This is a guest post by Mike Hearn, a software engineer who between 2006-2014 worked at Google in roles involving data analysis.
The Daily Sceptic has for some time been reporting on the apparent negative vaccine effectiveness visible in raw U.K. health data. Despite some age ranges now showing that the vaccinated are more than twice as likely to get Covid as the unvaccinated, this is routinely adjusted out, leading UKHSA to un-intuitively claim that the vaccines are still highly effective even against symptomatic disease. A recent post by new contributor Amaneunsis explains the Test Negative Case Control approach (TNCC) used by authorities and researchers to adjust the data, and demonstrates that while a theoretically powerful way to remove some possible confounders, it rests on an initially reasonable-sounding assumption that vaccines don’t make your susceptibility to infection worse:
A situation where this assumption may be violated is the presence of viral interference, where vaccinated individuals may be more likely to be infected by alternative pathogens.
Chua et al, Epidemiology, 2020
Amanuensis then compares results between the two different statistical approaches in a Qatari study to explore whether violation of this assumption is a realistic possibility and concludes that the multi-variate logistic regression found in their appendix supports the idea that viral interference can start happening a few months after initial vaccination.
What other angles can we explore this idea through? One way is to read the literature on prior epidemics.
H1N1
Between 2009-2010 there was a pandemic of H1N1 influenza, better known as Swine Flu. In April 2009 a small outbreak was detected in northern British Columbia. Researchers from Canada’s public health agencies researched the outbreak by doing interviews, testing and sero-surveys of the affected population. They were especially interested in the question of how effectively the routine trivalent influenza vaccine (TIV) was protecting people against H1N1.
The effect they saw was unexpected and previously unknown: people who had taken the flu vaccine had a more than doubled chance of getting sick with flu during the H1N1 outbreak:
We present the first observation of an unexpected association between prior seasonal influenza vaccination and pH1N1 illness … participants reporting pH1N1-related ILI during the period 1 April through 5 June 2009 were more than twice as likely to report having previously received seasonal influenza vaccine.
Janjua et al, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2010
This result was shocking to the researchers. They were well aware of the impact these results could have on public support for the influenza vaccine programme and thus they didn’t merely double check their results, or request another team replicate their findings. They waited a year and a half, until six different investigations were all saying the same thing:
Canadian investigators thus embarked on a series of confirmatory studies… these showed 1.4–2.5- fold increased risk of medically attended, laboratory-confirmed pH1N1 illness among prior 2008–2009 TIV recipients… 6 observational studies based on different methods and settings, including the current outbreak investigation, consistently showed increased risk of pH1N1 illness during the spring and summer of 2009 associated with prior receipt of the 2008–2009 TIV
After the sixth study they seem to have accepted that the effect they were seeing was real.
One reason for their hesitation was that studies reported in other countries were inconclusive. Some suggested protective effects; nearly as many suggested no effect at all, and one other report showed increased risk. However, there was a very real risk of the so-called ‘file drawer’ problem, where inconvenient research simply doesn’t get published at all, and the Canadians had by this point made an enormous effort to make the conclusions go away via further research. The follow-up investigations left them with a high degree of confidence in what they were seeing, thus they explained contradictory foreign studies as being likely a result of either Canada-specific factors or flawed studies:
Findings of pH1N1 risk associated with TIV – consistent in Canada but conflicting elsewhere – may have been due to methodological differences and/or unrecognised flaws, differences in immunisation programs or population immunity, or a specific mechanistic effect of Canadian TIV. High rates of immunisation and the use of a single domestic manufacturer to supply >75% of the TIV in Canada may have enhanced the power within Canada to detect a vaccine-specific effect.
Quality analysis
How robust is this research? This is an epidemiological study and by now it’s worth being extremely sceptical of such papers, even if they run counter-narrative. Surprisingly, this paper seems quite good. It’s not written by epidemiologists and bears little resemblence to the sort of modelling papers that now dominate policy making. In particular, it:
- Makes no predictions, only studies past events to learn from them.
- Puts actual boots on the ground to gather the data they need.
- Correlates self-reported symptoms with a sero-survey.
