Risks and benefits: replacing propaganda junk with real science

Wed 9:20 am +01:00, 7 Jul 2021

posted by Weaver

YOUR MIND IS YOUR MOST POTENT WEAPON AND TRUTH IS ITS AMMO – MAKE SURE IT’S LOADED!

The following excerpt is from an article by the excellent HART Group, which you can read in full here.

It makes some very important points and we have added some emphases.

Arm yourself with knowledge!

Excerpt from:

Junk science serves neither side of the debate

Criticisms for new vaccine study

Of note, in relation to attribution, this is always difficult to determine from voluntary adverse event reporting systems, but that doesn’t mean that Regulators should not be closely scrutinising products which are — unusually — being rolled out to 100s of millions with limited controlled short-term safety data and no long-term safety data. One group has in fact performed such an analysis on a sample of USA VAERS data and the results are illuminating, with a preliminary report indicating that in 86% of the first 250 reports of deaths the vaccine may have been a factor, and in 5% it was the most likely cause.

On the other hand, there are many omissions which those urging more caution could level at the paper:

No comments are made regarding unknown long-term side-effects.
No consideration is given to pre-existing immunity — now known to have been present to at least prevent severe disease in more than 80%, as shown here and here.
Immunity from infection is unacknowledged. Even asymptomatic infection is now known to create durable and robust immunity, even for variants. The duration and scope of vaccine-induced protection is unknown.
The calculations assume a very high CFR (case fatality rate) of 2% whereas in a paper published in October 2020 on the WHO website analysing worldwide data the estimates of IFR (infection fatality rate — which would be lower than the CFR) for those below 70 without comorbidities are a tenth of that.
No account is taken of the availability of early treatment, now shown to significantly reduce the risk of hospitalisation; see here, for example, the meta analysis published recently in a major journal re ivermectin, and here for the Oxford trial of inhaled budesonide — a commonly available asthma inhaler.
The efficacy figures quoted for the vaccines are accepted uncritically despite many flaws in methodology becoming apparent, and real-world evidence not meeting expectations. This perhaps is not surprising given that the trials measured mostly mild symptom reduction in the relatively healthy young and middle-aged; the evidence of the ability of the vaccines to reduce Covid-related severe illness — which occurs mostly in the elderly or those with comorbidities, especially obesity, is weaker.

The main criticism of this paper however must surely be that the calculations assume a blanket risk-benefit landscape across the entire population; in fact it has always been known that nearly all the Covid risks are in the elderly, and it is now becoming apparent from close scrutiny that serious adverse events appear more common in the young, although this could be an artefact of these events being more distinguishable from background rate in the young.

This means that risk-benefit analyses yield completely different outcomes in different age categories, and that the article did not address this is a major omission.