Participants who received a booster at least 5 months after a second dose of BNT162b2 had 90% lower mortality due to Covid-19 than participants who did not receive a booster.
Although the 3 per 100,000 death rate after 2 vaccinations is already very low. It's great that an additional vaccination would reduce it further, but after 2 vaccinations does it make sense to mandate a booster with these risk profiles?
Especially given that there are rare heart inflammation issues caused by the vaccine, I can see people having a difference of opinion about whether the booster is worth it compared to the risk, until the error bars on the risk measurement are narrowed down a bit.
I agree with your point that with low death rates it's important to try to determine which subpopulations are at highest risk of both (a) succumbing to the virus should they become infected and (b) vaccine-related side effects.
With respect to myocarditis, though, note that it is rare, and those affected recover quickly [1], and there are some recommendations about potentially changing the injection site to be further from the heart to lower the incidence of this side effect [2].
> A total of 843,208 participants met the eligibility criteria, of whom 758,118 (90%) received the booster during the 54-day study period. Death due to Covid-19 occurred in 65 participants in the booster group (0.16 per 100,000 persons per day) and in 137 participants in the nonbooster group (2.98 per 100,000 persons per day). The adjusted hazard ratio for death due to Covid-19 in the booster group, as compared with the nonbooster group, was 0.10 (95% confidence interval, 0.07 to 0.14; P<0.001).
> CONCLUSIONS
> Participants who received a booster at least 5 months after a second dose of BNT162b2 had 90% lower mortality due to Covid-19 than participants who did not receive a booster.
This paper can't take omicron into account, but, it's definitely good news. I'll take a 90% lower mortality rate any day.
Read the part you quoted carefully: the death rate in the control group is 3 per 100,000. And if you read the rest of the paper, you'll see that the study population was entirely over age 50.
Remember that the risk of death from Covid-19 goes up exponentially with age -- something like 90% of all fatalities are over age 50 [1]. If you're in the typical HN demographic (<30 yo), your risk of mortality from Covid-19 is much lower than what is reported for baseline here.
I want to put this in perspective. Per The Book of Risks (chapter 8; annual risks) [2], your overall chance of dying in a typical year is 1 in 115 (~870 per 100,000) Your chance of being murdered is 1 in 11,000 (9 per 100,000). The chance you'll die of an accident is 1 in 2,900 (34 per 100,000). From a fall: 1 in 20,000 (5 per 100,000). By getting hit by a car while walking: 1 in 40,000 (2.5 per 100,000).
In other words, your all-ages chance of dying from Covid-19 after two doses is somewhere between your annual chance of dying from a fall, and dying after being hit by a car -- and it's much lower than that if you're under age 50! Divide that number by ten, and you're in the realm of risks that any sane person wouldn't even consider: the annual chance of dying by freezing, for example (1 in 3,000,000).
Point being: dividing a very small number by 10 is indeed a 90% risk reduction, but you have to weigh it against the costs very carefully. There are tons of reasons why I wouldn't take a 90% relative risk reduction, if the baseline risk were quite small (as it is here).
Yes. Any day, and twice on Sunday. If 90% of COVID deaths in the US could have been prevented (in fact, many could have been)[0][1], that cuts this whole thing down to a very bad flu season, comparable to the 1957 flu pandemic [3].
Would you rather not cut your risk by 90%?
Edit: Incidentally, I have been hit by cars while walking 3 times. No injuries, luckily, since they were very low speed impacts.
Why are you seemingly advocating against something (getting a booster shot) that's also extremely unlikely to harm you?
Well, let's see: cost, $0, and a few minutes. Extremely tiny risk of serious side effects. Benefit... better immune response to the nasty virus going around. Let's also not forget this doesn't benefit just you; it benefits everybody you probably won't infect if you get exposed to the virus.
No emotion involved, at least not from me. Seems clear enough to me. You seem to be the one having an emotional response here.
How tiny? It matters. Your risk of a bad outcome from Covid-19 is extremely tiny.
(Also, by the way: the costs are greater than what you pay for the shot. Miss a day of work? Spend a day in bed? That's a cost.)
> it benefits everybody you probably won't infect if you get exposed to the virus.
We have no evidence of this, nor do we have any reason to believe elevated antibody levels will continue indefinitely. Antibodies from the third shot will wane, just as the antibodies from the second shot waned, and antibodies always wane after antigen exposure. It's how our immune systems work.
