A recent study titled ‘Averted mortality by COVID-19 vaccination in Belgium between 2021 and 2023’ published in the journal Vaccine claims that 12,800 COVID-19 deaths among people aged 65 years and over were averted, representing a reduction in Covid mortality of 54%. Presumably the study was carried out in good faith and, while it does mention potential limitations related to confounding factors and potential over diagnosis of COVID-19 cases, it also omits to include other limitations which, if considered, would reduce the deaths averted and lower the reduction in mortality.
Even taken at face value, the results may not be especially impressive, raising the question of how effective COVID-19 vaccines are and whether they are worthwhile. The answer to the first question is “not very”. The second can only really be answered by a health economist, but the answer is probably “most likely not”.
We’re well used to hearing, in addition to being very safe, that the COVID-19 vaccines were highly effective, with figures as high as 100% being quoted, but these figures were misleading. Vaccine companies are wont to express vaccine effectiveness in terms of relative risk reduction (RRR) instead of the recommended absolute risk reduction (ARR).
For infections with low mortality, ARR can be much lower than RRR and conveys the true figure for how much less likely a person is to become infected or die if they are vaccinated compared with being unvaccinated. It transpires, compared with other common vaccines, that none of the COVID-19 vaccines are much good. For example, figures of 20%, 5-20% and 5-15% are quoted for ARR to prevent infection of smallpox, cholera and yellow fever vaccines, respectively. In contrast, the ARR of COVID-19 vaccines to prevent infection hovers around and rarely exceeds 1%.
While the ARR of the COVID-19 vaccines (to prevent death) was not reported in the Belgian study, it is possible, with the figures presented, to estimate it at 0.85%. This means that the number of people needing to be vaccinated (NNV) to prevent a single death is 117. To prevent 10 deaths the NNV is 1,170 people.
Accepting that saving life is important, how robust are the results of the study? The limitations already referred to by the authors could potentially reduce the number of survivors and alter the above figures (lowering the ARR and increasing the NNV). However, the further limitations not considered by the authors, include the ‘cheap trick’ and the ‘healthy vaccinee effect’ (HVE).
The cheap trick, described by Martin Neil, Norman Fenton and Scott McLachlan, involves the method whereby people are classified as unvaccinated. This varies across studies but involves the inclusion of people who have received a dose of a vaccine yet remain classified as unvaccinated for a specified period. In the case of studies of COVID-19 vaccines this can be as long as 21 days but, as in the Belgian study, is often 14 days.
While it may make some immunological sense thus to classify, there is no agreement on precisely when protection from COVID-19 purportedly kicks in and ‘a couple of weeks’ is the time usually quoted. The effect of classifying early vaccinated people as unvaccinated increases the apparent effectiveness of the vaccine compared with correctly classifying them as vaccinated. Neil, Fenton and McLachlan estimate that the cheap trick can provide vaccine effectiveness of 70-90% even if a vaccine is completely ineffective.
Contrast the misclassification of the vaccinated people as unvaccinated at the beginning of a study with the use of intention to treat (ITT) analysis at the end of a clinical trial. ITT means the final statistical comparison of the treatment and control groups includes everyone who was allocated to the arms of the study, regardless of whether they dropped out, died or were discontinued for other reasons.
ITT protects against potential differences in the attrition from either arm of the trial. This principle is directly violated by the misclassification of vaccinated people as unvaccinated in vaccine studies such as those used to evaluate COVID-19 vaccines due, amongst other things, to the healthy vaccinee effect.
The HVE is based on the evidence that those who tend to accept vaccination differ from those who refuse vaccination. The former group tends to be healthier and to be comprised of people who make healthier life choices throughout life including (because they assume that it is a good choice) to be vaccinated. Of specific relevance to the Belgian study is the fact that people who are more likely to die soon after – regardless of the effect of COVID-19 – are less likely to accept vaccination.
Very small apparent uptake of vaccine doses can have large healthy vaccinee effects in studies. For example, the apparent effect of a vaccine will be reduced by between 25-75% if the number of doses of a vaccine refused based on the HVE differs by between 0.6-1.9%.
In retrospective studies of vaccination, such as the Belgian study, the cheap trick and the HVE if not considered will work synergistically to exaggerate the apparent effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines. If a conservative 15% adjustment is made to the figures in the Belgian study due to the application of the cheap trick, then deaths averted falls to 10,880, ARR to 0.726% and NNV increases to 138. If the effect of the cheap trick is larger and the HVE is large, then the statistics related to the COVID-19 vaccine could be much less impressive.
