- “Mass Covid testing is no ticket to freedom – it’s locking up people who aren’t infected” – The only thing astronomical about ‘Operation Moonshot’ is the cost, writes Ross Clark in the Telegraph
- “My ‘testing on arrival’ nightmare bodes terribly for the summer ahead” – It’s still not looking good for travel this Summer if Telegraph travel writer Eleanor Aldridge’s experience is anything to go by
- “Care worker who chose not to take coronavirus vaccine says employer’s treatment made him feel ‘worthless’” – Sky News tells the story of a care worker who has been with the same company for five years but was told his shifts would end if he didn’t get vaccinated
- “Parents following the science” – Following recent announcements about COVID-19 vaccine trials on children and infants, this new website set up by a group of parents and medical professionals seeks to “offer balance to the hasty and ill-considered approach that’s being taken”
- “Call for Evidence – COVID-19 Vaccine Certification” – A consultation being run by a parliamentary committee set up to consider “potential ethical, legal and operational issues and the efficacy and appropriateness of a certificate system”. Do contribute by the deadline, May 3rd
- “Is Boris lauding lockdowns because he’s planning another for October? It certainly looks that way” – The Prime Minister is “nudging us towards accepting another shutdown of the non-virtual economy in autumn”, writes Neil Clarke in RT
- “Two thirds of Londoners back Covid passports” – A poll for the Evening Standard headline finds a majority of Londoners are in favour of vaccine passports
- “Why has the Covid vaccine been relegated from ‘the best hope’ to ‘it helps’?” – Writing for the Conservative Woman, Mark Pickles looks at how the message changed from “vaccination is essential” to “lockdown is essential”
- “Covid – the cock-ups and the cover-ups” – Neville Hodgkinson in the Conservative Woman sets out his theory about the origins of the pandemic: that a genetically engineered virus, produced as part of an international effort to counter the threat of a pandemic, accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
- “The tearoom brewing hope and defiance” – Paul Stilwell in the Conservative Woman provides an update on the The Mustard Seed, the Christian tearoom in Gedling, which defied the lockdown
- “The COVID-19 alternative UK timeline” – Russel David imagines how Covid might have been had a different Prime Minister been in post
- “Legend of Banter” – The Irreverend clergy brought the American commentator Esther O’Reilly on to the show this week to find out if everyone in the U.S. is as fed up with Fauci as they are here with Whitty
- “Coincidence’ – What does the data say” – In the latest Pandemic Podcast, Dan Astin Gregory looks at the data, patterns and correlations that have followed the vaccine rollout
- “Spain will not require coronavirus tests or quarantines for travellers arriving with ‘vaccine passports’” – The European Union’s ‘Digital Green Certificate’ is due to come into force in June and will allow visitors to enter Spain without having to quarantine or take a test, El Pais reports
- “Germany warns of lasting economic damage as Covid cases spin out of control” – Writing in the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard analyses Germany’s economic outlook after the country’s five top economic institutions cut their growth forecasts
- “Ontario gives police sweeping powers as Covid crisis spirals out of control” – Ontario is going for the ultra hard lockdown approach, the Guardian reports, with police empowered to stop drivers or pedestrians and ask for their address and their reason for being out, and issue fines of up to $C750 (£430)
- “US Braces for One-Year COVID-19 Booster Shots; Pfizer Chief Sees Need” – David Kessler, Chief Science Officer for President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 task force has told a congressional committee that people will likely need a third dose of the two-dose vaccine, and maybe annual shots, Newsmax reports
- “Where’s Dr. Fauci As Another Corona-Myth Dies?” – US Centres for Disease Control recently announced that, contrary to what was first thought, the chance of contracting SARS-CoV-2 off the surface of an inanimate object is about 1 in 10,000. This illustrates, writes John Tammy at AIER, how the ‘deniers’ of received wisdom provide important information that ‘believers’ can not
- “Stanford doctor Jay Bhattacharya calls Dr. Fauci ‘Number One Anti Vaxxer’” – According to Newsweek, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is not a fan of Dr. Fauci
- “Magufuli’s Covid response saved thousands of lives” – The President of Tanzania was mocked in the West for rejecting lockdowns, but according to ex-World Health Organisation scientist Dr David Bell, writing in News Africa, he is viewed by many in the scientific community as a life-saver
- “Food prices soar in West Africa amid conflicts and COVID, WFP says” – According to the World Food Programme, food prices in West Africa have jumped more than 30% since last year to their highest levels in nearly a decade due to lockdowns and a decline in cereal production, Reuters reports
- “How New Zealand’s much-admired COVID-19 response helped fuel a housing crisis” – Reuters reports that New Zealand’s pandemic policies mean cheaper mortgages, which has pushed up housing prices and thereby increased homelessness
- “What ‘seemed like liberation’ during the pandemic, will soon ‘look like a prison’” – A Sky News Australia piece, with host James Morrow, on how Australia’s Zero Covid approach has created the “never-ending pandemic that won’t end”
- “People have to start seeing through this false narrative of the coronavirus mania” – PANDA chairman Nick Hudson appeared on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s talkRADIO show yesterday to speak some plain truths about lockdowns
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A poor report, well-challenged by Will Jones. I also have a challenge.
