Over-Certainties In Global Estimates of Vaccine Efficacy

Over-Certainties In Global Estimates of Vaccine Efficacy

How can you tell if a vaccine for a bug is effective? It’s not so easy; indeed, it can be excruciatingly difficult.

At the individual person level you’d need to measure all kinds of things, like the level of antibodies and other immune cells present before vaccination, and then again after and through time.

Then you’d demonstrate, in that person, the exact mechanism by which the vaccine was able to boost immunity, and whether this boost was sufficient to quell the infection, by looking at severity of illness (due to the bug and other existing conditions), how long it took for the infection to abate, and things like that. And that is only a hint of the complexities.

The analysis is made harder because the vaccinated person may never come into contact with the virus. People he meets may have already had priors infections, and so are now mostly or completely immune. Or those people have had a vaccine that was effective to varying degree.

As difficult as all that sounds, it is not impossible in highly controlled circumstances to discover the extent and to quantify vaccine effectiveness. But it is a slow and painstaking process.

One way you cannot learn, not with anything approaching certainty, is looking at group-level comparisons, where people are not individually counted and compared, but where averages across groups are contrasted, and where you have no idea what the status of any individual is.

This is a popular kind of analysis because it’s cheap and easy. But it can, and often does, lead to huge over-certainties.

A prime example is from the paper “Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study” by Oliver J Watson, Gregory Barnsley, Jaspreet Toor, Alexandra B Hogan, Peter Winskill, and Azra C Ghani, in Lancet Infectious Disease.

They used a “mathematical model of COVID-19 transmission and vaccination” for both “reported COVID-19 mortality and all-cause excess mortality in 185 countries and territories” to assess vaccine efficacy in preventing deaths. This is as group-level an analysis as they come, especially with its “excess” deaths portion.

Read the rest at the BROKEN SCIENCE INITIATIVE PAGE.

I mean it, now. Go over there. Your mother would want you to. It’s free. And easy. And necessary.

Subscribe or donate to support this site and its wholly independent host using credit card click here. Or use the paid subscription at Substack. Cash App: $WilliamMBriggs. For Zelle, use my email: matt@wmbriggs.com, and please include yours so I know who to thank.

10 Comments

  1. Hagfish Bagpipe

    ”How can you tell if a vaccine for a bug is effective?”

    When the vaccinated drop dead —> it’s effective.

  2. Uncle Mike

    What was and is effective against viral infection is vitamins+ionophores+zinc and in severe cases antibiotics+steroidal inhalers. Sometimes attenuated virus particles can inspire immune system resistance, but not with rapidly mutating single-strand RNA viruses (like flu and corona).

    What is not effective is intracellular MRNA spike protein synthesis. The spike protein is not the whole virus, and immune systems are overwhelmed by chronic spike waves.

    All this was well known prior to the China-Fauci Designer Pandemic, which would have fizzled out rapidly if not for the suppression of virologists, doctors, and epidemiologists by a cabal of dysanthropic authoritarians — who are still in power by the way.

    Which is not to say that crappy self-referential models are not hokum. They are. But the depth of evil displayed by these monsters is woefully understated with modelling criticisms alone.

  3. The vaccines are for fertility reduction. Gates has stated this many times.

  4. Rudolph Harrier

    I remember how the UK COVID reports would include information on “cases” for the vaxxed and unvaxxed. The rate would usually be much worse in the vaxxed population, which would lead to a negative effectiveness against infection in any sane world. However, the reports always contained a warning to not trust your lying eyes and instead listen to what models said about the effectiveness.

    One explanation they gave was that if you assume that most of the unvaxxed got COVID before the data was being tracked AND that the vaxxed got tested much more often than the unvaxxed AND that the people who got vaxxed were all from the population most vulnerable to getting infected AND that people who were vaxxed were more likely to ignore safety regulations about social distancing and the like THEN the vaxx could still have 95% effectiveness even with the actual case rate being about twice as high in the vaxxed population. None of these things were actually measured, and the idea that the vaxxed would engage in highly risky behavior flies in the face of what we’ve all observed with people excited to get the vaxx. (I’m sure we all know at least one person who is triple boosted and still wears a mask even to this day.) Since the reasoning was that the vaxx must be 95% effective, it wasn’t necessary to measure these things. If they were the only way that the numbers could happen with an effective jab, then they had to have happened.

