How 'pandemic of the unvaccinated' got traction
PHOTO/StatNews: Healthy heart muscle (left) has long fibers that allow the muscle to contract. SARS-CoV-2 infection dices up these human heart muscle fibers in vitro (right), which can harm the cells’ ability to beat.
By Tatiana Prophet
“The number of COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections reported to CDC likely are an undercount of all SARS-CoV-2 infections among fully vaccinated persons. National surveillance relies on passive and voluntary reporting, and data might not be complete or representative. These surveillance data are a snapshot and help identify patterns and look for signals among vaccine breakthrough cases.”
On June, 29, 2021, the Associated Press published an analysis of CDC data with the headline, “.Nearly all COVID deaths in US are now among unvaccinated.” How did they get this information? By looking at half the picture. Instead of looking for data on how many unvaccinated patients died, they merely looked at recorded “breakthrough” deaths that were reported. In other words, they’re assuming that any death not recorded as due to a “breathrough” case is automatically a death for an unvaccinated person.
In the AP article, writers Carla K. Johnson and Mike Stobbe took the amount of Covid-19 hospitalizations recorded in May, 107,000, stating that less than 1,200 cases had occurred among the fully vaccinated. And among the 18,000 Covid-19 deaths recorded in May 2021, the AP reported that 150 of those deaths had been in fully vaccinated people.
That methodology would work quite well if we actually knew who among the remaining deaths were among the vaccinated. (I can’t actually believe that I am talking about this — sounds like the 13th Century). But there is absolutely no way to tell this information. It is not publicly available because the data sent to the CDC from state and local governments are currently voluntary and incomplete. Further, what data there is, is oversimplified and relies on vaccine effectiveness clinical trials that are also incomplete (and in some cases, flawed).
By the CDC’s own admission, data is not complete. However, anyone reading the AP article would think that the omissions are small, quite small. Look at the qualifying adverb “Only”:
“Only about 45 states report breakthrough infections, and some are more aggressive than others in looking for such cases. So the data probably understates such infections, CDC officials said.”
While the data is available on the REDCap database system, it is neither complete, nor fully transparent. Anyone accessing it must meet certain requirements including being a nonprofit organization. Back to Facts, Inc., a California nonprofit corporation, is in the process of requesting to join the database.
If the Associated Press did access the REDCap system, it doesn’t appear that they used it. How do we know that? Because their article lacks any kind of detail whatsoever.
After reporting incomplete data based on assumption, the writers turn to interpretation of the data, using the vaccine effectiveness studies conducted by the shot-makers themselves. The interpretation sneaks up on us because of the conditioning we’ve received our entire lives, which actually belies the full data (in other words, complete facts). That conditioning tells us many things we’ve always held sacred; but come to find out, through close examination, are not necessarily true. And why should we have questioned them? We were living in a free and prosperous society (or so we thought). The bottom line of the AP article is that “the experts” tell us: People are dying because they are unvaccinated. That’s how effective the vaccines are.
The article continues:
“Still, the overall trend that emerges from the data echoes what many health care authorities are seeing around the country and what top experts are saying.
“Earlier this month, Andy Slavitt, a former adviser to the Biden administration on COVID-19, suggested that 98% to 99% of the Americans dying of the coronavirus are unvaccinated.
And CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said on Tuesday that the vaccine is so effective that “nearly every death, especially among adults, due to COVID-19, is, at this point, entirely preventable.” She called such deaths ‘particularly tragic.’”
The important takeaway from Walensky that clinches the headline’s claim is “the vaccine is so effective.” Yet the presence of any breakthrough deaths kind of dulls the claim, from a fish knife to a butter knife. Such facts are pesky sources of “dangerous misinformation” that might deter Americans from getting the vaccine. God forbid we’d have stop-gaps designed to prevent the politicization of “facts” or “science.” That’s totally unnecessary. Right? In what world is questioning official facts unnecessary? In a fake world. An absolutely fake and managed world, which never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined was possible. But I underestimated the power of the behemoth that is the federal government. You think I’m exaggerating, but any search to disprove how big the federal government is would result in absolute “shock and awe” at the ultimate power the United States government actually exerts over the entire world (except, superficially at least, Russia and China).
