It’s unfortunate that the drug companies decided to end their trials early, by giving active covid vaccine to the members of the placebo group after just a few months. It means that there is no long term follow-up of the covid vaccines from randomized trials, and there never will be. This means that we are instead forced to rely entirely on observational data as we try to understand how safe and effective the vaccines are over the longer term.
That is why a recent study out of Sweden is so very interesting. It is currenly available as a pre-print and can be found here. The purpose of the study was to determine how effective the vaccines are at protecting against covid over the longer term (i.e. after more than a few months). This was a registry based study, so it’s not surprising that it is coming out of Sweden. Sweden is generally acknowledged as being better than any other country at collecting and sorting large quantities of population data and using it to produce these types of studies.
The authors of the study began by identifying all people residing in Sweden who had been fully vaccinated against covid-19 by late May 2021. At that time, three different vaccines were being used in Sweden: Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca. The vaccinated people were then matched individually against people of the same age and gender, and living in the same municipality, who hadn’t been vaccinated. In total, 1,684,958 individuals were included in the study. They were followed until October to see if they developed covid-19.
So, what did the study show?
As would be expected, the vaccines were very effective at preventing symptomatic covid around two months out from vaccination. This is what the randomized trials showed, and it’s the reason the vaccines were approved for use. Overall, the reduction in relative risk at 31-60 days out from vaccination was 89%.
However, after those first two months, there was a rapid decline in efficacy. At four to six months, the vaccines were only reducing the relative risk of infection by 48%!
This is pretty interesting when we consider that governments had initially set the bar for approving the vaccines at a 50% relative risk reduction. So, if the trials had been required to run for six months before presenting results instead of only running for two months, then the vaccines would have been considered too ineffective to be worth bothering with, an would never have been approved.
Well, that’s not quite true. One vaccine did still provide a better than 50% relative risk reduction at six months – the Moderna vaccine. At four to six months, the relative risk reduction with the Moderna vaccine was 71%. Pfizer was at the same time point only offering a 47% reduction in risk, and AstraZeneca was at that point not doing anything whatsoever to lower risk.
It makes sense that the Moderna vaccine would offer better protection than the Pfizer vaccine. Although the vaccines are virtually identical, the dose in the Moderna vaccine is three times higher. This is likely the reason why Moderna has been associated with much higher rates of myocarditis, which is why it is no longer approved for use in people under the age of 30 here in Sweden.
So, if governments hadn’t been so hasty to get the vaccines out, and had demanded six months of follow-up rather than two, only the Moderna vaccine would ever have been approved in the first place.
When we go further out than six months, things get even more depressing. By the nine month mark, the Pfizer vaccine is no longer offering any protection whatsoever against symptomatic covid-19. Unfortunately, nine month out data isn’t offered for the Moderna vaccine due to the small number of people for whom that information is currently available, but at six months out, the Moderna vaccine’s ability to prevent symptomatic covid-19 had dropped to only 59%. So there is a continuous decline in effectiveness at each time point measured even for the Moderna vaccine, without any sign of levelling off.
What about if we look at sub-groups, such as the elderly, who are by far the most at risk from covid-19, and therefore potentially have most to gain from vaccination?
People over the age of 80 initially show a good response to the vaccine, with a 73% reduction in relative risk of disease at one to two months out from vaccination. However this drops to only 50% at two to four months, and by six months there is no benefit whatsoever. Even for the middle aged (50-64 years), who have better functioning immune systems and who should therefore respond more strongly to the vaccines, the vaccines are completely ineffective at preventing symptomatic disease by the four to six months mark. The only group for whom the vaccines are more than 50% effective by the four month mark is people under the age of 50 (for whom effectiveness at four to six months is 51%).
Of course, how good the vaccines are at preventing symptomatic disease isn’t really what matters, if by symptomatic disease we usually mean something more akin to the common cold than to the Spanish flu. What really matters is how good the vaccines are at preventing serious disease. So, let’s look at that.
