That is a dramatic misrepresentation of that preprint. The number of deaths is small enough that it is hard to draw inferences from it, and that was not the endpoint of the study. Rather, the key finding is a vaccine effectiveness of 97% against severe disease.
A preprint that did address deaths[1] found a vaccine effectiveness of 98.7% against death. This is not consistent with your claim of "no evidence."
There's no scientific evidence to support this. Even in the Pfizer RCTs, there were more deaths in the vaccinated group than in the control group (but this wasn't statistically significant, as the overall sample size wasn't large enough to make a conclusion WRT death reduction).
"They absolutely are effective at reducing the risk of death or serious illness"
Actually, possibly not :( This breaks down into two separate questions:
1. Are they effective at reducing risk of death / serious illness now.
2. Were they so in the past?
To answer these we can't rely on any scientific gold standards despite the importance of the questions, because the trials showed no impact on death or actually the Pfizer trial had more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group (due to extra heart attacks). This was written off as "not statistically significant" (this isn't the right way to use statistical significance as a concept). Then they vaccinated the control group, thus ending the RCT phase of data collection.
The problem was that despite the constant messaging, COVID is virtually never deadly outside of the very elderly or sick, and those people tend not to join drug trials. Thus despite having ~65,000-ish participants there were not enough COVID deaths to detect any impact on this metric. Hospitalization meanwhile and "severe illness" were likewise not trial endpoints. So only noisy observational data is available.
For (1) the data from countries that actually release the raw data shows very mixed results indeed, with deaths being higher amongst the vaccinated cohort for some dosing ranges and age groups, lower for others, and overall there is no clear message from the data that vaccines are reducing deaths.
"It appears that things have got somewhat worse since last week’s report, with the hospitalisation and death rates in the double vaccinated (not boosted) exceeding that seen in the unvaccinated for all aged over 70, and with a higher death rate in those aged over 60 as well. What’s more, there now appears to be practically no benefit of vaccination with two doses of vaccine for those aged under 60, in terms of the remaining protection against hospitalisation and death."
That's for the UK but similar numbers can be found elsewhere in the rare cases where governments actually release the actual data (normally, they hide the actual numbers). Also, what we actually care about is overall mortality because vaccines can and do kill people, and just changing the cause of death isn't very useful. There too the news is disappointing, with small increases in excess death being correlated with booster rollouts but not the winter Omicron wave:
All this is official UK government data so enough reason to at minimum reserve judgement. Data in the past is unfortunately heavily corrupted by mis-allocation of people to the different status buckets. The methodology they use would calculate a big but transient impact on death and sickness from an injection of water.
No, sorry. The linked study suggests a 60% reduction in deaths from this drug. Even if it were true, it is nowhere enough to be an adequeate alternative to the vaccines, that were both vastly more effective at reducing deaths and could also significantly reduce transmission.
Not at all. Just one example, flu vaccines have never been 100% effective in preventing disease - more like 40-60%. And flu patients who did receive the vaccine have better outcomes.
This is false. The current vaccine still makes one about 60x less likely to die of covid than being unvaccinated. It's ineffective at preventing infection to omicron, but highly effective at preventing death.
In general, what you claim would seem both surprising and impractical to me. There are many studies on very seriously ill groups, where the death of a large portion of participants is expected.
2 people in the placebo group died with a covid infection and 1 in the vaccinated group. That is way to little data to even remotely make such a bold claim.
Or, if I follow your flawed logic, Covid vaccines reduce mortality by 50%!
Please don't post conjecture like this that has been categorically shown to be untrue. Vaccines are effective and have been shown to decrease infection and serious illness rates.
Your point is well taken, but I doubt the casual reader would make the distinction that you do. And in regard to Covid deaths in the study, the people who ran it were well aware that the small number of deaths were not, by themselves, enough to establish efficacy. But in combination with the numbers for severe illness (2 in the vaccinated vs 106 for the placebo group) and everything we understood about how the disease kills, I would argue that the study does in fact overwhelmingly support the conclusion that the vaccine prevents death, just as we have since confirmed.
The data you mention provides extremely strong support for vaccine effectiveness in preventing death. The single data point in GGP post is quite useless, as GP points out.
Of course. I've seen that headline in plenty of places. But as soon as you scroll past the headline you see:
"However, the two-dose vaccine still works very well in preventing people from getting seriously sick, demonstrating 88% effectiveness against hospitalization and 91% effectiveness against severe illness, according to the Israeli data published Thursday."
You can however read the CDC report that shows vaccines are still hugely effective in preventing death.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
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