In 2021, we were flooded with visuals showing us how effective the mRNA vaccines were against death from Covid. We saw, for example, that the Covid mortality graph of those who completed the two-dose protocol was substantially lower than that of the unvaccinated. To strengthen the point, we were shown a consistent pattern across age groups or after age adjustment.
Much of this was an illusion. Back then, they did not display comparable graphs for non-Covid deaths. If they did, we would have seen that the vaccinated also fared better on non-Covid mortality. Of course, no one expects these vaccines to prevent death from cancer, heart disease, stroke and so on.
The pseudo-effectiveness of Covid vaccines against death from unrelated causes is not a new observation. The same kind of pseudo-effectiveness was discovered long ago for the flu vaccines. It is called the ‘healthy vaccinee effect’. For various reasons unrelated to the vaccines, people who are vaccinated have better background health on average than people who are not, and therefore they are less likely to die from ‘anything’, including flu and Covid. Vaccinated or not, they would have had lower Covid mortality than their unvaccinated counterparts.
When we try to estimate the effect of Covid (or flu) vaccines, the healthy vaccinee effect becomes the healthy vaccinee bias, a source of distortion that must be removed. (Conversely, we may call it the ‘unhealthy unvaccinated’ bias.) Research on this topic has been sparse, however. Neither the pharmaceutical industry nor public health officials have had an interest in discovering that common vaccines were not as effective as they claimed them to be, or perhaps not effective at all.
A recent study from the Czech Republic has made significant contributions to the scientific literature on Covid vaccines and the healthy vaccinee effect. First, the authors observe the phenomenon in an additional country, lending support to its universal nature. Second, they provide clear evidence that those who chose (or were coerced) to be vaccinated were indeed healthier. Third, they show that the phenomenon is consistent along the sequence of doses, as was evident in U.K. data for booster doses: those who continued to the next dose were healthier than those who did not. Lastly, they demonstrate that the observed pattern in their data can be reproduced by simulated data when a vaccine has no effect and only the healthy vaccinee effect is operating. It is worth reading the paper in full, whether or not you are a science specialist.
What was done in the study?
The authors computed rates of all-cause death in periods of Covid waves and in periods of low (almost no) Covid deaths. The latter are essentially rates of non-Covid death, which means that any ‘effect’ of the Covid vaccines during these periods is a pseudo-effect: it is the healthy vaccinee phenomenon alone. In each period, they compared the mortality rate between the unvaccinated and various groups of vaccinated people.
I will discuss one key topic: the pseudo-effect of the two-dose protocol, starting four weeks after the second dose when people are considered fully protected. To focus on that group versus the unvaccinated, I added oblique arrows to Figure 2. Notice that these bars show rates, not counts, of deaths in a period with low Covid deaths (green panel). Again, although these are deaths from any cause, 99.7% were not related to Covid. Therefore, they may be considered rates of non-Covid death, and that’s what I will call them.
In each age group, the rate of non-Covid death in the effectively vaccinated (yellow) is much lower than the rate in the unvaccinated (black). Of course, that’s a pseudo-effect of the vaccines. That’s the healthy vaccinee effect, or bias when trying to estimate the true effectiveness against Covid death.
The authors kindly provided their data, which are summarised in my table for the low-Covid period.
As you can see from the computation, the ‘bias factor’ (last row) is simply the inverse of the pseudo-effect of vaccination. It tells us how much more likely the unvaccinated are to die ‘in general’, as compared with those who completed the two-dose protocol at least four weeks earlier. Formally, it should be called the bias correction factor, but we’ll keep it short.
My next table compares the results from the Czech Republic to data from the U.K. and the U.S. in similar age groups (my computation from the available data).
Notably, the bias factor in data from different countries and cultures varies in a narrow range: between 2 and 3.5. It is lower in the oldest age group but is still at least 2. Overall, the unvaccinated are two to three times more likely to die from various causes than the fully vaccinated.
Other data indicate that the gap narrowed over time (because unvaccinated survivors were ‘healthier’ as time went on and some of the less healthy died), but it lasted months, not a few weeks. When a third dose was introduced, the healthier moved to the three-dose group, leaving behind a sicker group of ‘only two doses’. As a result, the two-dose group now appeared to have higher mortality than the unvaccinated. This observation was mistakenly interpreted as evidence of vaccine-related deaths (which unquestionably happened).
To remove the healthy vaccinee bias, we multiply the biased rate ratio of Covid death by the bias factor, as explained elsewhere. For example, if the biased rate ratio of Covid death is 0.4 (60% ‘vaccine effectiveness’) and the bias factor is 2.5, the correct effect on Covid death is 0.4 × 2.5 = 1, which is 0% vaccine effectiveness.
I will conclude with another example of the healthy vaccinee bias and the true effectiveness after correction.
A study of U.S. veterans presented survival graphs of fully vaccinated and unvaccinated elderly people following a PCR test (figure below). I will consider a death following a positive PCR as ‘Covid death’ and a death following a negative PCR as ‘non-Covid death’. It is just an approximation, of course, but that’s all we can get from the paper to distinguish between the two types of death. Studies of Covid vaccines rarely report data on non-Covid death by vaccination status, so we often have to derive such data from whatever is provided.
I visually estimated the risk of death at three time points, where the survival probabilities for a pairwise comparison were close to the marks on the Y-axis (2% intervals). My rough estimates are summarised in the busy table below.