From my analysis of the vaccine programme versus excess weekly deaths by age group, there was a strong correlation – possibly up to 0,6% of 80+ and 0.2% of 75-79.
Deaths appear to occur within a few days of the jab. The frail would be more likely to perish, leaving the more resilient. Proportionally, therefore, after a few days the jabbed group would contain more resilient members than the unjabbed group.
This report does not begin at day 1. It seems a bit lopsided to me to compare the jab’s ‘success’ starting a few days later while overlooking some fatalities that it caused at the start.
It’s intention is to sell vaccines, not to question strange deaths that, if investigated, would have the potential to destroy the market for them.
“However, look at that spike in infections during the two weeks post-vaccination – it’s huge.”
Yup.
What’s the mechanism for mass vaccination? Lots of people move to a single place and are vaccinated in a room where they all pass through in file.
Then 7 days later there is a spike in Covid infections greater than those people who haven’t filed through a single room.
That suggests people pick up the infection at the vaccination centre, which normies won’t accept because masks and ‘covid secure measures’ stop that happening in their world. This is more evidence that the secure measures aren’t working as advertised.
The uptick at the end will likely be due to the time shift within the group. The people who would otherwise have caught it later caught it earlier so you get a compensating down tick and then a rebound as the effect drops out of the time series.
I would do these graphs on rate of change rather than absolute figures. The lower initial level of incidence in the vaccinated groups suggests that they are more careful/isolated/resilient than the other group. Or it could be just random noise because of the low incidence of infection anyway.
I don’t think that is what I’d happening. It is just too severe an effect.
Have you been to a vaccination centre? Everyone waits outside, one in, one out, there’s no ‘filing through a single room’.
Yes I have. And it was filing through a single room. As is ‘one in one out’. You don’t go into separate rooms per person do you. There was somebody in there before you, and the air wasn’t changed.
That’s the case even if it is a busy facility with multiple rooms.
Total nonsense. People don’t go for vaccines if they have symptoms, they wouldn’t be allowed in, and healthy people don’t transmit viruses ffs, can we stop playing into the “asymptomatic transmission” myth
I posted in January about two similar events in my city when residents of previously Covid free care homes got jabbed.
Shortly afterwards several went down with Covid but were treated in their rooms (ie not hospitalised, the Kent mutant being more virulent but less deadly).
In each home a few of the already most severely ill passed away but the staff knew they were ‘already at deaths door’ and overall mortality was normal.
“We always lose a few in January + February from flu”.
In each home some of the staff were tested positive and some had symptoms but all subsequently recovered and returned to work.
These stories were not reported in the local press but were told to me by staff members; they incidentally did not link the vaccinations with the arrival of Covid, just putting it down to coincidence.
Devon had four nursing homes say story. It is happening in many countries, not just the UK. Look up cloistered nuns in Kentucky. All infected post vaccine, three dead so far, cloistered.
I can’t help but wonder if it was the vaccine that did for Prince Phillip. His health seemed to start deteriorating not long after it was reported he had the jab.
He was 99, ffs! Lucky to be alive at that point – even if the jab pushed him over the edge, something else would have done.
Not a good example.
