That's interesting, such confounding is an example for how difficult such research is. It's also two articles hammering on a single piece of data and making conclusions using Occam's razor. The comments on the second article don't help either.
Most importantly it's not just death I'm worried about, it's also not getting hospitalised (or worse, staying in coma for days on the IC). Not only for the individual, but also for society. At least here in the Netherlands, that was spot on the point we had to go back to lockdown like measures. There's a lot of numbers that suggest vaccins do wonders for that, for all ages (a bit less for elderly actually). An obvious one is the much bigger amount of daily infections we could now support with less beds compared to before vaccinations. These numbers are dropping, possibly because vaccinations being longer ago. Hopefully boosters will mitigated this.
You still can't compare those trends, because many of those countries have relaxed their lockdown measures after reaching a certain level of vaccination. When looking at hospitalization rates instead of only case rates, it seems that the countries with high levels of vaccination are seeing a much lower percentage of cases ending up in hospital.
Taking for example the NL numbers: we have twice as many cases/day as during last winter's peak, but only half as many deaths/day. Naively, that suggests that the vaccines reduce case mortality by 75%. But that data is also hopelessly incomplete: we recently reinstated some of our lockdown measures, so the number of infections/day is stabilizing, but fatalities/day will probably keep rising for another week.
Sounds pretty much like a fallacy to me.
It is a different time and different age. The stats about mortality from covid and from vaccines are quite different and easily accessible.
Are those worries supported by any data? As far as I can tell the rate of deaths after vaccinations is still incredibly low if you take into account how many people have been vaccinated. The fatality rate from Covid is much higher, even for young people. And that's not even taking into account the fact that a non-vaccinated person is also a potential carrier that can infect others.
The elderly were prioritized in getting vaccinated, and they have a higher baseline death rate. So it's still not clear what it means that the # of non-covid deaths in (1) and (2) is roughly the same.
I'm not disputing that the vaccines are effective at preventing death, but that doesn't mean that we can just point to any stat that looks good and celebrate without considering what it actually means.
> I fail to see any evidence of "much reduced risk".
If you just do a basic per-capita analysis the reduced risk of death is in the range of 5-16x depending on age group and vaccinated or vaccinated+boosted. There are obviously confounding variables (do vaccinated people behave differently? are healthier people the ones getting the vaccines?) but I would argue that those numbers are a pretty big W for vaccines as far as risk reduction goes.
And of course that is just deaths. You could certainly look at numbers for severity of infection or long-covid outcomes to further measure the efficacy of the vaccines.
Deaths in the US (like in the UK) are barely moving unlike during the other waves b/c of elderly vaccination rates. I really doubt this will budge the aggregate fatality rates much at all.
> Fortunately vaccination cuts that pretty close to zero.
Unfortunately as can be seen in table 5 from the link below, vaccination does not bring the fatality rate close to zero. It brings it closer to zero depending on your age. Bearing in mind this applies to hospitalized patients only(therefore not exactly IFR), the rate of death was reduced by vaccination in people over the age of 50, but not in people under the age of 50. Vaccination helps in certain cohorts.
One really has to ask why some one cares to write such a long blog post instead of simply publish the analysis to Lancet if it is so new and overlooked. Does the author expect to get careful reviews? I would care if I am publishing something that easily can also be misguide policy makers. If the author is correct from my understanding one should see more deaths and more hospitalised relative to the incidence in countries with high vaccination rates. We do see the opposite afaik. Did I get something wrong? But isn't that the claim: now mostly thoseppl just do not get infected which never would have died anyways?? Can someone please enlighten me, but there seems to be a major flaw in that analysis.
> kids are at no risk, the overwhelming majority of adults are at no risk
What I've been looking for for a long time now is data on infection, hospitalization rates and mortality by vaccination status and age. They all get mixed and it's never really clear to me what the risk for, say, a vaccinated 40 year old or an unvaccinated 1 year old really is.
Why is it so hard to find data showing how often people are dying, no matter the cause, broken down by vaccination status and age? Surely that would help clear things up. Lots of countries publish COVID-19 mortality rates which show benefits for vaccinated but that's really not helpful for understanding overall risk of vaccines. The UK is the only country I could find that publishes this data and unless I'm missing something things look really bad. Table 2 in [1] shows a 2-3x higher mortality rate for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated in almost all groups this year. Perhaps the unvaccinated are healthier on average, maybe, but 2-3x healthier? Yeah, don't think so. What's going on?
> "The data doesn't show that. There is a slim margin that might suggest fatalities are dropping, but not by much."
It takes longer for fatalities to drop because typically, there is several weeks between infection and death, and a further delay before deaths get reported. There is also a delay (weeks) between receiving a vaccine dose and achieving maximum immunity.
1) The weekly excess death tend to always largely fluctuate as far as I know.
2) If there really is a causation between excess death and vaccination, shouldn't the number of weekly excess death increase when the relative in crease in the amount of vaccinated people is higher (e.g. the steps between the measurement points is larger)?
3) The drop at the end is also easily explainable, it's a statistics over the first vaccination and vaccination takes some time to take effect and increasingly more people over the same time got vaccinated and once a large amount of people are vaccinated the excess death due COVID will notable fall. So not really that surprising.
The main problem with the article is that it assumes that all deaths after vaccination are due to the vaccination, which is nonsense. If 100% of the people are vaccinated they would describe all deaths to it.
Also they do not seem to correct for age. We started the vaccinations in the Netherlands with the oldest persons, who were already much more likely to die. So the LAREB results are not representative for the entire population. They will give an overestimate of the mortality by vaccinations.
The Israeli study [0] uses a large sample of people over 16. However they explicitly excluded persons bound to their home or were nursing home residents. This will give a low estimate for the effect of vaccination because the sample includes many healthy younger people, and excludes the highly vulnerable ones.
Your statement isn't contradicting the study, infections and deaths are different things and the study also mentions that in its interpretation:
>Even though vaccinations offers protection to individuals against severe hospitalization and death, the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated [10].
Any study that helps us understand the pandemic better is always welcomed in my book, however I agree that the study seems to be quite opinionated:
>In summary, even as efforts should be made to encourage populations to get vaccinated it should be done so with humility and respect. Stigmatizing populations can do more harm than good.
I don't see how the study proves that last point, even though I don't necessarily disagree with the statement.
"Finally, figures up to June 2022 looking at deaths from all causes show unvaccinated people were more likely to die than vaccinated people.
While this data on its own can't tell us it's the vaccine protecting people from dying - there are too many complicating factors - if vaccines were driving excess deaths we would expect this to be the other way around."
Most importantly it's not just death I'm worried about, it's also not getting hospitalised (or worse, staying in coma for days on the IC). Not only for the individual, but also for society. At least here in the Netherlands, that was spot on the point we had to go back to lockdown like measures. There's a lot of numbers that suggest vaccins do wonders for that, for all ages (a bit less for elderly actually). An obvious one is the much bigger amount of daily infections we could now support with less beds compared to before vaccinations. These numbers are dropping, possibly because vaccinations being longer ago. Hopefully boosters will mitigated this.
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