None of this means that COVID-19 does not have the potential to kill older people or that the COVID-19 vaccines do not work. But the fact remains, if they do work, we still do not know how effective they are. In addition, the harmful effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, including death, which are now well documented, should be considered. Even if the NNT really is 117, as reported in the Belgian study, that means that for each life saved, 116 people have been exposed to potential harm by the COVID-19 vaccines. If one person of the 116 dies of vaccine harm, then the net benefit of the vaccines is zero.
Considering the issues explored — ranging from the modest absolute risk reduction (ARR) reported in observational studies to methodological concerns such as the healthy vaccinee effect and time-dependent misclassification — the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in preventing death, particularly among older people, may have been overstated in key studies. While some level of benefit is plausible, the extent of that benefit must be critically appraised in view of these well-documented biases.
Public health decisions must rest on transparent, unambiguous evidence. If the purpose of mass vaccination is to prevent death at scale, then accurate estimations of the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) and deaths truly averted are essential. Anything less undermines both scientific integrity and public trust.
Dr Roger Watson is Professor of Nursing at Saint Francis University, Hong Kong SAR, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.
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Mmmmmm, up to a point Lord Copper. It all depends on who you vaccinate. Fatality rate in the under 40s was effectively 0. But lets suppose it was 0.1%. So, 1 case in 1,000 died. In this instance if the vaccine was 20% effective you’d have to vaccinate 5,000 people who all went on to catch covid to save a life.
Of course, as many people already had natural immunity, far better than vaccine, then you’d need to treat say 10,000 to save a life. However, the vaccines were very leaky. If only 50% leaky you’re quickly up to 20,000 vaccinated to save a life.
Vaccinate the elderly & the vaccines were even more leaky & probably negatively efficacious in terms of contagion.
Finally, no one has ever been able to point out the unvaccinated dead. There should have been piles of them. I never saw nor can discern them in the data.
Finally, no one has ever been able to point out the unvaccinated dead. There should have been piles of them
2021 and 2022 were the winters of death for the unstabbinated….even with their data fraud, only 5% of the dead were unquacked.
There was no pandemic. There is no such thing as a bat virus and the quackcines only kill and injure.
I have zero confidence that statistics referring to “covid deaths” are worth anything, for reasons that most of us here will already be aware of – the fast track death certificates, the hysteria, the testing with incredibly sensitive thresholds, the failure to distinguish between “of” and “with”.
Show me all cause mortality by age band, “vaccinated” vs purebloods, and compare that to some reasonable baseline taken over a longish period, say 10 years, maybe adjust if possible for general state of health. If you can detect anything more than noise, I will start paying attention.
I can understand the idea that “protection” is not immediately inferred on a person at the moment of the injection (if you accept that any protection is inferred at all – I don’t).
However, if someone dies within the “cheap trick” period then you cannot discount the injection as a course of death (or serious injury), you have to at least investigate the possibility, so it was always a double cheap trick – a despicable and onerous trick.
Once upon a time this would require an autopsy/post mortem to confirm cause of death.
Of course these could be modified, but should be performed to the satisfaction of a Coroner, who you sort of need to be beyond reproach and impeccably honest and ethical.
This is further compounded by the very serious issue of died with, or died from, yet another cheap and nasty trick, along with the equally despicable died within 28 days of a PCR positive result, assumed to be as died from.
If we ever expect them to admit they were neither safe, nor effective, we’ll never hear that admission!
And didn’t they make it bureaucratically less onerous to write out death certificates with Covid-19 on them? Back then, I suggested that the late Harold Shipman, the serial murderer, would have loved it. He might have avoided suspicion, after all.
Adolf Eichmann would have liked it as well.
Nobody has ever defined what COVID-19 actually is! What are the specific symptoms of this disease/illness?
The WHO defines COVID-19 symptoms as follows:
The most common symptoms are: fever, chills, sore throat.
Less common symptoms are: muscle aches and heavy arms or legs, severe fatigue or tiredness, runny or blocked nose, or sneezing, headache, sore eyes, dizziness, new and persistent cough, tight chest or chest pain, shortness of breath, hoarse voice, numbness or tingling, appetite loss, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain or diarrhoea, loss or change of sense of taste or smell, difficulty sleeping.
In other words, the WHO simply took all possible cold symptoms and added stomach problems, so as to cover the complete spectrum of common, day-to-day illnesses.
And no specific symptom whatsoever.
The only way anyone could determine they supposedly had COVID-19 was via the PCR test (actually, process), which its inventor said should never be used to diagnose illness.
