VACCINE hubris and obfuscation continues. Last week, the Commonwealth Fund released a paper purporting to prove that Covid jabs had saved almost 3.3million lives and prevented 18.6million hospitalisations in the United States alone. But for the promotion of this claim in Global Health Now (GHN), the newsletter of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, as we approach our first Christmas without any hint of Covid restrictions, except for a few recalcitrant countries, you might be forgiven for forgetting that there ever was a ‘pandemic’.
Essentially GHN is a daily dribble of how bad Covid was, how the next variant could be ‘the one’, i.e. the one that will kill you, how ‘long Covid’ is a real thing and, of course, the virtue of the vaccines. But on this occasion it excelled itself with its uncritical reference to this report.
The report’s title is the uncompromising assertion that: ‘Two years of US Covid-19 vaccines have prevented millions of hospitalisations and deaths.’ How can they possibly know this? The answer is quite simple: they don’t. Like the development of the vaccines, no controlled experiment was carried out to compare the vaccinated with the unvaccinated. It is impossible to know from epidemiological data if someone has not died or not been hospitalised because of any intervention. Moreover, what level of efficacy was assumed?
So how exactly did they arrive at the huge numbers claimed? From computer modelling, we are told, so no wonder!
It is now known that we were misled from the start and that vaccine efficacy was vastly exaggerated from the outset by focusing on relative as opposed to absolute risk reduction (ARR). The latter tells you how much you are really at risk and for Covid vaccines, according to a piece in The Lancet, the ARR across the range of Covid vaccines hovers around 1 per cent (while the propaganda suggests that risk reduction approximates at 90 per cent).
It is also known that the Covid vaccination means you are more likely to be hospitalised than if you are unvaccinated. Crucially, alongside the hubristic claims in this report, there is no mention of adverse vaccine reactions including death, not even a mention of vaccine side-effects. In other words, against the purported benefits of the Covid vaccines at saving lives and preventing people from being hospitalised, no account is taken of the number of people killed by the vaccines and the number of people hospitalised as a result of being vaccinated. The study is thereby, apart from the dubious modelling, intrinsically biased. Let’s be clear on this: the data used are not real-world data, they are modelled, and the figures entered into the model ‘were drawn from published estimates’.
In summary, unreliable data were run through an untested model.
It is on this basis of ‘fact construction’ that the hubris about vaccine efficacy continues. Based on the above barely credible analysis the report makes a further heroic claim: ‘The vaccination program saved the US $1.15 trillion’ and this was achieved by savings ‘in medical costs that would otherwise have been incurred’.
Unable to resist the temptation of the scientist with a microphone in her face Alison Galvani, one of the authors interviewed after the publication of the report, said: ‘If you factor in the cases of long Covid that vaccines likely prevented, the savings may be much higher.’
My interpretation of this literally unbelievable data is that we think we have saved more than a trillion dollars by preventing something that may not exist and by two things not happening that we do not know if we stopped.
Why would anyone believe them? I certainly don’t.