At one to two months out from vaccination, the vaccines provided a 91% reduction in risk of hospitalization or death. By four to six months, that had dropped to 74%. And from six months out, the reduction was down to 42%, although the difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated group was no longer statistically significant. In other words, at the six month time point it was no longer possible to detect a statistically significant effect of vaccination on risk of hospitalization or death.
As I see it, there are two possible explanations for the rapidly declining effectiveness of the vaccines. The first is that it’s due to the limited immunity produced by the vaccines themselves, and the second is that it’s due to the continued evolution of the virus and in particular the rise of the delta variant. If the second reason is true, then there is no reason whatsoever to give people boosters, because the boosters won’t do anything to improve immunity.
If the first reason is true, then there is a case to be made for boosters, although it feels pretty absurd to give everyone a booster every four months to protect against a virus that for most people is little more than a cold, that 99,8% of infected people will survive, and for which there is now massive natural population immunity, thanks to all the people who have already had covid. Unlike the short-term protection offered by the vaccines, the protection generated by infection has been shown to be both durable and broad, in spite of junk science claims to the contrary produced by the CDC. There is however a pretty good case to be made for regular boosting of the multi-morbid elderly every four months, preferentially with the Moderna vaccine.
So, what can we conclude?
The vaccines are much less effective than was initially believed, and effectiveness declines rapidly. With that being the case, the idea that it’s going to be possible for countries to vaccinate themselves out of the pandemic is clearly nonsense. The only way the pandemic ends is by enough people getting infected and developing natural immunity, which is the same way every prior respiratory virus pandemic has ended.
What is the absolute risk reduction for any of them?
100% RRR could be the difference of 2–>1 out of 1,000,000
ARR would be absolutely negligible..
I agree. The only % risk reduction that ought to be of interest to someone considering the possible benefits of being injected is the absolute risk reduction. Relative risk reduction is useful to a researcher because it suggests there is some effect in the snake oil being researched. As for the delta variant, I suspect that the “vaccines” may well be an evolutionary driver and will continue to be.
Stanford study showed absolute risk reduction 0.8%.
Check it out on their website.
Study hidden by mainstream news. Wonder why?
Actually isn’t absolute risk reduction ALWAYS hidden by media, which are funded by pharmaceutical companies?
It’s such a shame, though. Our understanding of treatments — not just vaccines — would be so much more well rounded if we saw both RRR and ARR.
Do you have a link : )
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8057721/
Read the paragraph below the graph where it discusses relative and absolute risk reduction.
Sebastian has done several articles on how this works.
As you can see in the article the absolute risk reduction of all the vaccines is around the 1% mark. Insignificant really .
Hi Sebastian,
A Dutch journalist has poked what seems to me a big hole in the Swedish study you quote. He’s the main science journalist at De Volkskrant, Holland’s largest left-of-centre newspaper, and here is his comment: https://twitter.com/mkeulemans/status/1457753633949421570
He says that the decreasing effectiveness of the vaccines in the study is purely due to an enormous decrease in cases in the unvaccinated. This may be because of natural infection or other circumstances. But the data in the studio seems to show that the effectiveness of the vaccines themselves remains stable over time (Table 2, page 26).
This means that the vaccines only APPEAR to become less effective because of the comparison with what has happened among the unvaccinated over time.
If this is correct, no conclusions whatsoever can drawn from this study about the effectiveness of the vaccines over time, yet it appears that the research does. Am I missing something?
Thank you and best wishes!
Paul Tingen.
This has already been discussed a couple of times higher up in the thread.
You sketch an interesting argument here: the non vaccinated group keeps gaining natural immunity, so the “control group” is contaminated. You would have to keep both groups in bubbles and infect them on purpose to have REAL SCIENCE.
I agree. And even if antibodies wane over time, that time allows potential exposure to covid without severe disease for some. Survival rate is different from survival state.
More relative risk reduction…. very disappointing.
How about doing a relative risk assessment in terms of adverse effects? You don’t because adverse effects are given as absolute risks.
So you continue to mix apples and oranges.