Excellent article, Will. The absolute difference in infection rate also seems to be tiny. And yes, it’s very worrying – although probably quite predictable – that governments are now saying vaccines aren’t the solution.
Ah, the sweet smell of scepticism returns!
Spot the problem with the following statement:
‘…new study appeared from NHS England and the University of Manchester that reassuringly confirmed’
Clue: these words are not the problem: ‘new study appeared from…..and the University of Manchester that……..confirmed’
The sceptical argument is also based on the inadequacy of the SARS CoV 2 testing regime.
How were all these ‘infections’ detected?
‘Symptomatic Covid events’……would those symptoms be similar the ones caused by over 160 other viruses and, no doubt, many more not yet isolated?
Did the testing regime test for other viruses or simply test for SARS CoV 2?
Was the test a PCR test and, if yes, what Ct threshold was used?
Quite frankly I don’t believe a word this government and the SAGE committee says. They are only in it for making money and acquiring power. Power, which the ordinary citizen, has far too easily handed over. And there is lots of money to be made from the gullible and foolish. That has been very evident over the past 12 months.
Spot on!
I’m no statistician, but I can work out that in a case matched study of around 170000 people, there must have been approx 85,000 people in each group. So the graph showing a max of less than 15 hospitalisation per 100,000 in the unvaccinated group equates to fewer than 14 actual hospitalised people, possibly much fewer if you account for the fact that group size was constantly decreasing as more elderly people in the study got vaccinated. So the differences in reported hospitalisations between the 2 groups in terms of ACTUAL numbers of people looks much less impressive. Is it even statistically significant?
You are highlighting what I keep banging on about – the importance of knowing the absolute risk reduction – the proportionate difference in terms of sample size.
You may not claim to be a ‘statistician’ – but a hell of a lot who make that claim – or claim to understand basic principles – don’t get anywhere near your crucial insight.
I suspect the error bars are substantial, and the lack of them in the graph is concerning.
Better Will, better. The ABSOLUTE differences are not statistically significant. There remains NO evidence the so-called ‘vaccines’ confer immunity or stop transmission, There is evidence that in creating ‘spike protein’ factories in human cells that they can and do create the very thing that kills people with the immune reaction people are calling ‘covid19’. Blood clots. And those factories cannot be turned off, and no-one knows which cells.
All NPIs including lockdowns are wrong headed as a means of reacting to something with an IFR of 0.15% ( probably less), masks, social distancing etc etc.
Wide-spread use of Ivermectin at an early stage, review and reduction of use of ACE-inhibitors, a targetted increase of ICU facilities and return to local smaller ‘epidemic’ hospitals would deal with the clinical side of this issue.
However the far greater issue now is the political/societal one, where ‘nudge units’ etc are openly used to manage behaviour of populations and impose totalitarian conditions to ‘change society’ with no democratic counter balance.
Absolutely agree.
For those who can’t calculate and are over 80, go ahead and have the jab if it makes you feel more secure.
Such a study among the younger will likely show no differences between the jabbed and the control group of done correctly, and on the basis of an even smaller absolute case number in both- you are bordering on innumeracy if you get the gene therapies as a healthy, younger person.
Covid is simply totally unsuited for vaccinationsas the 4 standard criteria always suggested and as this, the mutations, the side effects and the creation of asymptomatic infectiousness through them and only amongst the jabbed now proves.
Thanks for your excellent thoughts on the subject. I simply know this: I don’t trust the people who created these vaccines and I definitely don’t trust the government elites and media that is pushing them. Does anyone really believe, at this point, after months of vaccination “propaganda” and extreme salesmanship, these people and organizations would entertain any possibility that the vaccines either don’t really “work” and/or that they might be causing large numbers of negative results? Basically, those in the “watchdog” press are too wedded to the narrative to seriously challenge any component of said narrative. So we’re not going to get any serious journalism that challenges claims of the vaccine boosters.