- Makes restrained use of statistical methods (the primary results are a standard logistic regression).
- Controls for age, chronic conditions, Aboriginal status and household density, a selection which looks reasonable (the epidemic affected an Aboriginal reserve and they differ from the normal Canadian population health wise in several aspects).
- Stratifies by age. Note that Swine Flu was the opposite of COVID: it affected the young worse than the elderly.
- Honestly discusses the weaknesses of their study, which are primarily due to the small size of the epidemic rather than anything they could have addressed.
If there are errors in this work they are of a type that aren’t easily spotted by outsiders. Although we should give a tip of the hat to this team, after reading so many absurd public health papers over the past two years it’s nonetheless hard to escape the feeling that when researchers are about to violate some tenet of vaccine dogma they suddenly become model scientists, presumably in the hope that by applying higher standards they’ll find a reason why their results are wrong.
Other investigations
In 2018 Rikin et al published a study in the journal Vaccine designed to solve “the misperception that inactivated vaccine can cause influenza” which was acting as “a barrier to influenza vaccination“. They concluded that the folk intuition they were fighting wasn’t actually wrong in any meaningful way, due to the presence of viral interference:
Among children there was an increase in the hazard of [acute respiratory illness] caused by non-influenza respiratory pathogens post-influenza vaccination compared to unvaccinated children during the same period. Potential mechanisms for this association warrant further investigation. Future research could investigate whether medical decision-making surrounding influenza vaccination may be improved by acknowledging patient experiences, counseling regarding different types of ARI, and correcting the misperception that all ARI occurring after vaccination are caused by influenza.
Rikin et al, Vaccine, 2018
Although the paper claims that the mechanisms warrant further investigation, in reality at least one mechanism had been hypothesised as far back as 1960. In a seminal paper Thomas Francis Jr. coined the term “original antigen sin” to describe the way the immune system appears to prefer re-manufacturing antibodies for antigens similar to those it’s seen before, versus developing new antibodies customised for a slightly different invader. The odd name may be due to Francis Jr. having a Presbyterian priest as a father, thus OAS is sometimes summarised as “the first flu is forever”. This imprinting process can cause the immune system to misfire when challenged with a similar but different virus.
Some evidence for this comes from a 2017 review paper in the Journal of Infectious Diseases titled “The Doctrine of Original Antigenic Sin”, which stated:
Approximately 40 years ago, it was observed that sequential influenza vaccination might lead to reduced vaccine effectiveness (VE). This conclusion was largely dismissed after an experimental study involving sequential administration of then-standard influenza vaccines. Recent observations have provided convincing evidence that reduced VE after sequential influenza vaccination is a real phenomenon.
Monto et al, Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2017
Amusingly, the paper also states that, “Hoskins et al concluded at that time that prior infection is more effective than vaccination in preventing subsequent infection, an observation that remains undisputed.” How times change.
Speculating for a moment, viral interference might explain why despite influenza vaccines being advertised as having positive efficacy multiple studies have failed to find any impact on mortality at the population level (effectiveness). For example, in 2004 a U.S. government study concluded that they “could not correlate increasing vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group” and “observational studies substantially overestimate vaccination benefit”. This is difficult to reconcile with trials and studies showing efficacy at sizes smaller than overall population, but could be explained if vaccines merely redirect immune resources towards one pathogen away from equally dangerous variants. The same phenomenon was found in Italy.
There are also counter-studies. By 2018 awareness was growing of the problem of viral interference and the impact it can have on TNCC effectiveness metrics. In 2020 Wolff published a study of flu outbreaks in the U.S. military. It opens by confirming the problem highlighted by Amanuensis:
The virus interference phenomenon goes against the basic assumption of the test-negative vaccine effectiveness study that vaccination does not change the risk of infection with other respiratory illness, thus potentially biasing vaccine effectiveness results in the positive direction.
Wolff, Vaccine, 2020
This time “receipt of influenza vaccination was not associated with virus interference among our population”. However the results of this study are rather contradictory and confusing, e.g. it also says “Examining non-influenza viruses specifically, the odds of both coronavirus and human metapneumovirus in vaccinated individuals were significantly higher when compared to unvaccinated individuals (OR = 1.36 and 1.51, respectively)”. Overall, Wolff seems to have found a mixed bag of effects in which the vaccines worked against influenza, but made some other viruses easier to catch and still others harder.