I'm really starting to wonder what your issue is. Clearly, with the amount of effort you're putting in to obscure the issue, you've got to have some sort of emotion-driven agenda. And your attempts are so plainly transparent, I'll just come out and say it: I don't think you know what you're talking about. People who know what they're talking about don't obfuscate the way you are.
Turn your calculator off, and close your spreadsheet. I'll break it down in even simpler terms.
The vaccine has been approved by the FDA. They approved it because the costs and benefits of getting the vaccine outweigh the costs and benefits of not getting it. Same with the booster, if you're currently over 16.
As for missing work, spending a day in bed, that's not particularly relevant. We're discussing the booster, which means the only people who are relevant are those who have already had 2 doses of the vaccine. These are people for whom that cost is clearly not that significant, because they've already paid it twice. But, if you're making this decision for yourself, this isn't a thought you're going to have, because you already know that.
Regarding not infecting people, again, we know the vaccine is effective. It's effective in reducing hospitalization, severe disease, and against getting the disease in the first place. Again, this is why the vaccine got approved.
If you don't get the disease, how many people do you think you'll infect, hmm? And, if you have a lower probability of getting the disease if exposed, if you get the shot, does it or does it not mean you will infect fewer people if you get the shot? Simple logic.
The rest of what you've written is just some straw man bullshit I didn't say, which, again, I believe you wrote because you have some emotionally driven agenda here. There's no other logical explanation for why you'd want to obscure the issue, when it's so dead simple.
It doesn't take 30 minutes of googling and plugging numbers into an Excel sheet to figure out that getting the shot is the best option on a cost/benefit basis.
I'm not timr, but I share a lot of his concerns, so I'll try to answer. I think your model of how he is thinking is probably wrong. Some people (including me) care tremendously about the truth of an argument, independent of whether making that argument leads to a desirable social outcome. His "agenda" is likely a strong philosophical belief that it's more important to base policy on a solid scientific foundation than to reach an apparently preferred conclusion, because this is more likely to reliably reach a long term positive result. At least, that's what it feels like internally for me.
Despite your claims, the situation is not simple. Take this paper for instance. At this point, I'm pretty convinced that it is irredeemably flawed. That is, while boosters are probably a good idea for most people, I don't think it will be the case that greater than 1% of the doubly vaccinated but unboosted population will die of Covid in the next year. I think there are methodological problems with their approach that make their specific conclusions mostly meaningless. Unfortunately, despite these flaws, this is probably a higher quality study than most that are being relied upon to make policy.
For context, understand that I've been laid out in bed for most of the last week recovering from my recent Covid booster. I still believe that for me, taking a Covid booster probably was a better choice than not taking one. I don't currently believe that it produces the best health outcomes for a 14 year old boy, but I'm open to the possibility that it's best for society as a whole to put young males at slightly greater risk for the benefit of the rest of society. Please consider that you might be overconfident in how obvious the answers are.
Of course, this is true generally. But, as I said in my other comment, when it comes to drug approvals, the FDA is probably the least politicized government agency we have, and they have an amazing track record of not approving drugs that ultimately end up causing more harm than good.
It's also rational to hold a realistic prior, so, you should take all this into account. Mistrusting the FDA on this is literally irrational.
> His "agenda" is likely a strong philosophical belief that it's more important to base policy on a solid scientific foundation than to reach an apparently preferred conclusion, because this is more likely to reliably reach a long term positive result. At least, that's what it feels like internally for me.
I don't disagree...but I think it's much more concrete than this. At the scale of 330M people (let alone 7 billion), tiny risks matter. The OP simply cannot see past the emotion of the debate to the idea that even a few hundred-thousandths of a percent of additional mortality risk means that 100 people will die in the US.
If those 100 people were otherwise healthy and at no risk from Covid, that's a disaster. If the OP wants to take the tiny risk, that's fine, but it's a different matter to encourage other people to do it without evidence.
It is literally that simple. That thinking has already been done by the FDA when they approved the vaccine and when they approved the boosters. The FDA is very conservative when it comes to approving new drugs and therapies (perhaps too conservative, but that's another comment entirely).
If you're not going to trust the FDA, we don't have anything to say to each other, really, because that's what the FDA is for. They have a great track record on these things, with very, very few drug recalls happening due to unforeseen side effects. As far as government agencies go, when it comes to drug approval, the FDA is probably the most trustworthy and least politicized government agency we've got.
