by Dr Raphael Lataster, Daily Sceptic:
As a university academic, and former pharmacist, whose speciality is misinformation, disinformation and fake news, I have been very active of late in collecting (and writing) papers appearing in medical journals that provide evidence and arguments against the COVID-19 vaccines. Below is a summary of some of the recent papers I find to be most concerning.
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Vaccine effectiveness and safety exaggerated
An article appearing in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, including BMJ Editor Peter Doshi amongst its authors, discusses several biases that, if not accounted for, indicate that the effectiveness of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in observational studies is being heavily exaggerated. The most important appears to be one many of us have worried about from the beginning, the dubious ‘case-counting window bias’, which concerns the seven days, 14 days or even 21 days after the jab where we are meant to overlook jab-related issues, particularly poor effectiveness, as “the vaccine has not had sufficient time to stimulate the immune system”. In an example using some data from Pfizer’s clinical trial, the authors show that thanks to this bias, a vaccine with effectiveness of 0%, which is confirmed in the hypothetical clinical trial, could be seen in observational studies as having effectiveness of 48%.
In a follow-up article in the same journal I revealed ways in which the situation may even be worse. The aforementioned ‘case-counting window bias’ is often accompanied by a ‘definitional bias’, whereby the Covid cases in the vaccinated are not just ignored, but shifted over to the unvaccinated. So building on the above example, a vaccine with 0% effectiveness can actually be perceived as having 65% effectiveness. My article also shows, touching on the intriguing (horrifying?) issue of negative effectiveness, “a vaccine with minus-100% effectiveness, meaning that it makes symptomatic COVID-19 infection twice as likely, can be perceived as being 47% effective”. Furthermore, “Repeated calculations will show that moderate vaccine effectiveness is still perceived even with actual vaccine effectiveness figures of minus-1,000% and lower”. I also explained that this exaggeration could equally apply to studies on vaccine safety, which would be important when comparing the overall health of the vaccinated and unvaccinated, as may be appropriate when looking into the mysterious rise in non-Covid excess deaths post-pandemic.
