In a paper published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, Haas and his colleagues argued that the Pfizer vaccine averted over 5,000 deaths in Israel in the first quarter of 2021, during the Covid wave that coincided with the first vaccination campaign (Figure 1).
I will show here that their claim is false. If any deaths have been averted at all, the number is far from their estimate — undetectable in mortality statistics.
There is more than one way to show the falsehood of claims about exceptional benefits of Covid vaccines. I will rely on comparative data from Sweden. The country that showed the world the futility of lockdowns and mask mandates will prove helpful again.
Both Israel and Sweden faced a major Covid wave in the winter of 2020-2021, but the timing deferred by about one month (Figure 2). In Sweden, the mortality wave began in November and peaked in late December, whereas in Israel the mortality wave began in December and peaked in late January. Case waves (not shown) are shifted to the left by about two weeks.
To allow for a fair comparison, I will examine mortality in a five-month period that contains the full mortality wave in Sweden: November 2020-March 2021.
Unlike Israel, Sweden experienced the winter wave largely unvaccinated. By the time the mortality waves subsided, at the end of March 2021, only 10% of the population of Sweden received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine as compared with 55% of the population of Israel. At the end of February the numbers were 5% and 50% respectively.
The Sweden population is somewhat larger than that of Israel (10.4 million versus 9.2 million), but as far as mortality is concerned, the key difference is the size of the elderly population (over-65 years old). It is about twice as large in Sweden: two million versus one million. Consequently, all-cause mortality in Sweden has been 2-2.5 times all-cause mortality in Israel (Figure 3). In recent years the ratio has been essentially stable, just above 2. The value of 1.9 in 2019 reflects exceptionally low mortality in Sweden before the pandemic.
Figure 4 shows the cumulative number of reported Covid deaths in each country, at the beginning and the end of the period of interest, along with the percentage of the population that received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine by four time points. The graphs are shown on a log scale, which visually captures changes, or lack of changes, in the ratio of the number of deaths: when the curves look parallel, the ratio is maintained. If Israel fared better than Sweden, the curves should have diverged. They did not.
In early November 2020, the Covid mortality ratio was 2.3 (5,995÷2,569). At the end of March 2021, it was 2.2 (13,583÷6,205). In between, the ratio was 2.1 (7,588 Covid deaths in Sweden versus 3,636 in Israel). That is exactly the typical mortality ratio for Sweden versus Israel in recent years.
Haas et al. claim that Israel should have seen over 8,000 Covid deaths in the absence of vaccination (Figure 1), which implies over 16,000 Covid deaths in unvaccinated Sweden and an expected mortality ratio of about 4. The actual number of deaths in Sweden was 7,588, and the mortality ratio was 2.1, as we just saw. Where is the evidence that 5,000 deaths were averted in vaccinated Israel, but 10,000 deaths were not averted in Sweden (twice as many, proportionally)? There is none here.
Reported Covid deaths have been subject to misclassification. In both Israel and Sweden, many deaths with Covid have been counted as deaths from Covid. So let’s check, next, all-cause mortality in the relevant period. Is there evidence of thousands of averted deaths in Israel, but not in Sweden?
Figure 5 shows the number of all-cause deaths in the two countries between November and March in the past two decades (winter mortality). Again, the ratio has been maintained in recent years: about twice as many deaths in Sweden than in Israel in that five-month period.
As shown in the bar graph on the right, the same ratio (1.9) was maintained between November 2020 and March 2021: 43,954 deaths in Sweden versus 22,830 in Israel. If the vaccination campaign in Israel averted 5,000 deaths, the ratio should have increased from a baseline of 2 to about 2.3, because the number of deaths in unvaccinated Sweden should have been higher by thousands of ‘non-averted deaths’. Where is the evidence, in all-cause mortality, that a highly vaccinated country fared better than a largely unvaccinated country? Again, there is none here.
Lastly, let’s compare excess mortality in that period (Figure 6). Notice, first, that the ratio of expected deaths in Sweden versus Israel is, again, close to 2 (40,000÷21,000), using independent assumptions on expected deaths.
Israel’s Health Ministry has estimated 9.5% excess mortality in a four-month period (November 2020 excluded), similar to my most conservative estimate (8.9%), which included November. If 5,000 deaths were averted, excess mortality in that period — in the absence of vaccination — should have been over 30%! But excess mortality in Sweden was essentially identical to Israel (less than 9%).
