the strong incongruity of reported vaccine efficacy against covid death and all cause deaths
vaccines do seem to reduce covid deaths. but all cause deaths among the highly vaccinated are WAY up.
i ran an approximation of the vaccine efficacy data from the latest UK vaccine surveillance report which i believe to be the best society scale data available.
on cases, it was GRIM and showed a huge risk acceleration in the vaccinated that exceeded a doubling in many age groups.
more on that HERE.
but what of risk of hospitalization and death?
the numbers the UK reports here are severely misleading.
they fail to include the highest risk cohorts (the partially vaccinated) and in fact lump them in with the unvaccinated.
they also fail to account for the higher case counts among the vaccinated which increases the likelihood that you have to roll the dice on hospitalization or death. risk = chance of infection X likelihood of bad outcome IF infected
finally, they report efficacy in the most positive sounding “relative efficacy” light and ignore absolute efficacy. this can be extremely misleading. reducing 10% risk of death by 50% is a big deal. doing so for 1 in a million chance of death is functionally irrelevant and it’s always absolute risk reduction, not relative, that matters when comparing benefit to adverse event risk.
to address these issues, i summed all those with one or more doses of vaccine into one group “the vaccinated” and compared it to the unvaccinated.
this likely overstates VE to some degree because the data has a “donut hole” where those with one dose are tracked (split by 1-20 days, and 21+ days) and those with a second dose are tracked from 14 days after that dose, but nowhere does the data for the 14 days following dose 2 (peak adverse events) appear.
i see no way to correct for this so i have done the best i can with the data we have, but this deserves a large asterisk as a potential reducer of reported efficacy. (it also could well make the relative risk issue on cases much worse.)
i then added an analysis of absolute risk reduction as well.
here’s hospitalization:
blue bars are raw data, orange are adjusted for case prevalence. i find that to be the most reasonable and fairest measure of relative risk reduction.
it’s simply likelihood of getting a case X efficacy of keeping any case you get from hospitalizing you.
reduction in the key demographics looks to be in the 40%’s as an average. (bottom row)
but what of absolute reduction? i did the same here again with “adjusted” being the base efficacy per case X the likelihood of getting a case.
full adjusted absolute reduction in hospitalization does not exceed 2% until you’re over 50 and 5% until you’re over 60. effects in the young are negligible and would drop another 90% or more for those who do not have serious comorbidities.
deaths looked like this:
i’m honestly not quite sure why this is so high in 18-29. it feels like a data artifact, but i cannot figure out what it is.
overall efficacy for the key risk groups looks to again be in the 40’s overall.
absolute efficacy shows an incredibly stark picture.
it’s basically zero until you hit 50 and negligible until you hit 70. however, at 70, it spikes and rises rapidly to numbers that look meaningful.
this would seem to indicate that if you are older and/or in high risk categories, these vaccines might make sense on a personal risk limitation basis.
but this is only looking at one pan on the scale: benefit from reducing covid risk.
what of the risks posed BY the vaccines either from adverse events or other issues generated later from long term enhanced vulnerability/damage to immune or other body systems?
this is a VERY difficult thing to sum. we likely do not even have any idea what half of such issues are, much less the ability to get them reported and count them. VAERS is massively understated.
BUT, we may not need to as we have something of a natural experiment going on.
in the US, 99% of those over 65 are vaccinated.
last year, this group was culled of high risk members by covid. since last year, many more have had covid and recovered. altogether, this should, all else equal, lead to a big drop in all cause mortality, a measure that will, inherently, include deaths from covid and deaths from vaccine.
but as we can see from gatopal™ and frequent co-collaborator ben m, who knows more about US all cause mortality data than pretty much anyone i know, this is very much not the case.
all cause deaths in this near 100% vaxxed group are up 69% year on year from week 31-43 (overlapping the vaxx data above)
that’s a HUGE rise and an all time 3 month record for the US.
now, granted, this is US and not UK, but we’re using similar vaccines and while i cannot pull this quite this way for the UK, their overall excess deaths look to be up from 10.4% last year this time to 14.7% now. i’ll bet area under curve for the trailing 3 months up to current is up well over 100% from same period year ago.
(data thru 10/24/21)
now, because i can hear people winding up to starting claiming “iT wUz tHE vaRiaNTs!!!” allow me to head off your objection:
we have something of a control group here, US deaths in 0-24, a group that’s not vaxxed at all in the under 12’s as of week 43 (oct 22) and not highly vaxxed even above that. it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. if the variants were running riot, we should see mortality in this group rise as well, especially as so many are now back in school and we think vaccines do reduce covid deaths.
but we don’t.
ben was kind enough to let me have a rummage around in this data and it allowed me to produce this:
kids are seeing a 30% DROP in all cause mortality. and that, me amigos, is called “dramatic curve separation.”
it starts to get pretty difficult to support the “variants causing excess death spikes” narrative in the face of that.
i’m not sure we quite have conclusive proof that our suspect robbed the bank just yet, but this is definitely getting up towards “history of crime, unexplained whereabouts on the day of the heist, ski masks found in his car, and just bought a new ferrari on a bartender’s salary.”
the circumstantial evidence here is getting AWFULLY hard to ignore and i think more and more folks are realizing it.
we’re getting into the “change jerseys and pretend i was on the other team” stage.
even billy “bought bioNtech stock in early sept 2019 and have been cheerleading ever since” gates is changing his tune.
this is a BIG shift from his former take: (doubly ironic given that india eschewed vaccines and rapidly got covid under control using cheap, safe, widely available ivermectin)
bill is a smart guy. he’s made his killing (with a suspiciously well timed investment in just the right obscure little company that provided the tech that pfizer used to create the most profitable pharmaceutical in human history) and now seems to realize he needs to get out of the here before the roof collapses.
but what are the state actors to do? if these vaccines really are additive to all cause deaths and they have already pushed and mandated then so hard that 2/3’s of the developed world have taken them, it’s not like they can just say “oops, our 2 billion person clinical trial failed. sorry.”
i’m obviously speculating here, but if you were such a health official and you saw this coming down the pike and were desperate to salvage your status, career, and possibly not wind up behind a defendant’s table in the hauge, especially when your complicity in running rigged and slanted drug trials to allow this and assisting or looking the other way on hiding adverse events reporting came to light, what would you do?
you’d destroy the evidence.
there is no case here to vaccinate kids. there never never was.
there is no case to force every worker to get jabbed (and oddly to omit any pressure at all on, say, welfare recipients).
at best, these vaccines mitigate covid effects to a tiny absolute degree in the young and are clearly negative risk reward for any apart from the old or infirm.
they clearly accentuate spread. likely, they made the virus worse again.
and the best way to hide such ill effects is to eliminate all the control groups.
only by enrolling the whole world into it can the outcomes of this drug trial be hidden, a policy that finds suspicious consonance with the way pfizer and moderna eliminated their placebo arms after 90 days, right when efficacy started to fade dramatically.
obviously, we’re speculating on motives here, but certainly not on incentives. and these are NOT nice people. pfizer is one of the most sued, fined, and censured companies on earth and clearly facui and friends are no better.
so, i would not dismiss the idea that this is a cover up finding ready allies among those desirous of using a health emergency to drive bio-apartheid, invoke loyalty tests, and use vaccines and vaxx passports to initiate a long term techno-tyranny.
because an awful lot of this looks nothing like health policy.
The world needs a control group. Hold the line.
Thank you for helping to keep me sane. I am happy to participate in the control group.