by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
A new study by all-cause mortality researchers Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., re-examined the mathematical model behind a paper published in The Lancet claiming the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives. The Lancet paper, cited more than 700 times, was partially funded by the World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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When two University of Pennsylvania scientists earlier this month won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in developing “effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19,” the Nobel Committee and legacy media organizations celebrated the COVID-19 vaccines for saving “millions of lives.”
But a new study re-examining the mathematical model behind the life-saving claims — a model that was laid out in a study published in 2022 in The Lancet Infectious Diseases — concluded the model was deeply flawed and the resulting characterization of the COVID-19 vaccines “must be invalid.”
The Lancet paper, funded by the World Health Organization (WHO) Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, has been cited more than 700 times.
All-cause mortality researchers Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., calculated and graphed the mortality rates that would have occurred without the vaccines, as projected by Waston et al. in The Lancet study, and compared those projections to the actual all-cause mortality rates.
Rancourt and Hickey tested the assertions in The Lancet paper that the vaccines averted tens of millions of excess deaths, defined as the number of deaths from all causes that exceeds the expected number of deaths under normal conditions.
If The Lancet paper model were accurate, Rancourt and Hickey wrote, without the vaccines the global mortality rates would have spiked to historically unprecedented and unimaginable levels suddenly, a year into the pandemic, at precisely the moment the vaccines rolled out.
And the vaccines would have nearly perfectly reduced those unimaginable levels of mortality back to baseline mortality rates.
They concluded that Watson et al.’s “results and the associated fantastic claims of millions of lives saved are highly improbable,” and that their theoretical claims have “no connection to actual mortality,” but instead are based on “wild” assumptions.
The findings raise questions about the serious failures of the peer review process in top journals, the Nobel award process and the media’s verification processes, according to the authors, who are both part of the Canada-based Correlation Research in the Public Interest.
‘So improbable it should be qualified as impossible’
According to Rancourt and Hickey, given there is no known controlled randomized clinical trial showing the COVID-19 vaccines caused death to be averted, the primary basis for such claims comes from Watson et al., who concluded:
“[Findings] Based on official reported COVID-19 deaths, we estimated that vaccinations prevented 14·4 million (95% credible interval [Crl] 13·7–15·9) deaths from COVID-19 in 185 countries and territories between Dec 8, 2020, and Dec 8, 2021.
“This estimate rose to 19·8 million (95% Crl 19·1– 20·4) deaths from COVID-19 averted when we used excess deaths as an estimate of the true extent of the pandemic …
“[Interpretation] COVID-19 vaccination has substantially altered the course of the pandemic, saving tens of millions of lives globally.”
To test the validity of the model’s projections, Rancourt and Hickey used Watson et al.’s data to calculate what the all-cause mortality would have been over time for 95 countries if the researchers’ claims were true and no COVID-19 vaccines were administered.
To compare the implications of those claims to actual all-cause mortality, they distributed the paper’s most conservative estimate of “14.4 million deaths averted” globally, calculating the number of deaths averted per country as a mathematical combination over time of vaccines administered and vaccine effectiveness.
They created graphs to show how Watson et al.’s theoretical all-cause mortality rates without the vaccine compared to actual all-cause mortality rates.
The graphs also show all-cause mortality rates prior to the pandemic and note the date the WHO declared the global pandemic and the date of the vaccine rollouts for each country.
In the U.S., for example (Figure 1), there were unprecedented peaks in all-cause mortality in 2020, 2021 and 2022 that the researchers have tied, in other papers, to pandemic measures such as the widespread use of ventilators, and to mortality associated with the vaccine itself.
Those peaks can be seen in the blue line on the graph, which shows the actual all-cause mortality. The projected scenario from Watson et al’.s paper is plotted in red.
Figure 1. United States (USA): (top panel) All-cause mortality by week, 2018-2022, measured (blue), calculated following Watson et al. (2022) (red-solid), continued (red-dashed); (bottom panel) same, expressed as excess all-cause mortalities, and with 1σ uncertainty (shaded blue). In both panels, cumulative COVID-19 vaccine administration (all-doses) (dark grey), March 11, 2020 date, (vertical grey line). Credit: Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Joseph Hickey, Ph.D.
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