Whichever metric is used to compare unvaccinated Sweden with vaccinated Israel — reported Covid deaths or all-cause deaths — there is nothing to indicate any deviation from the usual pattern of comparative mortality in the two countries: twice as many deaths in Sweden. Judging from excess mortality, the death toll of the winter Covid wave was identical. It is impossible to reconcile these data with thousands of averted deaths in Israel by the Pfizer vaccine.
Lockdowns were futile and detrimental, mask mandates were futile, Covid vaccines were marginally beneficial, futile, or worse, and influential studies of vaccine effectiveness contain at least one major flaw, and probably more.
These truths will become common knowledge when contemporary, brainwashed Covid scientists are replaced by a new generation of scientists with inquisitive minds. Then, it will be the job of sociologists to explain how gross falsehoods, like the one discussed here, have reached the pages of medical journals during the Covid era.
Dr. Eyal Shahar is Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the University of Arizona. This article first appeared on Medium.
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Apologise? Er, I think all the British people historically involved in slavery back in the day are dead. So who is meant to apologise? How can you apologise on behalf of dead people? What a load of nonsense. What possible meaning can that have?
Let’s be honest, isn’t “apologising for slavery” more like “apologising for the relative success of European civilisation compared to Africa”?
What’s needed more often and more loudly is for someone with a brain to cut through the crap and spell it out for the hard-of-thinking.
Congratulations, keep it up.
I do not apologise.
I have never enslaved anyone.
If I had enslaved someone inadvertently I would probably apologise. As I have not, I won’t.
If I had enslaved someone deliberately then any apology would be hollow.
.
I firmly agree with your full stop.——–Just kidding
At least it is not a pointless comment.
Wish I had thought of that —-funny
You are too kind.
It is the sort of comment that I have to come here to make as Mrs Faffor had a humour bypass at birth.
There is a great deal of nonsense talked regarding the slave trade.
‘….military enslavement was by far the most significant method is important, for it means that rulers were not, for the most part, selling their own subjects but people whom they, at least, regarded as aliens. The fact that many exported slaves were recent captives means that they were drawn from those captured in the course of warfare who had not yet been given an alternative employment within Africa. In these cases, rulers were deciding to forgo the potential future use of these slaves. Some of the exports were slaves whom local masters wished to dispose of for one reason or another and those who had been captured locally by brigands or judicially enslaved.
This is exactly the situation described by da Mosto in his account of Jolof in 1455. After a description of the use of the slaves in the domestic economy, da Mosto noted that most slaves were captured in wars with neighboring countries and the civil wars. Many of these captives were integrated into the domestic economy, but the rest were sold to the “Moors” for horses.’
The Process of Enslavement and the Slave Trade
John K. Thornton
‘Military enslavement’ was as old as the hills. Once the apologies start, we will all have to apologise to each other and to ourselves.
At least Britain abolished the wretched trade……so could we ask the entire world to give us a round of applause, please, while we all give ourselves a big pat on the back…..
Or, alternatively, could the ‘apology’ blighters, whoever they may be, just drop the venality and stop being so silly?
White Slaves were 40% of the Roman empire’s population. A similar amount within the various Greek empires. Celts, Saxons, Teutons, the Vikings were all focused in large part on White slaving.
Then we have the Musulmans. 25 million White Slaves. 50 million Black Slaves. Don’t hear a god damn thing about it. One reason for the Viking invasions of this country was to provide White slaves to the Caliphs in North Africa and the Middle East.
Today right now in Africa some 5 million Blacks are enslaved by Arabs, Muslims and other Blacks. Zero whites involved.
This year and every year some 5000 Black Christian Nigerians will be killed by Black Muslims and if female, likely raped beforehand. Hundreds, probably thousands are sex enslaved by Black Muslims every single year, some are young school girls. But they are Black Christians so who gives a shyte – no one, not even the useless Churches.