They've examined the data on myocarditis and recently approved boosters for people over 16. They haven't yet approved it for 14 year olds, so, yes, that is an open question. But, it's one which they're working to answer, and which it's essentially part of their mandate to answer.
> Regarding not infecting people, again, we know the vaccine is effective.
There is simply no evidence of this. None.
> It's effective in reducing hospitalization, severe disease,
The only evidence we have for this -- so far -- is for people over age 50. There's no evidence of reduction in mortality for younger, healthy people.
> and against getting the disease in the first place.
Our current evidence for this is limited to a few weeks after boosters, and again, it is expected that this will fade over time as antibody titers decline.
> And, if you have a lower probability of getting the disease if exposed, if you get the shot, does it or does it not mean you will infect fewer people if you get the shot? Simple logic.
Still waiting for you to answer the core questions: what is the risk? What is the benefit? Don't just wave your hands. Quantify the benefit.
To make it as clear as I possibly can: if there is a .0000000001% improvement in mortality risk from illness, and a .00001% mortality risk from the vaccine itself, then the logic is obvious: one should not get a booster dose. The risks of the booster dose are (hypothetically; I am making up numbers here) 10,000x greater than the benefits, even though both are quite small.
Your comparison points are great, but I think you are misreading the quote:
"Death due to Covid-19 occurred in 65 participants in the booster group (0.16 per 100,000 persons per day) and in 137 participants in the nonbooster group (2.98 per 100,000 persons per day)."
The death rate of the control group is .16 vs 2.98 per 100,000 people per day. If you annualize this by multiplying by 365 to make it comparable to your other figures, I think this means you get 65 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the booster group versus over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted. Which is to say, the Covid risk is higher than all of the specific risks you mentioned with or without a booster. This might (or might not) suggest a different conclusion of the relative benefit of taking the booster.
That's fair. You can't annualize a daily risk by multiplying by 365 (volatility must be taken into account), but the broader point that annual vs. daily risks are different orders of magnitude is well-taken. Unfortunately, I don't have any examples of risks that low measured on a daily basis.
> over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted.
We know this isn't even close to true by looking at aggregate numbers. For example, a truly conservative back-of-the-napkin calculation: 800k deaths in the US @ 50M reported cases (which we know is low by a factor of at least 2...) -> 1600 per 100,000. And many of those (half?) happened prior to vaccines; many now happen in the unvaccinated population. It's fairly obvious that 1000 per 100,000 is much too high an estimate.
(...and this isn't even the correct number to compare...what you really want is absolute risk per person, which will be far lower than the risk if you get infected, which is what I've estimated above. If you do that calculation, you get ~240 per 100,000 in the US over the entire pandemic. That's somewhere between the annual risk of dying in an accident (1 in 700) and the annual risk of dying from cancer (1 in 500).
Generalizing from the sample in the study is problematic for a bunch of different reasons -- not the least of which is that it's an older group of people -- but I didn't want to get caught up in a debate about IFR estimates.
> You can't annualize a daily risk by multiplying by 365 (volatility must be taken into account)
Could you expand on this, or suggest the right search terms? My intuition is that it will be a little bit lower than straight multiplication, but that this a low enough probability that we can get a pretty good approximation by ignoring the "impossibility" of an individual dying multiple times during that year. Is there another complicating factor?
>> over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted.
> We know this isn't even close to true by looking at aggregate numbers.
I agree it seems extremely high, but I think this is the clear claim of the paper. There were 85,000 people who were never vaccinated, and over the 54 day period of the study, 137 of them died. Thus if you were to extend the study to a year, you should expect more than 1000 deaths. As I see it, the possibilities are a) the paper is lying, b) I'm grossly misinterpreting what it says, or c) the current death rate in Israel for those older than 50 is about 1% even among the doubly vaccinated. If you have time to read it more closely, I'd love to hear what your thoughts on the discrepancy.
Edit: I realize I should've added another option d) the statistics are hopelessly confounded and the results don't mean anything. My current suspicion is that if people who contract Covid early are no longer eligible for receiving a booster, the apparent Covid incidence in the not-boosted arm may be drastically inflated, but I'm not sure if this is a large enough effect to negate the result.
Is the control group composed of fully (2 dose) vaccinated individuals only? Or do they put non vaccinated people in there as well? I couldn't figure it out.
> We obtained data for all members of Clalit Health Services who were 50 years of age or older at the start of the study and had received two doses of BNT162b2 at least 5 months earlier.