So let’s examine the vaccine effectiveness studies.
Most of us have heard that Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine was found to be 95 percent effective by the end of phase III of their clinical trials, and that only 8 people contracted Covid-19 “with onset at least 7 days after the second dose.”
Peter Doshi, an associate editor with the British Medical Journal, pointed out that 3,410 participants with Covid-like symptoms were never given a laboratory test.
According to an FDA report on the Pfizer results, “3,410 total cases of suspected, but unconfirmed COVID-19 in the overall study population, 1,594 occurred in the vaccine group vs. 1816 in the placebo group.”
This factoid goes both ways: in the vaccinated group, if they don’t administer a test, then they don’t have to record a breakthrough infection. In the unvaccinated group, if they haven’t administered a test then they can claim as many people as needed had Covid in order to validate the study. It sucks to be this cynical, but its also, incredibly smart. Trust no man.
Going on with his ruling on the potential flaws in the Covid-19 effectiveness studies, Doshi added:
“Hospital admissions and deaths from covid-19 are simply too uncommon in the population being studied for an effective vaccine to demonstrate statistically significant differences in a trial of 30 000 people.”
The same is true of its ability to save lives or prevent transmission: the trials are not designed to find out.
Another puzzling flaw is that, while Big Pharma has pledged to monitor its participants for two years after the study, they cite ethical barriers to observing the placebo group, since ethically, they should be able to get the vaccine before two years are up. Further, they are not releasing their underlying data until 2022 or 2023.
Further, the trials were designed to tabulate final efficacy results after 150 indlviduals had developed symptomatic Covid-19. What?
In other words, all of the numbers being thrown around are based on incomplete data, and none of the results are final given that the trials will not officially complete for another two years. All the more reason to be fully informed before participating.
And the final reason that a 95 percent effectiveness rate by Pfizer is not exactly the whole story: When vaccine effectiveness studies are reported, they always deal in the Relative Risk Reduction (RRR), calculated as the amount of patients in the test group that contracted the breakthrough case after receiving the vaccine. But the Absolute Risk Reduction number, while not widely used in these studies (I wonder why), takes the amount of vaccinated people who contracted the disease compared to the unvaccinated people. The difference is very subtle, but it is absolutely material to our topic.
It has to do with how contagious the disease was in the first place. Sure, 8 cases out of 30,000 vaccinated got Covid; but 128 cases out of 30,000 vaccinated got Covid. The picture looks a lot different when you realize how minimal the disease impact is in “nature,” statistically speaking.
And statistics are important. When the official death numbers come out from 2020, as opposed to simply provisional, don’t be surprised if overall deaths have not risen as much as the agencies had reported. I will let you know when I check that out.
A summation of what can occur when trials are rushed, from Peter Doshi’s article in the British Medical Journal.
CORRECTION: In one of my videos a few days ago, I reported that the confidence intervals were very wide in the vaccine effectiveness studies. I had pulled this from the CDC web site in a page that was designed to prioritize elderly patients for receiving the vaccine. I should have clarified that this hospitalization study was different from Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccine effectiveness studies for all ages, which had much higher confidence intervals.
The item stated:
”In an evaluation at 24 hospitals in 14 states,* the effectiveness of partial or full vaccination with Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines against COVID-19–associated hospitalization was assessed among adults aged ≥65 years. Among 417 hospitalized adults aged ≥65 years (including 187 case-patients and 230 controls), the median age was 73 years, 48% were female, 73% were non-Hispanic White, 17% were non-Hispanic Black, 6% were Hispanic, and 4% lived in a long-term care facility. Adjusted vaccine effectiveness (VE) against COVID-19–associated hospitalization among adults aged ≥65 years was estimated to be 94% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 49%–99%) for full vaccination and 64% (95% CI = 28%–82%) for partial vaccination. These findings are consistent with efficacy determined from clinical trials in the subgroup of adults aged ≥65 years (4,5). This multisite U.S. evaluation under real-world conditions suggests that vaccination provided protection against COVID-19–associated hospitalization among adults aged ≥65 years. Vaccination is a critical tool for reducing severe COVID-19 in groups at high risk.”