Analysis
Despite the institutional pedigree of the Canadian public health researchers reporting the problem, other researchers have struggled to accept it. They are subject to the same systematic social conditioning as everyone else, which is why the HSA’s explanation of why they use the TNCC methodology starts by simply saying “vaccines work”, even though their raw data actually shows the exact opposite – for the original definition of “work”, at least.
As a consequence researchers sometimes hide this problem when it arises by deleting negative effectiveness from data sets or models. Recently UCL modellers responded to the changing UK data by simply imposing a zero lower bound. No justification was given for this, and as the above papers show, presumably no literature survey was done to sanity-check this “fix”. The Qatari study initially also did this, and thus their key results (see table 2) vary wildly between initial and final versions. Fortunately, they realised that this was not scientific and changed their approach before publication.
The problem seems to go like this: everyone knows vaccines work, thus data showing they don’t must be in error and in need of fixing. Different adjustments are tried for confounders (sometimes real, sometimes hypothetical) until the data comes good, at which point the results are published and the idea that vaccines work is reinforced, leading to a greater propensity to view opposing data as flawed and in need of correction… ad infinitum.
The raw data now departs so seriously from the conclusions drawn from it that it would require a staggeringly huge behavioural change between the two camps to explain, one which stretches credulity past breaking point. The argument that the data requires adjustment/replacement due to speculated behavioural differences has another problem: that’s a sword that cuts in both directions. UKHSA is keen to stress that its raw data shows some effectiveness against hospitalisation. But that data is hopelessly confounded at this point by the fact that vaccine recipients are being told, in no uncertain terms, that while they might well get sick with Covid after taking it, the vaccine means their case won’t be “severe” and they definitely won’t need to go to hospital. “Severe” is a vague standard. Because Covid has a wide range of severities there will be many borderline cases where going to hospital is effectively a choice that could go either way.
Opinion polling shows consistently that governments and media have catastrophically failed to educate the population about Covid correctly: people routinely estimate that the unvaccinated infection:fatality ratio is orders of magnitude higher than it really is. In a recent French survey the population estimated the IFR at an astounding 16% (the true level is closer to 0.1%-0.3%) and their understanding of severity has got worse over time. If you previously believed that you had a 16% chance of dying if you got Covid, you were very likely to rush to hospital immediately on presentation of more or less any Covid-like symptoms. If you now believe that the vaccine reduces this risk to negligible levels then you’re very unlikely to bother unless you become quite seriously sick indeed, because to do so would effectively be a repudiation of the advice of government, scientific and medical authority. And if there’s one behavioural difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated that is more plausible than any other, it’s that the vaccinated are self-selecting for strong faith in scientific claims by authority figures. I’ve not yet seen any recognition by public health that this confounder exists – they are literally telling people what to do, and then declaring victory when people do it. If hospitalisation was 100% a force of nature that involved no element free will this wouldn’t matter, but the 50% drop in A&E admissions at the start of lockdown showed quite clearly that it’s not.
Conclusions
Negative effectiveness is important because if a vaccine halves your risk of getting one virus but doubles your risk of getting a closely related virus, you can end up back at square one. In fact, you’d end up in a worse position than when you started because vaccination programmes aren’t free: they consume enormous resources, both financially and in terms of public health staffing, and cause collateral damage via vaccine injuries (hence why vaccine manufacturers refuse to accept liability for harm caused by their products). It’s therefore of critical importance to understand the gestalt effect of vaccination on the immune system, and not merely on the specific variant of a virus that was originally targeted.
The fact that papers published as recently as 2018 are talking about negative vaccine effectiveness as a new, not really understood effect should give governments serious pause for thought. Most people in public health are clearly unfamiliar with this phenomenon – as indeed we all are – and are thus tempted to either ignore it, delete it from their data, or try to convince the public that it must be a statistical artefact and anyone talking about it is guilty of spreading “misinformation”. The reports in these papers provide recent evidence that vaccines making epidemics worse is in fact a real phenomenon and that it has been previously detected by serious researchers who took every effort to avoid that conclusion.