Given that boosters are an attempt to counteract waning vaccine vaccine effectiveness, there are two fundamental questions:
1. Do boosters work at all?
2. Do boosters wane over time, just like the original shots did?
They answer only 1. They didn't even attempt to shed light on 2, which is a serious letdown. Given known waning vaccine effectiveness, at a minimum claims on booster effectiveness should be bracketed by time since boosting event.
"We've measured the position of iron balls thrown at different speeds from a 56m tall tower and found they were 90% likely to be found flying in the air."
This is technically correct, yet fundamentally misleading. The same statement, bracketed by time since triggering event:
"We've measured the position of iron balls thrown at different speeds from a 56m tall tower, 0.1 seconds after throwing, and found they were 90% likely to be found flying in the air."
Even better, show the plot of position by time, or at least clarify you are merely doing a point-in-time measurement. Time is a fundamental component of the vaccine effectiveness equation.
Given the profit incentive to create a booster-treadmill for humanity, i doubt the booster is much different from the previous jabs. Therefore we should expect it will wane just as before.
Is it too early to conclude whether booster effectiveness will also wane in 6 months?
I had some mild but persistent side effects from the second Pfizer dose (ear ringing and Eustachian tube dysfunction). It's gotten about 98% better - but not 100% - and I'm a bit nervous about the booster given that many people are reporting the side effects are somewhat more intense than the second shot.
If the booster is the final answer, maybe I'll take the risk. Not sure what I'll do though, if the new status quo is a booster required every 6 months, and you become a pariah in polite society if you're not "fully vaccinated"...
Data is showing T cell response is great from 2 doses so you won’t be a burden on the hospital. Looking like cases will diverge from hospitalizations soon and vaccinations will move to flu-like in “strongly encouraged and taken up by the responsible”
I’m in a similar boat and I hate it. I did both vaccines and I’m otherwise healthy, very low risk of hospitalization or death. My workplace has said vaccination is a requirement (even though I’m remote!) and I think boosters will be part of that.
I don’t want to file a religious or medical exemption because I don’t have one. I want to file a “I shouldn’t have to do this” exemption.
Two things I'm honestly curious about in your response:
1. I understand getting the vaccine is unpleasant (personally I was knocked out for 36 hours after the second dose with a high fever and body aches), but the linked study showed that the booster lowered chances of death by 90%. Yes, things like age and underlying health have a big impact, but many seemingly healthy people have either died or been hospitalized from that. Forgetting about mandates for a moment, on a personal level, why wouldn't you want to get something that showed such high efficacy against death and hospitalization that had such a low, temporally finite cost?
2. Just wanted to comment that I do agree that employer-initiated mandates make no sense to me if you are fully remote. Sure, restrictions on coming into an office unless you've been vaccinated make total sense to me, but mandating for remote employees makes no sense from the perspective of the reality of how the virus is transmitted.
I wish there was a more concerted effort on following up on both covid patients and vaccine administrations and presenting the data on the outcomes in the general media. Instead, the only widely decimated message is "get your vaccine".
> So you want them decrease their risk from 0.2% to 0.1%
The linked study said those that had gotten a booster had 10% of the risk of those that didn't, so using your first number it would be like 0.2% to 0.02%.
> Expires in a few months
It's unknown how long the booster would last, or if after the booster the recommendation would be to move to something annual like flu shots.
> They've already had a history of reacting to (further shots always worse)
The person I responded to didn't say what their reaction was, or if it was time limited. Also, "further shots always worse" is demonstrably false, I know a couple people who had bad (yet, again very short term) side effects with the second dose and barely anything for the booster.
> Relatively has higher risk of side effects among their profile
The person I responded to didn't mention this
> Unknown long term risk
Vs. the now well-known long-term risks of contracting Covid, which given its prevalence seems highly likely that your long term choices are (a) never leave your house, (b) reduce likelihood and severity of infection with a vaccine, or (c) get Covid.
It's well within reason to expect that it won't be longer than the 2nd dose.
> The person I responded to didn't say what their reaction was
I kind of extrapolated based on the parent's parent. I had a personal example in mind. Chest pains after first shot, heart palpitations after 2nd, checked at ER. These are myocarditis signs and a booster makes me very uneasy. This I would guess is the most commonly brought up examples of potentially serious side effects.