“The figures also suggest the link between infections and admissions has also been broken by the vaccine programme.” This needs a challenge. You have previously posted a review that these figures were already disassociating at the beginning of the year or possibly before (sorry, I haven’t looked for it so can’t recall the date, may even have been late last year). Admissions/ITU admissions have not been tracking positives for some time.
yes, it seems to me that the “vaccine program” is being credited for results that were already happening without the vaccine program. Basically, no vaccine program and we’d still have the same results (i.e, a decline in cases, hospitalizations and deaths – all of which began well before even a tiny percentage of the population had been fully vaccinated).
Well said.
You’re getting tantalisingly close to taking the red pill and accepting what’s really going on.
“Ministers claimed until recently they would end the state of emergency and return things to normal when the vulnerable were vaccinated, and we took them at their word. Increasingly it seems that was, predictably enough, a mistake.”
No, not a ‘mistake’ – a lie. They have knowingly and willingly lied all along the line.
He meant the taking them at their word was a mistake, not that the bastards had said it by mistake.
I have a new game called, “Where’s Billy”. I look for the grants that any institution might have received from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when they release a particularly execrable piece of “research”. Very rewarding, as their philanthropic influence knows no boundaries and they are very transparent, (lol-imagine what the true figures must be). .
Here’s the website, in case you want to play, “Where’s Billy” too.
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants?q=University%20of%20Manchester%20
University of Manchester are not big recipients, which probably explains their absence from the big table. But they happen to get $549,765 from BMGF last year.
Whenever I see this person, it always strikes me that he neither sounds nor looks like the sharpest knife in the drawer. I know he must be streetwise – but there’s something about him that doesn’t give the impression of a professional go-getter.
.
Thanks for an excellent article again and also for the Israeli true effects of vaccination.But why did they chose 80-83 year old? Very odd. Had they chodsen anoher age band and had worse figures? I don’t think it is paranoia to discuss this very special age band.
Will is correct there are serious concerns esp. in Israel that the antibodies are dropping faster than expected also in some HCWs.This might be the thing concerning politicians.
And yesterday CEO of Moderna came out after the CEO Pfizer had said that people vaccinated needed a boster in 12 mths time.CEO Moderna said probably a booster this fall(sorry for the Americanism)
Vaccines were not silverbullet(if we take away the actual bullet victims in the beginning of the campaign) and is not giving longer immunity than flu vaccine .This vaccine will not help in a third wave(seasonal wave) next winter or hardly much if this wave more unlikely happened this summer. The whole idea that a vaccine passport will protect you for life is dead, and I imagine the anger of those receiving the vaccine for travel purposes how they will be disappointed to have the nasty vaccine again.All for nothing.Because testing will not be exempted for those countries paranoic of C-19,and for those countries not paranoic just wanting the tourist money will skip testing and vacine.
And all these millions who have been vaccinated will be bombarded now with naked propaganda to hide much of this walking back of the marketing promises. They know only one route out of this and it is to continue digging.
I can see the penny drop once the booster calls go out to the public. The hesitancy rates will shoot up, the fear machine based on the natural winter resurgence will go into overdrive and it’ll really become a war. The media will not countenance any support for the growing number of refuseniks, demonisation and psuedo science will be deployed to that end.
This gets ugly very soon. They’ve already shown their hand that this is nto about a virus. Expect Great Reset plans to be ramped up, more measures, lockdowns return in full force.
We have hope. We are right in the middle of a window of opportunity as summer approaches. People should be warned that unless we do not consent, the reopening will be taken away again.
To put it bluntly, the ‘vaccines’ are a big con.
In general real world terms, their effects in preventing undesirable outcomes appears to be less than 1% (and that figures top of the estimate range). And yet the populace is still being fed bullshit about between 60% and 90+% ‘efficacy’. This sort of nonsense is in the same league as the ‘Internet Provider ‘phone call I’ve just had.
J&J vaccines now suspended in the USA. AZ vaccines suspended around the world. Which one is next. Cdc VAERS gives a picture of disaster and it is thought that this is only 1% of actual injury. Many more reluctant to get experimental biological. Watch Del Bigtree, the Highwire last night’s show, full,of relevant information, read Robert Kennedy’s Children’s Defense Fund news out daily. Both good sources of vaccine information.
I have to agree re: Kennedy. He has real pedigree, like Reiner Fuellmich. And a capacity to consider worst case scenarios without retreating into abusing the victims or witnesses of corporate and governmental malfeasance that I find incredibly heartening.