I also hear there are no black people running around in Arab countries because the Arabs castrated their slaves. ——-Forgotten slavery: The Arab-Muslim slave trade | FairPlanet
No one today should apologise for the actions of anyone who was alive 100, 200, 300 years ago etc. Otherwise the Germans would never be done apologising. But how many people today blame Germans for what Germans did in the last 2 wars? It is well understood that those Germans back then were to blame for their actions and this has nothing to do with Germans alive today. —–Should Joachim von Heisenberg working as a butcher in Mannheim have anything to apologise for because his grandfather was in the SD or SS? ——Ah but the butcher in Mannheim is not the government I hear people say. —–But todays governments were elected by people alive today not by dead people who might have committed atrocities in the past and those current politicians cannot be held responsible for the actions of previous generations of politicians. ——-This “apologising” nonsense is like many other things in todays world political. Political agenda’s are behind all of the apologising, just as the wealthy western world is now apologising for having “appropriated” the earths atmosphere by it’s use of fossil fuels and must now pay the price for that by fobbing its citizens off with inferior energy solutions at great expense by way of “Apology”.
Indeed but as I said above it’s nothing to do with actions hundreds of years ago. It’s about the “success gap” now.
And the Arab persecution and enslavement of black Africans is still happening to this day, but because whites or Jews aren’t the so-called ”oppressors” in these examples, the West turns a hypocritical blind eye. Once more the Muslims seemingly have protected status, because ‘Islamophobia’. The Western ‘powers that be’ prefer to talk about and scapegoat the phantom menace that is the ‘far-right extremists’ but a quick look at any crime figures on terrorism easily contradicts their hollow assertions;
”Since Arabs first invaded Africa in the seventh century, murderous raids targeting innocent civilians have been a common feature of the spread of Islam in Africa. Today, in Mauritania, Black Mauritanians whose ancestors were taken into captivity centuries ago and whose status as chattel has been passed down through the generations, live in bondage, serving as slaves to their Arab Berber masters. Even though indigenous Africans in Mauritania were converted to Islam after the Arab conquest, race has trumped religion, and the Arab Berber rulers have treated the Black Mauritanians as they would infidels.
Modern-day Mauritania is essentially a racist caste system ruled by the 30% Arab Berber minority, called beydanes (“whites”). The Arab-controlled government has “banned” slavery five times since independence from France—in 1961, 1980, 1981, 2007, and 2015—yet today, absurdly, denies that it exists. According to the Global Slavery Index, approximately 149,000 Black Mauritanians still live there as slaves. These slaves remain in chains. They’re bred and are known to have been horrifically tortured in ways that rival and may even surpass Hamas’ torments. Yet these Black Muslim slaves who are passed down like the family furniture from the masters to their sons have no serious champions in the West.
Why are these horrors of real-world slavery, with women raped and men kept in chains, based on the color of their skin or their religion, not better understood and publicized in the West? Because the reigning progressive ideology taught in almost all American educational institutions divides the world into “oppressors” and “oppressed,” bestowing on the latter protected status. With the Arab and Muslim communities in America having been granted this new form of immunity, casting light on evil conduct committed by Arab colonial conquerers who enslave and murder Black Africans, is simply not allowed.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/arab-enslavement-black-africans
Great ——Cheers.
Excellent history article by former Royal Navy Officer Lewis Page.
Ethnic Europeans must strongly reject all attempts to impose a false “White Guilt” upon our whole ethnic group. There is no such thing as communal guilt, or ancestral guilt, or national guilt, or racial guilt.
These false concepts have been forced upon the German people, the Japanese people, the Spanish people, the English people (Welsh, Scots & Irish deemed to be ancestral victims of the English), the American people, Australian people, and all Ethnic Europeans around the world. It’s time to say “No!”, and teach our children to say “No! We are proud of our race, our history, and the western civilisation our ancestors worked so hard to build. And we will not apologise for any of it.”
Britain was not a slaving society in the era in question. It was not a Government policy. Slaves were not used in Britain. That some individuals and private companies – like the East India Company – were involved in slavery, does not mean Britain as a social, or political entity was involved.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade was started by Spain, mostly, but Portugal too. African slave taking was Government sanctioned and African slaves were initially brought to work in Spain.
Spain and Portugal shipped more than six times the number of slaves to their South American colonies, than were shipped to the British Colonies/USA in North America and West Indies. Oddly, neither are in the frame for reparations or opprobrium.
But the real significant point is, those slaves were bought – not captured – by European traders, at first from Arab traders but later from the Chiefs and Kings of powerful African tribes that had traded slaves for more than 1 000 years prior to Europeans setting foot in Africa.
Those idiots who want reparation need to go to the head of the supply chain, in Africa… or better still, just get lost.