> Relatively has higher risk of side effects among their profile
Just generalising, assuming young healthy male with no underlying health conditions.
> Vs. the now well-known long-term risks of contracting Covid, which given its prevalence seems highly likely that your long term choices are (a) never leave your house, (b) reduce likelihood and severity of infection with a vaccine, or (c) get Covid.
It's inaccurate to have "Never leave your house" as an option, situations are different. Different case numbers based on location, different personal lifestyles. On the other hand, the vaccine risk is fixed, you either take it or don't.
I'm personally happy doing continuous risk assessment and acting accordingly and if I did catch Covid then so be it, risks are extremely low already.
Maybe you can consider another vaccine as a booster if this one did not acted well on you?
I don't see how the booster is guaranteed to be the final answer as the virus keeps mutating and spreading among the very large unvaccinated population.
I personally think that it will become endemic, thanks to the vaccine we would have enough immunity to keep us out of hospital and each time we get the virus it would act as a booster.
This thing is not going to end without something like world wide super strict lockdown(Wuhan style) or world wide vaccination(and probably some combinations as the vaccine itself reduces but doesn't completely stop the spread).
Its actually the 'leaky' vaccine that is causing the problematic mutations. In the same sense that bacteria mutate to evade antibiotics, the virus mutates to evade the vaccine.
It’s not exactly random, it includes Robert Melone who is early researcher in the mRNA technology who was part of a team that got some patents but he likes to call himself the inventor of everything mRNA.
So the guy somehow got bitter with the people involved and turned it into media battle. He tries to portray himself as an insider who is not afraid or has higher morals to tell the truth about mRNA.
He says stuff like “This research shows that virus spike proteins damage the heart, the vaccine produces spike proteins therefore vaccines are dangerous”.
Doesn’t have any actual research on his claims, he simply invents things from thin air and says them from the position of inventor of the mRNA.
Is there any research that it doesn't? I mean the guy is a well-known scientist, he can make educated claims can't he. Being apart of the team that created mRNA vaccines probably means he knows more then the average smuck about them...right?
So why not take his claim seriously and figure out if its true or not.
For me, i'm young and healthy, im not at risk. Thats been demonstrated
clearly now. For me, the risk of unknown long-term side effects
related to the mRNA vaccine far outweigh my risk to covid. Also i just
don't trust the profit incentives of modern big-pharma and big-science.
Educated guess is a good start, that’s how you find what to work on. The important part is the work, you can’t suspect something and preach it as if it’s true. Most of the time these hunches are wrong.
Also, just as a good mechanic doesn’t necessarily make a good racer, knowing how to produce mRNA doesn’t mean that you know what it does and doesn’t do to humans. That’s completely different field.
The guy is a complete schmuck, if he had something he would have been working on it and publishing the results instead of using his CV to preach BS in the media.
Vaccines are different from antibiotics in that they are designed to use your own immune system. Whereas an antibiotic targets a bacterial weakness which the bacteria can fix, the immune system watches for both specific invaders and possible variations of those invaders.
Unless those accounts extensively discussed how immune compromised individuals and not evolution across whole populations provided the virus a platform to mutate extensively as that’s the current leading hypothesis of omicron’s origin, then I would recommend understanding those accounts are garbage and should be a big red flag about their motivations
I think the media might have unintentionally done themselves in by using the terminology "vaccinated" with no qualifiers in much of the coverage of the virus in the past two years. Soon we might have to be careful to state "vaccinated, but only within the last six months" or "vaccinated, but with the version targeting omnicron". I can't imagine it will be easy for all the existing articles from months ago to be updated now that we have new information.
I feel the same way with masks. If you didn't do enough research, you could easily believe that anything with an N95 certification would be ideal for protective purposes, but plenty of N95 masks have valves which makes them useless for preventing infected individuals from infecting others. There are also cloth masks, gators, and so on. But to many people they all fall under the umbrella of the unspecific term "wearing a mask", and unless you explicitly look up the medical consensus, many sources of information are unlikely to also state "but not those masks."
It’s a mass communication, not precise scientific communication.
It will keep evolving as the situation evolves.
I think, the danger lies in the fact that everything said by scientists on the media is oversimplification and technically wrong as a result of the simplification attempt. This can erode credibility significantly.
Same here, no vertigo before in my life - had it for both doses, longer the second time, still not 100% recovered. I even voluntarily filled in my info on the Pfizer side-effects page, but didn't hear anything back. Did you manage to find out what exactly goes wrong with the inner ear after the vaccine?