Considering how infectious the delta variant is, virtually everyone is going to be infected at some point over the next few years if they haven’t already been so. So relative risk reduction gives a much better picture of benefit in this situation than absolute risk does. The only situation where absolute risk would be better would be a study that ran from day one of the pandemic to at least five years out.
Thanks Sebastian. I think I need a whole article from you on absolute vs relative risk for dummies! It’s quite hard to wrap my head around.
“Considering how infectious the delta variant is, virtually everyone is going to be infected at some point over the next few years if they haven’t already been so. So relative risk reduction gives a much better picture of benefit in this situation than absolute risk does. ”
I would love to hear an explanation of why Rel risk would be better than abs risk here. If the vax makes my odds of harm go from 2 in 100,000 to 1 in 100,000 I don’t see how relative risk makes that fact any clearer.
Because the longer the study is, the more people will become infected.
Relative and absolute risk reduction: Right, the longer the study lasts, the higher the absolute risk reduction. Ex, with a ARR of 10% for one year, you would expect 20% ARR for two years – applied to lifetime, RRR and ARR would approx be the same (given the drug effect is not vaning, virus is not adapting etc). Compare to risk for say cancer when eating red meat.
However, it still does not follow that everyone will get sick in a lifetime (I think sickness and being infected or a ‘case’ has become a little bit fuzzy), since there is a kind of base- or cross-immunity. Ex Princess Diamond, not everybody on the ship got sick, and not everybody eating red meat gets cancer.
Remember, prognosis are tricky, especially those about future.
So maybe I should have my booster and then go out and make every effort to become infected?
But then do we know that post-infection immunity lasts any longer?
Yes, lots of observational data shows strong post-infection immunity over a year out from infection.
And at the end of the article, they
recommend dos 3= booster, precisely because immunity after vaccination is no longer available.
So? Can anyone call themselves fully vaccinated?
Though: it MIGHT be that natural immunity AFTER being vaccinated is not as effective as natural immunity without vaccination due to antigenic sin:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/original-antigenic-sin
https://brownstone.org/articles/79-research-studies-affirm-naturally-acquired-immunity-to-covid-19-documented-linked-and-quoted/?_gl=1*11yhs72*_ga*YW1wLV9oMDhUY1RNVjRFejM5YWw3VWFFaEJ6WllHRjNCa0hWd0JEWVlWRi1ja2pudDl2bnU4VXoydlpnUVRYbDRRY0Q.
I am in the US and have had 2 pfizer shots plus a booster. I’m a 72 yo male. And I suspect I had covid-19 18 months ago (leading to no more that some tinnitus). My question is: what level of immunity do I have? If I did have Covid previously, did getting the pfizer shot screw up my immune respones? If I did not have Covid, I would expect that my being vaxxed plus boosted might leave me with lowered immunity (re: the Israeli study). Not sure where I stand…
Yes we do.
In the case of SARS COV (2002) 17 years and counting has been recorded. But then they hadn’t had the ‘benefit’ of a gene treatment that apparently causes a long term suppression of innate immunity.
Gene treatment? The mRNA never reaches the nucleus of your cells, where your genes are.
@Rosalind Franklin
mRNA very well could ‘reach’ your genes by means of EPIgenetics, dimming up or down the effect of your genes (up- or down-regulation of gene expression) This is a very much new field, and we don’t really know. It was interesting for me to do plant research in the field of Virus-Induced Gene Silencing (VIGS) where the objective is to silence genes by means of Post-Transcriptional Gene Silencing (PTGS)
Here is a review that talked about PTGS back in 2001, not 1970, quite new grounds I would say: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11590235/
So, yes, once you have the mRNA in your cells –by means first experienced in the past 13.6 billion years or the 6,000 year mark, according to personal believes– yet-to-be-known things can certainly happen, no doubt.
Stefan Oelrich(Bayer) :” The mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and GENE THERAPY …”
https://twitter.com/EliseiNicole/status/1456631946642141184
mRNA = GENE THERAPY
interesting!
What about the absolute rick differences?
“In total, 1,684,958 individuals were included in the study. They were followed until October to see if they developed covid-19.”
