Claim: Vaccines protect against Covid infection
A large preprint California prison study says they do, but there is a fourteen day-sized hole in their reasoning.
New Preprint California prison study
A large preprint California prison study has found that vaccination and prior infection protect against Omicron infections; the statistics are generally sound, there is about a 20% protection from either, and 40% protection from both.
Monkey see no evil, monkey do no evil.
However there is one period of time they didn’t happen to look at very carefully. The first fourteen days following a Covid shot.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.08.08.22278547v1.full-text
A prison population is the ideal group of people to do a study into transmission and infection: it is a closed system, to a large degree. The people inside the prison do not mix with the people outside; at least, only to a limited extent. The close contacts are monitored and known, the vaccination status is known; it is probably the best possible population on which to do such a study.
But it’s the definition of breakthrough infections in this study that is problematic.
We defined SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections as a positive SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic test occurring in persons at least 14 days after their first dose of vaccine, as long as that person did not have a prior positive diagnostic test in the preceding 90 days.
So in fact, if you look at this paragraph carefully, the first 14 days after their first dose of vaccine is somehow exempt from testing for positive Covid infections - it appears that a positive test is only counted as positive if the person was tested 14 days or more after the vaccine, or 90 days before the vaccine. Actually I’m not sure if the 90 days refers to 90 days before the vaccine or 90 days before 14 days after the vaccine, but that’s another issue.
Immune system takes a dive in the first 14 days
The reason the first 14 days is exempted from the stats is that a person’s immune system apparently takes a dip in the first 14 days, while the vaccine has not yet fully kicked in. Which means that in the first 14 days you are more likely to be vulnerable to all infections, including Covid infections.
It begs the question, what good is the vaccine if you are more likely to catch Covid in the first 14 days, and then immunity wanes? If you look at government statistics in Australia, US, Canada, Britain and many other places, during this 14 day period the person is counted as unvaccinated in all the statistics regarding Covid infections that I know of, and this must certainly skew the stats, making unvaccinated people seem far more vulnerable to infection than they well might be.
In the case of this prison study, they are either counting people in the first fourteen days as unvaccinated, or completely discounting their Covid infections during this period. If it’s the second case, that might be better over-all since it is not ascribing extra Covid infections to the unvaccinated population, but in fact, what we really want to know is, how many people are catching Covid in the first fourteen days following their vaccination? If they are catching Covid in those 14 days, it means that they should possibly be counted not only as vaccinated subsequently but also as having had a prior infection.
It’s what we don’t know….
And that makes us ask the question, what if the vaccine is making them more vulnerable to Covid in that 14 day period, during which they catch Covid, so that what causes their resistance is not the vaccine at all, but the fact that they have caught Covid already?
As in so many things, it is the one thing we don’t know that casts doubt on all the things we think we do know.
Grants and honorariums
It’s also good to know that the grants, honoraria and speaker fees JAL received from Merck, Pfizer, Sharp, Dohme and VaxCyte are all unrelated to the subject of this work:
JAL has received grants, honoraria, and speaker fees from Pfizer; grants and honoraria from Merck, Sharp, & Dohme; and honoraria from VaxCyte; all unrelated to the subject of this work. ATK and DS received funding from California Prison Health Care Receivership. The remaining authors have no disclosures.
I am glad ATK and DS declared their funding from the California Health Care Receivership, too, even though it couldn’t possibly have affected their conclusions: I am sure the California Health Care Receivership would have been happy with the results of this study either way, even if it was found that pushing the vaccines on the inmates turned out to be unwise and unhelpful and unprotective.
HOW THE DODGY STATISTIC AFFECTS THE RESULT
It turns out that in Covid vaccination statistics around the world, people in the first fourteen days after vaccination are counted in the studies as unvaccinated, because apparently the vaccine doesn’t work in the first fourteen days.
This video explains how this skews the statistics to make even a completely ineffective treatment with zero efficacy look effective.
Norman Fenton says on his website:
In assessing the efficacy of Covid vaccines in observational studies (such as in the large Israel study which claimed 95% efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine) it is now standard to assume that the vaccine takes 14 days to 'work' and hence to classify a person as 'unvaccinated' within 14 days of vaccination. But, as the previous exampleshows, such an approach inevitably exaggerates efficacy.
…
The video also shows how vaccine effectiveness in observational trials is further exaggerated if the unvaccinated are less likely to get tested for the virus than the vaccinated (as happened in the Israel Pfizer study).
Joanne Nova’s article alerted me to the video and the links.
Change Log
27 dec 2022 Revised to include the Norman Fenton video
References
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356756711_Latest_statistics_on_England_mortality_data_suggest_systematic_mis-categorisation_of_vaccine_status_and_uncertain_effectiveness_of_Covid-19_vaccination DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.14176.20483
This freaky bit of statistical confirmation bias also demonstrates why the apparent vaccine efficacy gradually descends to its actual level of zero efficacy:
Nordström, Peter and Ballin, Marcel and Nordström, Anna, Effectiveness of Covid-19 Vaccination Against Risk of Symptomatic Infection, Hospitalization, and Death Up to 9 Months: A Swedish Total-Population Cohort Study. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3949410 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3949410
https://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-impact-of-misclassifying-deaths-in.html
Infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections and reinfections during the Omicron wave Sophia T. Tan, Ada T. Kwan, Isabel Rodríguez-Barraquer, Benjamin J. Singer, Hailey J. Park, Joseph A. Lewnard, David Sears, Nathan C. Lo doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.08.08.22278547
Well done finding the holes in the argument. You need to teach as many as you can how to do this.