Credit where credit is due. Good piece.
It is clear to see the bias is baked into the study, the headline is created and the political capital gained. The anomolies are left to the blogosphere to argue over. Such are the times we live in.
It’s spin and marketing. Conflicts abound. How can we trust any of this?
This demonstrates how important it is to actually read studies in full, rather than just report the conclusions of the authors. The conclusions almost always associate with the conclusions that their funders want.
Will’s done a good job here at actually looking at the study and finding some glaring issues.
Thanks. Good article.
Someone made an excellent point about studies. Scentists don’t like to lie although their future grants may depend on it. So they will bury the actual results in the middle of the paper. The discussion may be some way off the actual findings, the abstract even further and the press release may bear little relationship to the actual findings
NNT vs NNH
Data from NEJM Israeli study and Pfizer trial published by UK Gov MHRA.
(References and data summary pic in tweet link below):
https://mobile.twitter.com/JavRoJav/status/1372749574629060608
Just 214 people need to be vaccinated for 1 person to suffer a severe adverse effect. Who in their right mind would play Russian roulette with their health and for what ‘benefit’? This is scandalous.
Yes based on the NNH.
But based on just the vaccinated group in that trial its 1 in 90 (21,621÷240).
Also noted on the same Twitter thread the difference in the relative and absolute risk for the Pfizer vaxx. Good graphs, very enlightening.
Well done.
It’s possible from that to calculate absolute risk – the missing guest at the feast.
Scroll up in the twitter thread and there are several tweets referenced re Absolute vs Relative from the Trial lll data.
The ab risk is also in the pic. See “ARR” in calc extract. You have to move up 2dp to get %.
I need to see what happens right at the end of that graph, where there is a little upturn in cases and admissions starting day 40. Can we see day 80? Or would that be something awful to behold.
I remember getting an anti itch medicine for my dog. Had a quick look online to see what the side effects were. Stunning results and little size effects for three months where the graph ended. But I looked further and it was at six months where there was a surge in cancer cases and deaths (I don’t like the new ‘uptick’ word, something vile about it)
It does look like the two lines are going to converge. Which suggests that the “advantage” delivered by the vaccine may be very short-term – that would tie in with the rumoured lack of T-cell involvement in the vaccine response. Is the vaccine effect purely temporarily creating antibodies with no long-term immunity? Do these antibodies actually work on preventing infection with the real virus?
The information in the manufacturers own leaflets on the vaccines say the answers to those questions are “no” and “no”. So, Boris, I’m sure entirely accidentally, is for once quite correct. The vaccines are not the solution. Of course he is wrong about lockdowns being the solution. The solution is the same as it always has been – herd immunity achieved by the young and healthy catching the disease, combined with “warp speed” investigation of prophylactics and treatments, and stopping squandering money, time and attention on vaccines or on testing asymptomatic people.
One other thing about the numbers involved in these statistics: they are tiny. If you look at the second graph, at its widest the gap between the unvaccinated and vaccinated looks like it is about 12 per 100,000 compared to 4 per 100,000. Scaling that up on the basis of the sample size of 170,000 that’s the equivalent of 20 compared to 7 people. Out of 170,000. Just shows you what a tiny problem COVID is.
“the “advantage” delivered by the vaccine may be very short-term”
More importantly – it’s practically invisible, anyway : less than 1% in terms of absolute risk reduction.
I reckon any sane person would want a better return for submitting to an experimental treatment.
Good sceptical article about the vaccines. Hurrah!
Those two graphs, especially the first one, have statistical sophistry written all over them, as I pointed out here the other night when the story appeared in the Telegraph.
It is unbelievable that people will read these words ”…those are factors which the world is learning about…” and not question why they’re being give a drug that is STILL being ”learnt about”.
With statistics, often the thing you often need to look for isn’t the data and the graphs which are presented, but the data and graphs which are not.
The elephant in the room is this one:
Where is the graph which shows how many vaccinated people died, compared to how many unvaccinated people died? I suspect that might reveal a rather unwelcome truth about the vaccines.
@Will, you’d be doing us all a service if you could contact the authors of the study and ask for that data.