Seems like an excellent opportunity to look long term at the other aspect of “vaccination” (we should not pretend that a treatment that modifies the body’s cells at the genetic level is just a vaccine in the familiar sense, of something that just directly exposes the body’s immune system to the pathogen or something like it – these are novel therapies and should be identified as such), namely what the relative risks of eg myocarditis, and indeed all cause mortality, are between the “vaccinated” and un-“vaccinated” groups.
Did they look at other outcomes, do you know?
wow. I mean, it’s what seems to be true to anyone paying attention, but to see actual data backing it up is just amazing.
Not that I think anything will change. The powers that be can not admit they were wrong, can not admit liability (which they removed from the drug companies to begin with) and will likely push on with mandates and have full support of the sheeple.
I’m trying to find a solid psychological method to get people to snap out of their blind hysteria. I’ve found a lot of incongruent beliefs in both extreme deniers and mostly, in the extremely afraid people around us. Any ideas or experiences?
It’s not logic, it’s emotion. We need a way to guide people to an emotionally sane equilibrium again.
There is a technique, used in business, when you have to make a decision where the group is polarised and has stopped listening to each other. You ask each of the participants to imagine that we are in the future, one year later (or whatever amount of time is appropriate). They’ve won the argument (today), and we’ve spent the year doing things their way. Unfortunately, things have not worked out well for the business — we now wish that we had the decision to take back and make it the other way. Write a letter to the group, apologising and taking responsibility for the mistake that was made. Explain how it was that you made this mistake, without trying to justify it.
Everybody has to write their own letter. We’re trying to get rid of group-think here. Writing is important. Unless you have to deal with people who have some sort of learning disability that makes it impossible for them to write letters, don’t let them get away with making a speech or a video. There is something about finding the words and ordering them on paper that focuses the mind, in most people at any rate.
If you can get people to imagine ‘hey, I might be wrong about this’ you have made tremendous progress. And it turns out that there are always a lot of people who really don’t know how to backtrack from a position they have taken. They need permission to say they have made a mistake, and need to imagine a future where they are forgiven. (Which won’t work if one side has so much contempt for the other that they will never be willing to forgive them for any reason whatsoever, so if that is the situation, do not try this.)
I don’t know whether this technique will work for discussions around covid. ‘We just lost a bunch of money and our #1 customer is quite peeved with us’ is a rather different terrible outcome than one where people die. But I have seen it used (and used it myself) to reach a needed consensus on a plan of action among people we thought could never agree on anything, so possibly worth a shot. Of course, it requires people who actually want to work together and get along with each other. If you don’t have that, then I am not sure anything can work.
I agree, to my simple mind the contagion is really a mind virus.
I’m afraid it may be too late for mankind to turn around. Imagine one Dr Fauci admitting he was a major cause of this pandemic by supporting research that led to it. Or Hitler doing an about face half way into his campaign to rule the world. Or the cheerleaders of such admitting they were wrong all along. Pride. Not going to happen on any large scale sorry to say. So scapegoats will forever get blamed. “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” That archaic document called the Bible still has a thing or two for us moderns, even if its current worshipers have lost all relation to its main tenants.
It’s religion. People are repeating history. Religion (covid) or otherwise is based in “ belief.” A very strong motivator. People have been hikacked into hysteria via religious propaganda.
If this data is correct we should be seeing increases in hospitilisations and deaths as people lose protection. This isn’t the case is it?
Um, go look at the US or Israel for some examples. They both saw big recent spikes which they should not have seen if the vaccines were truly effective over the long term. Those spikes have now started to come down, likely due to enough people having developed natural immunity from infection.
In Israel rather because of the boosters, am I wrong?
Also Ireland (specifically Waterford). Obviously places starting with I are the problem.
Huge spikes are in rural areas, aren’t they? Not in my suburban county, except for transfers from rural hospitals.
Please compare the UK stats for July, August, September 2020 vs 2021. The Monthly Mortality Analysis from the ONS is a good place to start.
