely. I am just using it as a yardstick for the sake of orders of magnitude.
According to this article https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... US excess deaths over the course of the pandemic are 347 per 100k people compared to the UK's 221 which is a lot more(!) to be sure but I think the point still stands.
This analysis is pretty dumb, but not really surprising coming from an antivax organization. The conclusion of this post is that any death of a vaccinated person is caused by the vaccine, which is obvious bullshit.
23 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 69.7 ms ] threadI'd be interested to hear views on whether it is coherent or what the issues are.
Do you also believe bandages cause death or injury? It’s weird. People who are hurt often wear bandages. You would argue band-aids cause injury?
He does control for the most obvious confounder (age). Some people - like the UK HSA and ONS - have tried to argue there must be other confounders like vaccines being given preferentially to unhealthy people, but they're self-contradicting on this point. I've seen them argue for both a healthy vaccinee effect and also an unhealthy vaccinee effect, both times with no direct evidence. They're shooting in the dark to try and avoid the obvious inference.
The bandage analogy is illogical. Injuries cause bandages so of course there's a correlation. Vaccines are not meant to cause death, so there should be no correlation. They're meant to prevent death, so the ratio should run in the opposite direction - the unvaccinated should die more often then the vaccinated.
The problem is that COVID vaccine effectiveness started dropping almost immediately after the rollout began and never stopped falling. It dropped below zero quite some time ago, according to UK data. That is, vaccinated people get COVID at higher rates than the unvaccinated do. And this is not a tiny effect but a massive one - by the time they stopped publishing the data the UK rates were something like COVID being 4x-5x more frequent in the vaccinated population (per 100k). This also shows up in data from New Zealand, Denmark, it was showing up in Scottish data until that was hidden and a few other places iirc.
If effectiveness is below zero, then give that vaccines have side effects which are sometimes deadly, it's impossible for vaccines to save more than they kill. Even if they did so originally, with time that will be cancelled out unless the fall in effectiveness goes into reverse.
This is obviously very difficult to believe. I was astonished when I first learned about this. Some countries report very different statistics so the obvious question is why do e.g. US authorities report great effectiveness when other places report negative effectiveness. A word of advice: only investigate this question if you're ready to have your confidence in public health and government destroyed. The amount of mendacious statistical game playing that goes on around vaccine effectiveness is appalling. The average public health agency won't even think twice before redefining basic terms to ensure the outcomes they want. It seems to be a basic structural issue with public health because the same agencies that are tasked with collecting and reporting effectiveness data are also tasked with getting everyone to take vaccines. They see data as a way to create compliance, not objectively reflect reality.
The underlying biological problem appears to be a form of immune system over-fitting. It learns to respond to the spike protein it was trained with via the vaccine, which is the long since extinct 2019 Wuhan strain. Then it misfires when challenged with the real virus because it can't tell the difference, so you make antibodies designed to dock with the extinct strain and the newer virus isn't stopped by it. People who aren't vaccinated have fresh immune systems that haven't been over-trained and generate more accurate antibodies, so the infection is stopped quicker and they don't get sick as much.
The existence of this effect (with the odd name of OAS) has now been proven in various scientific studies. In particular, it's been proven in studies of new mRNA vaccines targeting the Omicron spike. One reason we don't have new vaccines for Omicron is that they don't work. People who were already vaccinated with the original vaccine just produce antibodies for the old antigens in response to the new vaccine. The ability to differentiate is somehow lost.
It appears that this analysis hinges entirely on assuming the all cause mortality of vaccinated and unvaccinated groups should be the same and the only differences would be due to the vaccine. This is ridiculous because the vaccinated set is preferentially less healthy and excludes children.
He is breaking it up by age too. He actually excludes older age group for that reason:
> Above 80, the UK data was too confounded to be useful.
We know that the stats definition, collection, etc have been politicised, and that it's hard to get straightforward data. Given that what we are provided is murky, I can't think of a better/simpler way to evaluate statistics than a simple death tally, where the only differentiating factor he is accounting for is vaccination.
Well, no, not really? COVID is not actually very deadly in the grand scheme of things. In the UK the first wave caused death rates to increase to the same levels they were at in 2008, which was an unremarkable year. Later waves didn't even do that. Winter 2021 had no excess mortality I think.
This is one of the problems the vaccines face, COVID just isn't that deadly. That's why the vaccine trials were unable to demonstrate any impact on mortality. Actually, in the Pfizer trial more vaccinated died than unvaccinated because they didn't recruit enough of the very very elderly for mortality to show up. The vaccines were declared a success purely on the basis of reduced PCR positives. It's really an issue because now the vaccinated test positive at much greater rates than the unvaccinated do. Effectiveness fell from strongly positive to strongly negative.
For instance: https://public.tableau.com/views/COVID_excess_mort_withcause...
Really a lot of people have died who would not have otherwise died. Arguably some of that is "pulling deaths forward" and we might see improvements to all cause mortality over the next few years but overall COVID has had a pretty big impact on mortality. In the US for instance life expectancy has fallen from 78.9 to 76.6 over the course of the pandemic.
According to this article https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... US excess deaths over the course of the pandemic are 347 per 100k people compared to the UK's 221 which is a lot more(!) to be sure but I think the point still stands.