“you often need to look for isn’t the data and the graphs which are presented, but the data and graphs which are not.”
Precisely. And the one that is usually missing is, indeed, that tell-tale ‘absolute risk reduction’.
… because a figure of less than 1% improvement ain’t going to sell any vaccines.
Has seasonality been adjusted for? What has strikes me is that the decline from peak deaths to double digit deaths in 2020 was approximately 10 weeks (early April to mid June). The decline from peak deaths to double digit deaths in 2021 (mid January to mid March) was also approximately 10 weeks. If vaccines made a difference, surely we’d see a faster decline this year? I’m no expert, but it’s almost as though deaths (and infections for that matter) were going to decline anyway at this time of year without vaccines. Y’know, like they did last year? Perish the thought.
Thanks Will. A well-reasoned and very clear article. Nice to see some analysis and criticism.
These spikes in cases of COVID (and deaths) immediately following vaccination are sufficiently common every where to merit some serious scientific study. Of course for as long as the scientific community has been captured by Big Pharma no-one is likely to get any funding for such a thing.
I do wonder whether it reveals something that we may not have yet known about SARS-COV-2, and even other existing coronaviruses. Can someone be infected with it and have it lie latent in the body for many weeks or months, only for some event which stresses the immune system (in this instance the vaccine, but in other instances perhaps a stressful event, exposure to pollution, or even a cold weather snap) give the virus the opportunity it needs to become active?
We know that other viruses can behave in this way – the coldsore virus herpes simplex, for example. Why not also SARS-COV-2? It would explain a lot. Not just about the spikes in cases and deaths following vaccination, but also about the behaviour of the virus more generally.
Has everyone already had this virus in their system for a very long time?
At the risk of repeating myself ( but frankly I don’t care anymore especially as BBC MSM et. al continuously regurgitate nonsense) we really do need to look at the number of DEATHS – 835 up to 12/4/21 (521 AZ 314 PF) and 624,633 ADVERSE REACTIONS (492,105 AZ 132,528 PF).
ANYONE CARE?
It seems to be about 1 death per 45,000 people vaccinated in the UK. That seems quite a lot to me, for a medical intervention which is supposed to be protecting people.
As someone in good health in their early 50s, my risk of death from coronavirus is, according to an online calculator, around 1 in 10,000 (and that is probably diminishing fast as the virus vanishes over the summer).
So for me, the risk of death from the vaccine is approaching the risk of death from the virus in scale. And for much younger people the risk from the vaccine is probably more than from the virus.
You’d think someone in the media might be looking into this but I suppose the pockets and influence of Big Pharma and its multibillionaire lobbyists spread far and wide…
The NHS report makes reference to deaths, but appears to report only infections and hospital admissions. Why not report the deaths – did I miss something?
Stirring the pot…. I was watching one of the stock advice doom videos the other day telling me to sell all my shares and buy crypto/gold/tulips. They were looking at Warren Buffet’s Q1 share trading according to his US “13F Filing” (me neither). It wasn’t picked up by the narrator, but one of the half dozen holdings that he sold in its entirety last month was Pfizer. Routine cyclical profit-taking by a shrewd investor….. or does he know something we don’t?
Just to elaborate on Javhead’s earlier posting of a png of figures for the NEJM’s study of the Israeli trial.
No outcome – from hospitalization to death even reaches one tenth of a percent absolute risk reduction from the vaccine in this sample of half a million subjects.
This is why absolute figures are so important, when extravagant claims are being made on the basis of relative figures. The differences can be stunning.
I’d be happy for anyone to check my working.
I don’t recognise the force of your argument.
I believe the utility of relative risk reduction is that we can assume (sorry, we imagine) that the reduction will apply indefinitely.
So, I can take a course of two (experimental) injections and this will reduce my risk of ever (which should be several decades, I hope) dying of CoViD-19, by 90% (or whatever).
If I’m only concerned with making it through the next six weeks (or whatever is the length of the study period), then the absolute risk reduction (from negligible to very slightly more negligible) would, indeed, be what I weighed against the inconvenience, pain, and risks, of the injections.
In conclusion, what I’d wish to examine is an absolute risk reduction, but, specifically, the absolute reduction in my lifetime risk from CoViD-19.