Still, regarding the study, it appears that taking the booster would be the better choice, considering most of us will catch the omicron variant at some point.
It was 6 days after each of the doses. I posted my story on the VEDA forum's COVID side-effects post[0], which is now a whopping 800 pages long. The good news is that some literature is starting to appear on this topic[1], but I'm afraid that these kinds of side effects will be seen as noise in the grand scheme of things.
I filled out a VAERS report and never heard from anyone about it.
Unfortunately I haven't learned anything interesting about what the mechanism of action might be. Especially with respect to the most interesting question - does this reaction to the vaccine mean I might have had an even worse reaction to a COVID infection? There are plenty of people who report tinnitus following COVID.
Countering this anecdata with my own: I have several rare diseases and I'm quite disabled. I didn't get noticeable effects from my first two Pfizer doses (at least nothing I could distinguish from my chronic illness), while the third gave me flu-like symptoms for 2-3 days. I was happy about this because it told me it was working, and I returned to my (crappy) baseline afterwards with no lingering effects.
I wonder if you just happened to get ear ringing coincidentally around the time you got your second dose, and connected the dots even though it might not be causally related.
It makes sense that the booster might lower mortality from an already very low rate.
My question is, are we already below the risks from seasonal flu? I do normally get the seasonal flu vaccine, but I didn’t last year or this year because I’m still practicing social distancing.
There is a low risk of heart inflammation related to the Covid vaccine for young males. Is this risk the same regardless of number of booster doses that you take, or does it go up with each additional booster? If it goes up - is the function linear, slower than linear or faster then linear?
I want to know what percentage of those who died also suffered form
comorbidities. Also this is for people aged 50 and above, what about
healthy young people?
Do the math, death rate is 0.008% (boosted) vs 0.16% (unboosted) for aged
50 and above. Still super low. And we're getting better and better at
treating this thing.
Get it if you *want* it. Don't if you don't. I do not want it or need
it thank you very much.
Agree that we’re getting better at treating it. You seem to be praising those treatments and not wanting to get the vaccine. I don’t understand the idea that medicine that prevents the disease is bad but medicine after the disease is ok?
I think people like it because it scales with the actual disease. It may be irrational as far as resource allocation but it is maybe a bit more transparent.
If stuff like this hadn't been censored a billion times, alot of
deaths would have been prevented. Big Pharma wants us all to
think that *their* vaccine is the only thing that works. What
a *big* lie.
I'm going to do this as a top-level comment because I think it's important. Throughout this thread, a number of people seem to be misreading the numbers and arguing that the results are unimportant because they show that the booster reduces a tiny risk (0.00298%) to an even tinier one (0.00016%). In general, this is a fine argument to make, but I don't think it's well supported by this paper.
Here is the Results section from the paper: A total of 843,208 participants met the eligibility criteria, of whom 758,118 (90%) received the booster during the 54-day study period. Death due to Covid-19 occurred in 65 participants in the booster group (0.16 per 100,000 persons per day) and in 137 participants in the nonbooster group (2.98 per 100,000 persons per day).
The risk of death is being reported per day, and not per year as many people seem to be assuming. They had 85,000 people in the control arm, and 137 of them died in the less than 2 month timeframe of the study. If you multiply the daily risk by 365 to make it an annual risk, you find the non-boosted (but already doubly vaccinated) group had a slightly greater than 1% chance of dying within a year. By most standards, and compared to most other situations, this is a considerable risk of death. By contrast, the boosted group had a less than .1% chance of dying per year, so it's not just that an elderly study population was already on the verge of death.
So unless you think 1 person out of 100 dying within a year is insignificant, it would be more helpful to point out the potential flaws in the study than to say the results don't matter. Should the data be trusted at all? Is the boosted group really comparable to the unboosted? Did they mishandle/miscount the way people were switched from one group to the other throughout the course of the study? Should those less than 30 years old even care? These are potentially good questions, but it's not reasonable to suggest that the study as printed shows that there is no real benefit to the booster.
(Obviously, if my math is wrong or if I'm misinterpreting the results, please correct me!)
The study is somewhat skewed since its comprised of people 50+ years old, which have a significantly higher risk to begin with compared to young healthy adults.
Participants who received a booster at least 5 months after a second dose of BNT162b2 had 90% lower mortality due to Covid-19 than participants who did not receive a booster.
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