New Study From Czech Republic Confirms Covid Vaccines Have Around Zero Efficacy Against Death
Dr. Eyal Shahar
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.
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The Predictable Wastes of COVID Relief
If you ever had the vague sense that COVID relief funding worked in a manner akin to U.S. aid packages in failed Middle Eastern dictatorships, your instincts weren’t wrong.
First off, there were cases of just outright fraud nearing the $200 billion mark with drug gangs and racketeers collecting COVID unemployment benefits from the U.S. government, with some recipient fraudsters not even having the common decency of being honest American fraudsters.
Even worse, though, were some legitimate uses of COVID funds that actually counted as legitimate despite being laughably frivolous or clearly unrelated to nominal goals connected to public health or helping communities deal with the economic impact of the virus—or, more accurately, the lockdowns.
One of the most should-be-satirical-but-actually-real examples of a legitimate use of COVID cash was a researcher at North Dakota State University being awarded $300,000 by the National Science Foundation through a grant funded at least in part through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to aid her in her 2023 efforts to reimagine grading in the name of equity. (If none of that makes sense, please don’t hurt yourself with mental pirouettes.)
Other more mundane projects pertained to prisons and law enforcement using COVID relief money for purposes that extended well-beyond simply paying salaries or keeping the lights on. In 2022 The Appeal and The Marshall Project reported on how large sums of COVID money went to prison construction and expansion projects and to outfit police departments with new weaponry, vehicles, and canines. Regardless of how you feel about law enforcement or our prison system, these probably did little to stop the spread of COVID or keep out-of-work bartenders afloat while public health bureaucrats consulted horoscopes or goat entrails or their equally useful models to divine the proper time to let businesses reopen safely at half-capacity to diners willing to wear a mask between bites but too afraid to leave their homes.
Yet, of course, that didn’t stop people from trying to make the case that these expenditures absolutely were essential to slowing the spread. Often coming off like precocious children explaining to their parents how a new puppy would help teach them responsibility or an overpriced pair of sneakers would facilitate their social-emotional development by ensuring the cool kids would like them, local sheriffs and city managers were reported as claiming prison expansions could help prisoners social distance from each other, new tasers would help officers social distance from suspects, and new vehicles would allow officers to take their cars home with them rather than share one with another officer who might end up contaminating it with their COVID cooties.
But even worse than the funds that were outright plundered or just snatched up as part of a cash grab were those that were used on projects that helped further erode the freedoms of American citizens.
As documented in a 2023 report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, more than seventy local governments used ARPA funds to expand surveillance programs in their communities, purchasing or licensing gunshot detection systems, automatic license plate readers, drones, social media monitoring tools, and equipment to hack smartphones and other connected devices.
Sometimes EPIC reported that this was done with little, if any, public debate over the civil liberties and privacy concerns inherent to these tools. In one case from a town in Ohio, approval for ARPA-funded ALPRs—cameras that can create a searchable, time-stamped history for the movements of passing vehicles—came after only a 12-minute presentation by their police chief.
Similarly, schools also likely used money from ARPA, as well as the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, for their own surveillance purposes, although documentation of how schools used their COVID money is said to be somewhat spotty at best.
Vice News in 2021 reported how Ed Tech and surveillance vendors such as Motorola Solutions, Verkada, and SchoolPass marketed their products as tools to help reduce the spread of COVID and allow schools to reopen safely.
Some attempts such as Vice’s description of SchoolPass presenting ALPRs as a means to assist with social distancing come off like police departments explaining the social distancing benefits of tasers.
Others, however, such as Motorola plying schools with lists of behavioral analysis programs that “monitor social distancing violations” and room occupancy while “automat[ing] the detection of students who are not wearing face masks,” seem to offer a glimpse of the dystopian future into which we are heading—as do the other surveillance tools bought with COVID cash.
Maybe at some point Disease X, about which our ruling class has been warning us, will hit and the additional drones, ALPRs, and social media monitoring tools bought by the law enforcement agencies reported on by EPIC will be used to monitor adults for social distancing violations and automatically detect who isn’t wearing a mask. Maybe those tools will just be used to keep a digital notebook of the daily activities of everyone while police reassure us that they promise only to look at it when they really really need to.
In either case, though, if you currently have the vague sense that post-COVID America is a little more like a Chinese surveillance state than in the Before Times, your instincts are dead-on.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-predictable-wastes-of-covid-relief/
*************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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