As you can see, correcting for the healthy vaccinee bias has changed estimates of effectiveness from around 70% to around 10%. And that’s not the only bias in observational studies of Covid vaccines. Differential misclassification of the cause of death is another strong bias. Would any effectiveness have remained if all the biases could have been removed? Were lives indeed saved by these vaccines?
Let me end with a comment not on Covid vaccines, but on flu vaccines.
If you look at the U.S. CDC website, you will find data on the effectiveness of the flu shot each year. Usually, it does not exceed 50% in the elderly (a risk ratio of 0.5). By now, you should be able to compute the correct effectiveness, say, with a bias factor of 2.
Dr. Eyal Shahar is Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the University of Arizona. His latest book The Covid Pandemic: Unconventional Analytical Essays (2020-2023) is available now.
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Some of the truth is crawling out of the woodwork. It might actually be that it is not zero efficacy in reality, though. That is to say, it might actually be negative, or a cause of some deaths, albeit allocated to other diseases that were exacerbated in the medium, or longer, term.
Notwithstanding the dubious accuracy of using PCR alone as a method of determining whether death was caused by Covid-19, the rough calculations make sense. There has been a lot of blatant lying about the promotion of the product under question, and a list as long as your arm at the bureaucratic attempts at intervening in human rights, and associated opportunism as well.
I don’t really understand this too well.
It seems to me that a jab that is more likely to kill you than help you doesn’t have zero efficacy but negative efficacy.
And as ToF points out repeatedly, a jab that doesn’t protect you from a disease isn’t a vaccine. It’s just a chemical concoction.
Surely someone who believes that a jab doesn’t have any efficacy should stop calling it a vaccine.
Indeed. Outside of the “PCR test” which seems of questionable provenance, I’m not even sure “covid” has been defined accurately enough to make it possible to develop a “vaccine” for it or to measure the efficacy of such a product. “Covid” seems to be a ragbag of symptoms as long as your arm, that overlap with colds and flu, with no clear defining features and I’m not even clear exactly how the “experts” allege it causes death. Perhaps it weakens the frail and they then get pneumonia which kills them. The old and frail have weaker immune responses so how any “vaccine”, even if it were a genuinely effective product, can help them much is doubtful. Given all this, how can a “covid death” be defined well enough to make any statistics meaningful given the vagueness of it all and the inconsistent and slapdash way it was measured, from tests administered by amateurs to death certificates waved through with scant details, deliberate obfuscation or lack of collection of key statistics. The thing was a circus, a theatrical event. There may have been a novel virus and it may have killed a few people who would otherwise have died slightly later, but more than that I don’t think we can say – there was no huge global leap in all cause mortality that indicates a “deadly pandemic” of the kind that posed a threat to society – and even all cause mortality figures are not that useful because the lockdowns and changed care protocols may well have accounted for any changes that did occur.
I couldn’t agree more about not understanding this article. It seemed as if he were saying that the unvaccinated were less healthy whereas I’m sure I’ve seen articles saying the reverse, eg on Children’s Health Defence. It doesn’t make sense anyway, does it?? I don’t believe it!
You would’ve thought it would be the healthy predominantly that were the unvaccinated, as they were healthy enough to trust their immune system. I’m sure if they did a survey they would find more fitness fanatics were unvaccinated.
I fully agree. As far as I can see it was more of an unhealthy vaccinee effect..”I’ve got asthma, I’m overweight, I suddenly knew more people with “compromised” immune systems
I completely agree about the healthy being mainly the ones not vaccinated and I’m sure that’s more likely to be the case. Children’s Health Defense would know. Think Will Jones would too. This article is odd and it’s odd to be on Daily Sceotic. Unless I’ve totally misunderstood it!!
I’ve been somewhat hit and miss lately so apologies if I’m a bit behind, but please try and watch Dr Campbell’s video. I can’t see anything on DS covering the paper.
Excess Deaths in the United Kingdom: Midazolam and Euthanasia in the COVID-19 Pandemic …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3cqo9V2MzM
The link below is to the full report
https://www.medclinrese.org/open-access/excess-deaths-in-the-united-kingdom-midazolam-and-euthanasia-in-the-covid19-pandemic.pdf
“New Study From Czech Republic Confirms Covid Vaccines Have Around Zero Efficacy Against Death”
So more likely to kill you than save you from death.
Brilliant. Fantastic. “The science” at its best.
People need to swing for this. Happy to open the trap.
Jacob Rees Mogg in his State Of The Nation speech on euthanasia…..”We wouldn’t want to rename the National Health Service as the National Death Service”….Think that ship has sailed on that one re PATHWAYS, maybe you should’ve joined Andrew Bridgen in Parliament last year when they discussed it. DNRs. Morphine & Medazolam, and the one size fits all with ventilators. That was the ‘pandemic’.
Another slip up by Greta:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnLc77LqXFE
Defective Programming…..destroy, destroy.
Not many comments here which is unusual. This article is odd and I don’t understand it, nor why Daily Sceptic has published it. Am I missing something?
I don’t really follow the stats in this article, but it seems to me that there are two cohorts of “unvaccinated.”
Unless you can separate-out the two groups, then it seems to me (as a non-expert or statistician) then the findings in this report are, shall we say, unreliable?
It took me sometime to understand this as I consider myself as a healthy unvaccinated and I needed to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. By and large the healthy metropolitan elite et al were all vaccinated. Those that can afford organic food, good health care, good supplements etc. were vaccinated. On reflection it’s more likely, as this article suggests, that the poorer, deprived ‘unhealthy’ weren’t vaccinated but they would have died anyway regardless of vaccine due to deprivation.
it would be helpful if this was suggested in the article to avoid confusion.