  5. Gunther Heinz

    Same business in Brazil. Meanwhile, if you plot the number of doses of the Pfizer Pediatric vax for covid since 2022, and the number of hospitalizations of kids with sudden acute respiratory syndrome SARDS, the curves match almost perfectly.

  6. Uncle Mike

    Fauci lied, millions died.

  7. Well, for some vacciness you can tell simply by observing the obvious. Like polio. Where’s polio? And when did it dissapear? Or better yet smallpox.

    Here’s a rule of thumb: if you don’t need statistics to see the difference, you can tell if a thing is effective. xD

  8. A strong case can be made vaccine “efficacy” rode in on the back of improved public health measures such as clean water, improved sewage and drainage, improved childhood nutrition, and in general access to timely medical care for illness. It’s absurd to imagine all diseases respond to vaccination such that vaccination is some kind of magic bullet. We’ve been conned for the longest time, the coof debacle made it blindingly obvious to those with eyes to see.

  9. Patient

    How can you tell if a vaccine for a bug is effective?

    There is only one sure way established by science: if you stick a magnet to the vaccination site, then the vaccine is effective (and safe).

    Tatyana Golikova and her husband Viktor Hristenko, can tell us more.

    Minister of Industry and Energy Of the Russian Federation V.B. Khristenko
    Order of the Ministry of Industry and Energy of the Russian Federation dated August 7, 2007 “On approval of the Strategy for the Development of the Electronic Industry of Russia for the period up to 2025”

    “Forecasts of electronics development for the post-silicon period (after 2020) suggest the widespread introduction of nanotechnology achievements in industry.
    ..
    The introduction of nanotechnology should further expand the depth of its penetration into the daily life of the population. There must be a constant connection of each individual with global information and control networks such as the Internet.
    ..
    NANOELECTRONICS WILL INTEGRATE WITH BIOLOGICAL OBJECTS and provide continuous control over the maintenance of their vital functions, improving the quality of life, and thus reduce the social costs of the state.
    ..
    Embedded wireless nanoelectronic devices that ensure constant human contact with the intellectual environment surrounding him will become widespread, and means of direct wireless contact of the human brain with objects surrounding him, vehicles and other people will become widespread. The circulation of such products will exceed billions of pieces per year due to its widespread distribution.

    The domestic industry should be ready for this challenge, since the ability to produce all components of network systems will mean the establishment of actual control over all their users, which is unacceptable for many sides from the point of view of preserving their sovereignty. A similar point of view is shared by EU experts in connection with the global expansion of electronics manufacturers from Southeast Asian countries and the intention of the United States to secure permanent technological leadership in this area. Therefore , in the period 2016-2025 . we should expect another strengthening of the role of electronics in the life of society and be economically ready for a new round of global competition of countries based on nanoelectronic technology.

    4. Main program activities …[At the end of Point 4.:]
    At the third stage (2016-2025) The strategy is supposed to be implemented within the framework of a new federal target program, which will be developed taking into account the implementation of the Federal Target Program “Development of electronic component base and radio electronics” and provide for:
    […]
    – widespread introduction of the achievements of domestic nanotechnology, bioelectronics and microsystem technology in everyday human life in the fields of healthcare, education, housing and communal services, transport and communications.

    6. Conclusion
    ..
    Taking into account the high potential level of domestic science in the field of electronics by 2025, we can expect a significant development of international scientific and technical cooperation and a breakthrough in the field of new technologies, including nanotechnology, bioelectronics, optoelectronics, quantum computers, etc.
    …..
    On January 29, 2020, Tatyana Golikova headed the operational headquarters for the prevention of the “import and spread” of “covid19 coronavirus infection” in the Russian Federation. So – leading the pressure team-including mandatory vaccination in many sectors – on Russians to inject themselves with what’s in the injections.
    ..
    (October 21, 2022) Tatiana Golikova will oversee the development of genetic technologies […]will oversee the “direction for the accelerated development of genetic technologies.”
    ..
    The development of genetic technologies, for which Tatiana Golikova will now also be responsible, is immersed in a specialized federal scientific and technical program approved in April 2019 by the then Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Initially, the program was supposed to be valid until 2027, but in March 2022, President Vladimir Putin instructed to extend it until 2030.
    ..
    The program involves the creation of genomic research centers, the development of genetic editing technologies[…]

  10. Patient

    There is only one sure way established by science: if you stick a magnet to the vaccination site, then the vaccine is effective (and safe).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *