For awhile, I have been mentioning person-years lived as the best way to calculate VE over time. Governments, regulators, and vaccine enthusiasts disagree. These people regularly throw out terms like “90% of deaths are in the unvaccinated in [x] country”— this is unadulterated data manipulation and, frankly, evil in this context.
The vaccine enthusiasts, in their defense, do not know any better. They believe “science” is a nurse on TikTok, a beat writer in the media, a teleprompter on CNN. Even George Bush could read a children’s book. The point of those mediums is for people to turn on, tune in, tune out.
Government officials, too, read off a script, and most of those scripts are written to do well in a poll. The regulators and scientists (at least competent ones) know better, though. They should be screaming corrections on the rooftop. They should be pressuring governments not to put those numbers out. Much like with the lies about natural immunity, if you want to lose the trust of intelligent people, that’s how.
I guess I have to.
Using Alberta data, I analyzed the VE of deaths for those 60+. I could not dis-aggregate further than that due to data limitations (it would be interesting to see VE by every 10 years, for example).
Excluded are deaths labelled as probable, unknown, or prior to January 1st, 2021.
In total, there are 1414 deaths in my data set. 133 of those were in the first 14 days of the vaccine, 94 were partially vaccinated, 285 were fully vaccinated. 901 deaths were in the unvaccinated. There are 875335 individuals in this age group.
The absolute risk for the unvaccinated is ~0.337%
For the partially vaccinated in the first 14 days, the absolute risk is ~0.42%.
In short, VE is -24.6%. Roughly translated, around 26 deaths can be directly attributed to the vaccines in the first 14 days, or around 19.5% of those deaths. I suspect this is a best case scenario due to seasonality. The vaccination campaign really began to kick off as the January wave began to scale down, and deaths in Alberta during the main vaccination schedule were rather low. In other words, the virus was barely spreading in the general population at the time, thus, even with weak immune systems, many deaths were likely prevented. But that is speculation as we did not observe that outcome. I would be interested to see if any country or state vaccinated their older population at the beginning or mid wave.
Further to the point, the healthy vaccine effect should make the VE higher just due to the fact that people are unlikely to get a vaccine if they are on their death bed. How much this improves VE in those first 14 days is a matter of speculation.
Of course, I am not saying the vaccine has been ineffective! I have always considered the vaccines to have mild, medium term benefits. In fact, it was 69.54% effective in preventing deaths due to the virus in this age group. That is a far cry from official government numbers.
BUT! This number suffers from a high amount of bias. Why? Because the winter wave was at its peak in January before the vaccination campaign really began. In fact, the vaccination campaign did not truly begin until the middle of February or March (around 5% of this population was vaccinated at by February 10th).
From January 1 to February 10, 600 people died with the virus. The vast majority of these were unvaccinated and over 60. This is an enormous bias, and if you remove those deaths effectiveness even further. If we assume absolute risk in that period is the same as in the first 14 days, only 10 of these individuals would have been vaccinated. 590 would be unvaccinated.
While exact information on dates is imperfect, 541 of the first 600 deaths in the year were in those older than 60. Assuming 531 of those would be unvaccinated (less the 10 vaccine deaths from earlier), post-Feburary 10th 503 vaccinated people died and 370 unvaccinated died.
The absolute risk of the vaccinated group is 0.1% and 0.21% for the unvaccinated group. Or a VE of 51.8%. A far cry from the claims made by the government. One would also expect those remaining unvaccinated to be more likely to have major health issues, though, that is again, unverifiable.
One has to weigh this lower than expected VE against a few things:
What does all cause mortality look like? Many countries and studies are showing a spike in the vaccinated population (over previous years).
What do comorbidites look like on both sides?
What if the vaccine is driving the waves? That could mean the vaccine is CAUSING more deaths than it is saving. Even in the vaccinated.
But here’s the rub! 85% of all deaths are 60+, most of the rest are 50+. 96% have comorbidites… 23% even have cancer and would have died anyways. There was a 14 year old boy that died in Alberta. The death was labelled a COVID death, the media feigned faux outrage and sadness. How could this happen? Oh. He was at the end of a 9 month battle with terminal brain cancer and happened to test positive a couple of days before he died. His death was not due to the virus. He would have died without the virus. He would not have died to the virus without cancer. That is what is counted as a COVID death, but it is not.
Many are obese or unhealthy in other ways due to poor life choices. We did not mandate them not to make those choices, and they take up the same amount of hospital space (more, to be technical). It is unclear how many of these deaths are only sparsely linked to the virus, but these types of deaths may be the majority (which explains why mostly older people die to this and the young are at an extremely low risk). Meaning, the actual life years saved by these vaccinations is likely minimal.
But the potential for life years lost from complications due to the vaccine is high. Many otherwise healthy people, either young or people that have spent their lives trying to be healthy, have had serious vaccine injuries. There is a lot of life years lost here. The government refuses to give us the data required to know just how bad things are. These vaccines are being given to all age groups, and all people with health risks beyond the old or unhealthy, and if they reduced the spread in any meaningful way, it would have happened by now.
tldr; the government is cooking the books to make these vaccinations look better than they really are. At best, they have a modest benefit to the old, which is MUCH lower than advertised. Why does that mean everyone should be forced to get it?