Buh Muh Severe Disease

Do the COVID-19 "vaccines" prevent hopitalization and death?

The injectable pharmaceutical products from Pfizer and Moderna were sold to the public on the grounds they prevent infection from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It is on that basis and that basis alone that these pharmaceutical products were given Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA in the United States and equivalent authorizations in many other countries. The initial heady claims of 95% efficacy against infection are obviously untenable now, to put it mildly.

To circumvent this obstacle, following the trend observable in every other aspect of the past two years, vaccine injection advocates seamlessly updated the narrative so that, now, the Very Scientific injections maybe aren’t so effective against infection but they were never intended to be, because their true purpose is to protect us against severe COVID outcomes (i.e. hospitalization and death). Having dragged the goalposts down to the other end of the field, they began the process of gaslighting us into believing the new narrative is what they’d been saying all along.

You see, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, and the Very Safe and Effective vaccines injections have always been about Muh Severe Disease.

Is this claim of protection from severe disease really tenable? Let me start small by rehashing a few of my own graphs and then I’ll pull out the big guns, including an Israeli media report and a stunning graph buried in the supplementary materials of a very recent study in the Lancet.

In my take on week 6 of the UKHSA report, I presented graphs showing the current rate per 100,000 people of hospitalization and death in England broken out by dosing status:

Please note that the “Never Injected” and “Dose 3 Only” rates are explicitly provided in the UKHSA report tables, and that I have derived an estimate of the “Dose 2 Only” rates via basic arithmetic and those and other data, using the methodology described in my week 4 discussion.

Already from these graphs we can see that the “Dose 2 Only” population has worse severe disease than does the population of people who were never injected at all. Now because the massive discrepancy in the older age categories is hiding the signal in the younger ones, let’s drop every category above age 59 from the graphs and take a closer look at what’s happening with the younger folks:

Look at ages 18–29, 30–39 and 40–49. In all three cases, booster efficacy against hospitalization is less than 50% while in two of the three, “Dose 2 Only” efficacy is negative and in the 18–29 category it is zero. Yes, there appears to be some very temporary reduction in severe disease rates when you get your third shot of Very Protective and Safe science formula. To give you an idea of how rapidly it declines, look how “Dose 3 Only” had something like 80% efficacy against hospitalization only two weeks ago in week 4:

So we declined from 80% to 50% in only two weeks.

But enough of my charts. Perhaps you believe in the brilliant analysis of Kevin Roche, who runs the Healthy Shill blog, that the UKHSA’s numbers can only be used to show how remarkably Safe and Effective the vaccines injections are, and if they ever show something negative about the vaccines injections then you can’t use the numbers anymore, because it isn’t fair, and shame on you for trying. What other evidence is there outside the UKHSA reports?

As you likely know, Israel has been at the forefront of injecting the living hell out of the obedient sheep who populate that country. Despite having put more Pfizer into more human hearts faster than anywhere else in the world, Israel seems to be struggling with a lot of the severe disease that, we are told, the magic injections are so very protective against.

But all those deaths they’re now having are just the Dirty, Dirty Unvaccinated getting their comeuppance, right Abhijit? Wrong. Let’s check in with Prof. Jacob Giris, director of the coronavirus ward in Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital. Just how wonderfully is that vaccine working there, Professor Giris? (via Israel National News)

“Right now, most of our severe cases are vaccinated,” Giris told Channel 13 News. “They had at least three injections. Between seventy and eighty percent of the serious cases are vaccinated. So, the vaccine has no significance regarding severe illness, which is why just twenty to twenty-five percent of our patients are unvaccinated.”

Well, you can’t trust an uneducated anti-vax Science Denier like Prof. Giris. He only directs the coronavirus ward in a hospital in the second largest city in one of the most “vaccinated” countries in the world. Why don’t take a look at an obscure journal called The Lancet, which I’ve heard is a Very Scientific publication. On February 4th, The Lancet published a study from Sweden entitled Risk of infection, hospitalisation, and death up to 9 months after a second dose of COVID-19 vaccine: a retrospective, total population cohort study in Sweden. (If you want a very thoughtful analysis of the paper in the broader context, please check out bad catitude’s article, which is where I stole this whole idea from.)

In the main paper, they have the graph shown immediately below, which is slightly interesting, as pace the Science Deniers like Kevin Roche, it clearly shows a finding of negative efficacy against infection by eight months after the second dose:

Figure 2: Vaccine effectiveness (any vaccine) against SARS-CoV-2 infection of any severity in 842974 vaccinated individuals matched to an equal number of unvaccinated individuals for up to 9 months of follow-up. The association is shown using proportional hazards models with 95% CIs (shaded areas) and restricted cubic splines. The model was adjusted for age, baseline date, sex, homemaker service, place of birth, education, and comorbidities at baseline.

But, as the bad cat discovered, it is in the Supplementary Material where the real story emerges. You see, somehow they didn’t quite have the room to fit this graph into the main paper, yet, here it is:

Supplemental Figure 1. Vaccine effectiveness (any vaccine) against COVID-19 hospitalisation or death in 842,974 vaccinated individuals matched to equally number of unvaccinated individuals for up to 9 months of follow-up. The association was illustrated using proportional hazards models with 95% CIs (shaded areas) and restricted cubic splines. The model was adjusted for age, baseline date, sex, homemaker service, place of birth, education, and comorbidities at baseline.

That’s quite an interesting supplementary figure! The thick black line is their best guess as to what efficacy against Muh Severe Disease may be. That giant grey area, oh how apt, is the 95% confidence interval. And yes, you are reading that right if you read it as “we are 95% confident that after nine months, injection efficacy against Muh Severe Disease is somewhere between, oh, about +63% and, maybe, -90%, so yeah, it could be making you significantly more likely to be hospitalized and ultimately die than someone who didn’t take it”.

And all this together, my friends, is why the narrative about how vaccination injection protects you from severe COVID-19 will crumble too, and when Kevin Roche finds out (he will be the last to know), he will tell you that he always said it didn’t stop severe disease, and was against vaccination from the beginning.

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Postscript: Can anyone name a vaccine (like a real one I mean) which doesn’t have any protection against infection, or maybe even makes you more likely to get infected, but people take it happily because it protects them against severe disease? Isn’t protecting against severe disease what a medicine does, as opposed to a vaccine? Or is it kind of like that thing Berenson said that resulted in Twitter kicking him off its sorry excuse for a platform?