How much protection do the vaccines provide against severe Covid? Some people claim that getting vaccinated reduces your risk of death by as much as 90%. They point to charts showing massive disparities in hospitalisation and death rates between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
However, these crude comparisons may overstate vaccine effectiveness. A study published last year by the U.S. CDC found that vaccinated people were less likely to die of non-Covid causes, suggesting that they’re inherently healthier and/or more risk averse than unvaccinated people.
This ‘healthy vaccinee’ effect means that part of the disparity in death rates between the vaccinated and unvaccinated is due to factors other than vaccination. So even if currently-unvaccinated people got vaccinated, they’d still die from Covid at higher rates than currently-vaccinated people.
Now, I’m not claiming that all or even most of the disparity in death rates between the vaccinated and unvaccinated is due to the ‘healthy vaccinee’ effect. I’m simply claiming that crude comparisons overstate vaccine effectiveness – which is probably less than 90%.
Okay, but is there any evidence for this form of ‘selection bias’ – as it’s known in the jargon – other than the CDC study? Yes: the ONS documented the very same phenomenon in a report published last year. See the table below, which shows age-standardised mortality rates by vaccination status:
Looking at the second column, unvaccinated people have a higher non-Covid death rate than all four groups of vaccinated people.
Note, however, that the ratios in the first column are substantially greater than those in the second column. This implies that the ‘healthy vaccinee’ cannot explain all or even most of the disparity in Covid death rates between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
On the other hand, the ratios would presumably be smaller if the comparison were restricted to vaccinated people who’d received their second dose more than, say, six months ago. We know that vaccine effectiveness wanes over time – for both infection and serious illness.
The ‘healthy vaccinee’ effect turned up again in a study published in Science. Barbara Cohn and colleagues analysed a large dataset on U.S. veterans, and found that survival rates among over 65s were higher among vaccinated individuals who tested positive than among unvaccinated individuals who tested negative:
Note: the left-hand chart corresponds to those aged under 65; the right-hand chart to those aged over 65. The researchers did acknowledge that selection bias may have impacted their results, writing:
Patterns of survival for those with a negative PCR test by vaccination status suggests there are underlying differences in unvaccinated compared to vaccinated persons, and that we did not measure or account for in our analysis; these differences may contribute to the different risks of death we observed.
There’s now fairly robust evidence for the ‘healthy vaccinee’ effect, at least in Britain and the U.S. The next step would be estimating how much of the disparity in death rates between the vaccinated and unvaccinated it can account for. Hopefully someone with the requisite data will attempt this soon enough.
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Sadly, monetary expenditure doesn’t matter when it comes to “saving the planet”. It’s more important to be seen to be “doing the right thing by the environment” regardless of the cost. OK, the population may be saddled with crippling taxes, OK, the economy might crash, OK, society might crumble under the pressure, but we’ll be able to hold our heads up high as a nation and say “We did our bit by reducing the world’s carbon emissions by 1%”. And then sit back and realise that all the pain it’s inflicted on us has had no effect on the climate after all.
Yep, you got it in one.
Cost per house? “We do not have an accurate cost per property to provide this information”
This is a lie, obviously. They must have paid invoices for equipment and installation. Ergo, the cost is grossly disproportionate to any alleged benefit.
Weasel words – ‘We don’t know accurately the cost per property because we know we can’t just add it all up and divide by eight because some properties had PV and some had thermal solar panels. Therefore, it’s technically true that we can’t give an accurate cost per property.’
The fact they’ve refused suggests they’ve spent more than £60,000 x 8 = £480,000. If not, they’d be patting each other on the back about the massive savings they’d made.
I hope the information commissioner does not back the refusal of the FOI request on the basis that revealing the costs would be too controversial.
Yes, they lie.
Or it was paid to a few councillors mates?
Milton Friedman’s 4th way of spending money illustrated perfectly. Spending other people’s money on other people means you are not interested in either price or quality. Government spending in a nutshell – just spend it.
172 years? Nonsense. It’ll only take 12 years (if energy prices increase at 50% per year).
Exactly the same as my council. The only eco-focused properties in the borough are those built by the taxpayers’ £££s. No intention to find out if it’s value for money.
Such standards are classed as “nice to have” where private housing is being proposed, despite the declaration of the climate crisis. Hypocrisy writ large.
It isn’t supposed to be monitored they make the momey upfront because the agenda is purpose built to funnel money that way to the appropriate parties. They did well out of it. Never mind that it is fading now they are pulling money out and making money on the way down just look at electric cars.
This is par for the Net Zero course. Net Zero was waved through parliament with no discussion of cost/benefit. There was no debate and no vote. The Political Class have imposed this on us all under the false pretences of a climate crisis in order to comply with the UN’s Sustainable Development goals. Our governments are simply local administrators implementing globalist mandates, and taking their instructions from the UN/WEF. We are simply an inconvenience to them and any concerns we have are brushed aside.
All dead but we pay anyway. Can you even conceive of a way that we would get the lost money back from the last forty years. The best we can do is stop it and never allow it to happen again.
I can conceive that if they re-introduced gladiatoral combat, with the Uniparty clowns who gave us all this crap and the eco-profiteers who paid them, scrapping with hungry tigers and lions, the ticket sales would make a very big contribution to the lost money.
And hugely enhance public jollity.
I think we have to be a bit more aggressive in our response to this sort of obfuscation. When people complete these schemes, and refuse to reveal their results, we should be saying, very loudly indeed, that the only possible reason is that they have failed. And asking not what the results really were, but why they refuse to admit failure.
With Socialists it’s money no object so long as it’s not their own.