Nonetheless, despite my harsh words about IFR education above, we must acknowledge that the UKHSA is so far standing by the basic moral and foundational principles of public statistics. Their answer to the confounders and denominators debate is clearly written, straightforward, reasonable and ends by saying:
We believe that transparency – coupled with explanation – remains the best way to deal with misinformation.
That’s absolutely true. The deep exploration of obscure but important topics by independent parties is possible in the U.K. largely because the HSA is not only publishing statistics in both raw and processed forms, but has continued to do so even in the face of pressure tactics from organisations like Full Fact and the so-called Office for Statistical Regulation (whose contribution to these matters has so far been quite worthless). England is one of the very few countries in the world in which this level of conversation is possible, as most public health agencies have long ago decided not to trust the population with raw data in useful form. While the outcomes may or may not be “increasing vaccine confidence in this country and worldwide”, as the HSA goes on to say, there are actually things more important than vaccines that people need confidence in – like government and society itself. Trustworthy and rigorously debated government statistics are a fundamental pillar on which democratic legitimacy and thus social stability rests. Other parts of the world should learn from the British government’s example.
Many questions now lie open:
- To what extent does negative effectiveness require viruses to be different? For example, is the difference between H1N1 and the flu strains targeted by the Canadian TIV bigger, smaller or the same as the gap between COVID Alpha and COVID Delta, as perceived by the immune system?
- Although highly suggestive, is this genuinely happening with COVID vaccines, or is raw negative effectiveness due to something else, e.g. a temporal artefact caused by splitting waves into two overlapping waves as effectiveness wears off, or indeed, due to lack of adjustments for factors that TNCC fixes even though it may introduce other problems?
- Should this cause health authorities to abandon TNCC as a methodology, despite its speed and cost advantages?
The fact that TNCC can artificially make vaccines appear more effective than they really are, and that this would actually have happened during the Swine Flu pandemic, should really be addressed at the highest levels before anyone uses terms like “misinformation” again.
Thanks to Amanuensis and Will Jones for their review.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Good article.
But it seems to me that what the relative failure of Brexit showed is that the EU was just one symptom of the globalism that is deeply entrenched in the whole of the West, with its centre not in Europe, but in the USA.
In fact, from many sources it appears that Britain’s Establishment was, and is, the primary European agent of globalism. Hence the concerted opposition to Brexit, the cheerleading of Britain above all the EU nations for a war against Russia and/or China, and of course the lockstep response to COVID.
Even the claim that Britain was the US “mole” in the EU does not seem implausible to me.
None of this alters the message of the article that “we” need to fight for our liberties, but the “we” needs to be carefully defined as the common people of Britain, rather than the political system, which represents them no more than the EU did.
Britain is indeed the primary agent of globalism, and a lot else I may add.. managed through its ‘good offices’ (sarc) in the City of London. Dare I mention the Rottenchilds et al. There’s a very good reason Britain was called Perfidious Albion..
What is missing here is leadership. It’s not leave or remain, it is the ability to take decisive action rather than politically correct action. One of the few politicians I see with it today is Ron DeSantis. Structures can affect ability to deliver but I do not see any conviction other than to how a message is received in the polls.
Ah.! The rise of the focus group.! People who have no clue, trying to find one in what know-nowts think. Its a poor substitute, but I think we saw during Covid that Government policy was pretty much led by public opinion polls…
Yes and when politicians pander to popularity, playing both sides as circumstance dictates, you get this mess.
But they are not pandering to popularity, they are pandering to the margins.
How popular is grooming and sexualisation of our children, Pride flags, parades, reducing the electricity supply and higher electricity prices, inflation, mass immigration… well a long list?
Public opinion was created by government policy: if the government had been honest about the trivial threat posed by the disease there would have been little support for the extreme policies put in place.
Ron DeSantis is most definitely not his own man despite giving the appearance of being one. No, just like so many others, including Robert Kennedy, he’s firmly under the control of the Zionist lobby..