What??????? Your ‘two experimental injections’ will ‘reduce [the] risk of ever …. dying of Covid-19 by 90%’
Where and how did you come by that complete fantasy?
I think you’d better go read a bit before you get engaged in this stuff.
The figures I calculated are derived from the base data of the Big Pharma concealment exercise, where they quote relative risk reduction, and use those misleading figures as a justification for the vaccines. Absolute risk reduction is the same numbers put in proper context – for six weeks, six months or six years.
The same data are the only basis upon which the act of vaccination is justified.
Had you not noticed that government is already talking about re-vaccination, as for ‘flu – not lifetime protection!
The point is that having a vaccine or not makes bugger all difference. That’s the simple bottom line.
“Where and how did you come by that complete fantasy?”
It’s simply what I remember being claimed in the interim clinical results, and then, supposedly, confirmed, by observational studies of the mass injection programmes. I’m sorry, if you thought I was presenting this as established fact.
I’m woefully underqualified to comment upon the soundness of the relative risk reduction determination, as regards both statistical significance and experimental design. However, it doesn’t appear to have been comprehensively dismissed.
Your response is high on invective, but rather less appointed with argument. You’ve done no more to explain the inutility of relative risk reduction than I had, in my comment.
Perhaps you’d like another go.
Sorry to have upset you – it’s not invective : it’s simply astonishment.
This issue is not about statistical significance (although that can also be measured) – it’s about real world significance, given that studies using samples are the only indication that we have of the effects of a particular treatment. ‘Absolute risk’ is the key measure of how much a treatment does for you, based on the sample that you are monitoring, in terms of the actual reduction in overall risk where the size of the effect is measured in terms of the difference as a proportion of the sample size.
‘Relative risk’ – the figure most quoted (and abused) simply measures the difference between treatment and non-treatment groups relative to each other.
So a reduction of only 4 subjects suffering a bad outcome in the treatment group, but 8 subjects doing so in the control group, in relative terms, suggests a difference of ((8-4)/8*100) = 50%. The reference point is simply the difference between the two numbers. Wow! It’s pretty effective.
If that is put into the context of a sample size in both groups of 100 – this becomes a difference between 8% and 4% of the sample – i.e 4%.
You can see why those selling a drug prefer the calculation of relative risk, because it can massively increase the apparent effect of that drug.
No, it’s OK; you didn’t upset me, and I’m going to leave the meta-analysis at that.
Thank you for the new reply, which I’d say is a very clear explanation of the terminology.
Perhaps I can do a better job of expressing my original point:
The absolute risk reduction pertains purely to a tiny piece of history, to a particular band of people, living through a few weeks, during which the local (to them), prevalence of CoViD-19 moved through particular levels. As such, it’s of no direct use to me, in making decisions for my future.
Moreover, had the investigators increased either or both of the duration of observation, and the prevalence in the environment(s) selected for study, they would, surely, have found a greater absolute risk reduction.
(We should look not merely at the central datum, but also at the confidence interval. As I’ve already mentioned being unqualified, I certainly shall not suggest you need accept whatever CI was reported, but let’s accept that we have credible lower and upper bounds in relative risk.)
Now, given that I am totally SARS-CoV-2 naive now, my chance of developing a “serious” case of CoViD-19, in the next few days, will, if I’ve been injected, be only 10% (say) of what it would be, had I not been injected, and this will continue to hold for all future intervals, until the precondition, my SARS-CoV-2 naivety, is no longer met. This, I believe, is a valid, and useful, application of the relative risk reduction metric.
Of course, it does not tell the whole story: maybe I have prior immunity (from other coronaviruses); maybe I’ve already “recovered” from CoViD, without even noticing; maybe prevalence is now so low I’m more likely to encounter Lord Lucan. So, no, I’m not going to look at that 90% and say, “Wow!”, because my perception (which has not been rigorously attained) is that my risk from CoViD-19 is, anyway, pretty negligible.
Please do challenge my interpretation, but I believe that the problem is not with the relative reduction metric but with its raw presentation to people who are likely to be over impressed by it. For anyone scared witless about CoViD (though, I’ve absolutely no idea why anyone would be!!!), that 90% does look good.