And then pharmaceutical companies suddenly threw all those ‘vaccines’ out on to the market, all in record time, all clearly having been insufficiently tested, because any medication, let alone a vaccine, requires a minimum of 10 years development and test to pass normal certification requirements.
If you cannot define one symptom of COVID-19, specific only to that disease, then clearly there was no such illness, in which case there can be no effective countermeasure, let alone a vaccine.
But it saved over 8 million (pick a figure and I’ll add the noughts) and never harmed nor will ever harm a soul –
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35436552/
https://jessicar.substack.com/p/the-immunological-mechanism-of-action
https://jessicar.substack.com/p/autoimmunity-and-tolerance?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
Isn’t it worse than that, in as much as the way in which so-called vaccines are easier to get to market than other drugs? Looks like an incentive to reclassify things as vaccines, by dint of redefinition, to wheedle out of the uneconomic system (from the pharma perspective)
When I was just looking through the internet in 2020, it was claimed that a vaccine generally took 15 years of development and test, since you are going a step further, beyond the stage of finding a medicine to treat a disease. But past are the days when regulatory authorities responsible to check the work of pharmaceutical companies actually used to investigate and question their products. In our modern, capitalistic world, it appears that pharmaceutical companies finance the authorities to a large extent. And, clearly, if you can sell a vaccine millionfold, you are presumably making a lot more profit than from some simple tablet medication.
Exactly this. As far as I have been able to establish, the “covid” thing that killed people was cytokine storm – immune system overreaction. Everything else just looks like cold/flu/pneumonia rehashed and anyone who died was probably “with” rather than “of”. From what I have read, the initial “variant” triggered this much more often than subsequent variants, though perhaps it was also the case that the few unfortunate people for whom this was a problem had already died. Whether the “vaccines” actually helped prevent this particular cause of death I rather doubt – in fact they seem to cause problems for the immune system and invoke an inflammatory response. Died “of” numbers if they are real at all, are much smaller.
I only ever heard of cytokine storms happening after COVID ‘vaccinations’. I had never heard of the term before.
I did read about it before the “vaccines” – as I am in long term remission from an autoimmune disorder this was of particular interest to me.
It was very suspicious, and proof it was all a lie when they gave the “vax” to the control group in the trials – totally invalidates the trials and renders them null and void! You just can’t do that!
The only control group are us brave souls who suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, bullying, threats and coercion to resist the pressure and remain unvaxxed.
The only genuine control group are those who acquired fake certificates. The rest of us were cut off from public life and this may have affected many other things in our lives. They can only actually look into this if they issue a general amnesty for all those who used fake certificates. So far there is no preparedness to do this. Isn’t it strange that nobody wants to discuss this. Even the official statistics speak of vaccinated persons rather than persons holding certificates. It’s almost as if there is an issue they don’t want on the table because they are afraid of something.
I would like a study comparing morbidity and mortality between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
Dr. Clare Craig is trying to get the data through the courts and I hope she is successful.
This ‘head in the sand’ attitude regarding potential vaccine harms is utterly unhelpful.
Can we not get a team together to do this study? What is holding us back? Is it purely lack of access to data? Funding?
I am not sure if valid data are available for such a comparison. Denis Rancourt’s work analysing mortality data from 125 countries clearly shows increased mortality linked to vaccination roll-out. (https://denisrancourt.ca/)
I agree. You would have to really make sure you design a good study first. Maybe using hospital data? Is there a difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated people ending up in hospita, whilst taking into account that most people were vaccinated? Comparing a vaccinated vs non-vaccinated cohort? This may be more difficult.
The data will be slightly murky, but I think it is possible with high enough numbers.
Even so this would not be double blind data. Doctors may see a patient is not vaccinated and has a nasty cough and then put that person on a ventilator that ends up killing them, while the same person had they been vaccinated would have been sent home and survived. So one would need to clarify who in the hospital had access to vaccination data and whether any decisions were influenced by it.
It would end up as a retrospective study looking at levels of vaccine side-effects, not necessarily vaccine effectiveness. For instance looking at all hospital patients with their diagnosis (cancer, heart disease, neurological disease, reproductive problems to name a few) and vaccination status. If the numbers looked at are high enough we may end up with something meaningful. That will probably be easiest? Else looking at population data, but this might be more prone to errors and bias.
For a start, deaths cannot be averted but only postponed. Anybody claiming that anything big pharma did averted even one death is obviously not fit to call themself a scientist.