So far Brexit has brought us COVID jabs a month before other EU countries… and nothing else,
So I would say Brexit so far has been a massive con perpetrated by a bunch of salesmen completely incapable of delivering what they sold.
The economic impact of Brexit has been virtually nothing. Despite the IMF, the World Bank & indeed our very own OBR & BofE consistently predicting that we’ll underperform our peer countries we’ve, slightly surprisingly, had the highest or 2nd highest growth over the past couple of years (admittedly, from a lockdown induced low).
EU peers, such as Germany, are in recession, we’re a nano % above it.
None of it’s made much difference. Of course, we’ve spent far more than the promised £350m a week on the NHS & look where that got us.
Covid was an accelerant, we’ve got to the economic state we’re in 10 years earlier than we would otherwise have done. The vaccines accelerate heart problems & possibly cancers. The authoritarian tendency heralded in by Covid nonsense accelerated the imposition of net zero, CBDC & WHO pandemic treaty & the panoply of global restrictions coming down the line.
Brexit has, so far, been a sideshow.
“we’ve, slightly surprisingly, had the highest or 2nd highest growth over the past couple of years (admittedly, from a lockdown induced low)”
The chart “G7 real GDP % change compared to pre-pandemic level” in the publication linked below shows a different picture. Comparing Q1 2023 with Q4 2019, UK is -0.5%, Eurozone is +2.2% and USA is +5.4%.
I guess it depends on the start and end dates chosen for comparison. And, as you imply, with the massive intervention of the covid policy measures, it is pretty much impossible to identify cause and effect as regards impact on economic performance.
GDP – International Comparisons: Key Economic Indicators – House of Commons Library (parliament.uk)
Its called BRINO Stewart.. Brexit in name only, they’re still all ‘in it together’ against us plebs.
Well that is true, except that does not devalue Brexit.
Brexit has been a massive con because it has not been enacted. End of.
Except we don’t actually have Brexit yet. So all of the squirming leftists blaming every bit of bad news on Brexit are WRONG. (as usual)
What we do have is many of the negative consequences of Brexit, such as lost trading opportunities with the EU due to being outside the single market.
What we don’t have of course is Ursula Von der Liar.. not that that makes a difference, they’re all equal on the corruption stakes..
The EU is a protectionist Customs Union – it is mercantilist by nature.
You confuse free movement of goods with free market trading.
When a central authority fixes the conditions of trade to exclude market disruptive innovation and technology, to stifle competition internally and exclude it externally, forcing consumers to shop only within it, a near autarkical ‘single market’ exists. That carries no benefit for consumers who have to pay more for ‘access’ to this wundermart, have less choice than otherwise if they were able to trade freely outside it.
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production. The interest of producers is to be considered only as much as it benefits consumers. – Adam Smith.
The EU is the exact opposite of that truism. Only those who are bonkers can imagine this is desirable.
I don’t understand people who think paying more to consume goods and thus making themselves poorer just in order to be part of an ideological Fascistic club is a benefit to them.
Funny old World.
Absolutely..
That’s not really true.
Selling goods to the EU is now harder as it requires customs procedures and duties that weren’t required before.
Also, British nationals can’t spend more than 3 months every 6 months in an EU country without having to go through some immigration process.
Also, the reverse is true for EU nationals in the UK.
That’s just the ones I’m aware of.
So actually, “Brexit” has happened. I think what you mean is that it has been a gigantic flop, which I would agree with.
We could debate the reasons for that, but I would put somewhere near the top of the list, if not at the very top, is that those that sold us the tale aren’t delivering. I don’t want to hear excuses about the EU not cooperating, or international organisations undermining us, the the globalist elite infiltrating our political system.
They sold us something and they haven’t delivered, They should have had a better plan for delivering. What did they think, that they wouldn’t face some resistance? That everyone would go – oh, ok, off you go then..
It’s been a giant scam by a bunch of stupid, amateurish tossers.
We’ve been governed and administered by remainers since the referendum.
Boris Johnson is not a Remainer. He’s an incompetent twat and a giant bullshitter whose bullshit eventually caught up with him.
