accines Really Work? // (John Hinderaker)

Covid is dangerous, especially to elderly people who are already ill. This is why there has been a special emphasis on vaccination and boosting elderly. Our public health system has now stopped claiming that vaccination will prevent someone from contracting covid. However, it claims that vaccination will greatly reduce the chance of death or hospitalization.

To assess the relative risk of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, it is necessary to have accurate information about the numbers in each group. We have records of who has been vaccinated so the “unvaccinated”, in government figures, is simply the difference between the total population and the known number who have been vaccinated. The size of the total population cohort is crucial.

Kevin Roche, owner of Healthy Skeptic realized that the Department of Health in Minnesota was using different time periods to compare vaxed/unvaxed. It looked at case, etc. Rates for people who were vaccinated by 2021. However, to determine rates for those who were not vaccinated, the Department of Health used the average population numbers between 2015 and 2019. Between 2015 and 2021, Minnesota’s over-65 population grew by a significant amount. This is a significant difference in a cohort with high vaccination rates.

This chart tells the tale:

Kevin explains:

Here’s what the relative event rates might look like if Minnesota used the 2021 one year Census population estimates instead of the five year 2019 estimate that DOH uses. The change in the 65-and-over group is dramatic, as we expected. For example, the October event data week (which should be using 2022 information, which we will extrapolate into in a future blog post) shows that the change from a 2017 age 65 population estimate to a 2021 one brings the unvaccinated number from approximately 62,000 to more than 162,000. It increases the number of cases per 100,000 people to 396 to 151, hospitalizations to 71 to 27, and deaths to 4.9 to 1.8. The vaxed population has a lower case rate than the boosted, and the boosted has a similar rate. The hospitalization rate for vaxed is much lower than the boosted population and almost equal to the boosted population. The death rate is 4.9 to 1.8, which is the same as the vaxed and lower than the boosted population.

The alleged benefit of vaccination for people over 65 turns to be a statistical error. Or maybe a statistical trick.

You can find more information at the link. There are charts that show the effect of boosters and vaccinations in younger age groups. These charts show that boosters and vaccinations have a positive effect on these age groups, though some cases are not so clear-cut.

Are national figures and data from other states prone to similar errors? I don’t know the answer, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

It is easy to manipulate statistics in any way you want. Smart observers such as Kevin Roche are able to do the work that neither the journalists nor our public health establishment have the ability or desire to do.