Gove is a serpent who stands for nothing but himself as demonstrated by the way he weasels his way into positions with every government, regardless of its policies.
The British public was scammed by those two tossers who in reality couldn’t organise a piss up in a brothel.
And Farage has just washed his hands of the whole thing, He’s given up.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newsscotland/brexit-is-biggest-act-of-self-harm-in-history-of-uk-and-it-will-take-decades-to-recover/ar-AA1cUUv9
Not the COVID response? Not the policies of successive governments?
The main achievement of Brexit was highlighting that a) the public cannot always be nudged and b) there will be an endless push to ‘correct’ the public thinking.
The combination of Net Zero, lockdowns/jabbings and population replacement makes Brexit seem like a paper cut in comparison.
Speaking with my Francophile hat on.. many of my French friends are actually envious of Brexit and want Frexit.They say they were stuffed by Sarkozy and the Lisbon Treaty, and as an aside.. absolutely detest Ursula Von de Liar..
Why keep pushing this wretched ‘covid’ thing, you’re inferring there was actually a pandemic. There wasn’t.. it was a hoax, carried on the back of fake PCR testing. Fake like everything else spewed forth by governments, WEF, WHO, UN, and every other Tom-Dick or Mohammed worldwide..
There was no pandemic. Posted yet again the graph below to prove it..
Is that chart for the UK? Please clarify…
Yes.. compiled by the BMJ – British Medical Journal using ONS statistics, and first published here by our own Will Jones..
thanks
Bang on Will.
Britain is suffering from Long EU.
Symptoms: continued authoritarianism; erosion of the Common Law; protectionism; indentured servitude for its citizens; corrupt Uni-Party State; State direction of the economy to benefit cronies; alliance with global vested interests moving toward global governance.
I think we need a vaccine.
I tried to read this. But I’m tired of Brexels with no clue about the actual workings of the EU flaunting their ignorance. Apparently, they don’t have any other properties. Hence again: The EU is a confederation of states and not a federal state and it doesn’t have a government of its own. EU-wide policy decisions are made by the council of representatives of the elected governments of the EU member states and the EU commission is just the head of the EU administration which is responsible for the implementation of these policy decisions. This EU adminstration is also small enough that one could comfortably loose it in a corner of Whitehall and would need to spend some time searching in order to find it again.
What on earth has Brexit got to do with the covid pantomime?
C1984 was magicked up in order to pave the way for the initial wave of cull injections. With that undertaking out of the way the Davos Deviants could move on to Digital ID’s and CBDC and once those are in place the gates can be banged shut and the real depopulation process can begin.
That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Exactly.. well said Hux..
Thanks Will.
While we’re at that: The other fairy tale.
There are no German ambitions for European unification. The German ruling caste, which was forcibly installed by foreign powers who had fought to more-or-less avoidable world wars solely for being able to do that has ambitions to get rid of Germans as people and Germany as their nation state. This is meant to be accomplised by funneling loads and loads of German money into the EU (among other things) with the goal to reduce Germany to nothing but an EU region predominantly populated by a random selection of outcasts from all over the globe.
From my reading of history, not the stuff we get rammed down our throats from school age in the UK, I’d say you make a very valid point. Maybe one day the truth will out. I for one hope it does, and hope again that I’m still around to witness it..
I think the Brexit vote was a rare occasion on which a large number of voters ignored the advice of the establishment. Sadly that didn’t carry through to Covid. We need to be less trusting and more sceptical of the motives of each and every organisation, public, private, national, global. The larger and more global the less trusting we should be.
tof – I thought you accepted that the C1984 was a Scamdemic and if that is the case why are people rambling on about how the pantomime was run?
Definitely a scam, yes, which I think could have been thwarted if people had been more truculent.
Excellent article but……
”Boris Johnson would undoubtedly point to his vaccination programme as the prime example. He moved swiftly ahead while the EU was mired in internal processes” and no mention that it was in fact one of the most unmitigated disasters inflicted upon the British people since WW2. 2,300 plus deaths thousands upon thousands of adverse reactions causing many many life changing injuries including amputations and no proof anywhere (oh except of “the models”) of any life saved. The elephant is still very much in the room even in TDS.