Reference the mortality
Could there not be an argument that the reason death and cases are low (but higher than last year) is because
1) more people have natural immunity
2) it’s summer and coronavirus generally live in the colder months
Take a look at professor Fenton on twitter
And
https://twitter.com/ThinkingSlow1/status/1453449392153845769?t=PUdB10W5G6FEXJNNmblELA&s=19
Same for Germany. Higher hospitalisation (4 times higher) and higher symptomatic (3 times higher) in the last four weeks than since beginning of vaccination.
https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Situationsberichte/Wochenbericht/Wochenbericht_2021-11-04.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
(page 21)
Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens (2015).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4516275/
Wonderful, clear, rational, data based piece. Thank you. 🌳
Great article. Thanks.
You say “And from six months out, the reduction was down to 42%, although the difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated group was no longer statistically significant.” So what is the 42% reduction relative to, if not relative to the unvaccinated?
The risk reduction is 42%, but the difference between the groups doesn’t reach a p-value of 0.05, so it isn’t considered to be statistically significant.
Thanks Sebastian. Depressing stuff. I’m just over 50 and won’t be taking the vaccine myself (recovered from confirmed case Xmas 2020) but I’m happy to see both sets of parents (in their early 80s) have taken their boosters. I was really hoping the current vaccines would be the key out of this. Do you know if any of the big pharma companies are developing vaccines which may confer longer lasting immunity? Or do you think we’ll be stuck with this 6 monthly cycle of boosters and the (almost certain) never-ending NPIs?
There are vaccines being developed that are based on whole inactivated virus. The effect of those vaccines should in theory be much more like the effect of real infection.
Unless the vaccine is delivered nasally, you won’t see any mucosal immunity, unlike from naturally-acquired immunity.
I would think this would be obvious, but maybe the intent is to keep us coming back for more boosters.
I believe this study found that people develop nasal prptection too after vaccination.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.07.442971v1
This is a too technical for me so apologies if Its not correct.
Kalle,
Mucosal immunity is about IgA. The paper you referenced is about humoral immunity. You get some mucosal benefit from humoral immunity, but the heavy hitters in mucosal immunity are your T-cells and IgA, from what I can tell.
I’m still studying the following link:
“The mucosal immune system in the oral cavity—an orchestra of T cell diversity”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4170154/
Hey Sebastian, you said that statistically everyone gets the virus. I was together with my parents for 3 days in the same household, even physically touching them (ie. hugging my mother), when they already had symptoms. After that I was constantly testing myself (PCR test, gargling), 4-5 days apart, none of the tests showed positive. I have heard many cases from friends where the whole family caught the virus, except for 1 or 2 persons, despite physical contact. Can it be that some people are really immune, or that their immune system eliminates the virus before the PCR can show anything?
(And a side-note for the vaccine that contains whole inactivated virus, the chinese Sinopharm vaccine is exactly that. You are welcome :D.)
Makes one rather glad to have had the damn thing (last September). Though I’ve had two AZ jabs since and having booster (think Pfizer) this eve. Shouldn’t have bothered with any of them?
Sept 2020 I should have said.
I’m in the ONS Covid survey, so at least my immunity and Covid status will be logged and useful.
Excellent piece. As is often the case, I’ll be forwarding it to friends and family.
Från Hjärtat & Hjärnan Tack Sebastian **
Du är Professionellt Kunnig – Saklig – Modig & En Skatt för Alla Oss Ovaxxade som Känner Häxjakten i Ryggen!
It would be nice to have the absolute %s instead of the relative!
There’s just one little question I have. The Covid brouhaha was not something that just popped up out of the bowels of the Earth. Bad boys and girls in the good ol’ United States were behind this devastation called SARS Cov-2, according to Unz, ace columnist. When we consider what I consider a definite route to depopulation, how does that fit in with this article? After all, if Fauci and his crew want to create widespread murder and mayhem, do they care what vaccine has the best residual immunity? Listen, the little Rodent wants to kill you, your family, and just about everybody else. WE should be talking about abject murder, not the niceties of immunity. Dead people have no immunity even though they are immune to further infections. But, they are stone dead. I’m hoping we still have a semblance of a judicial system in this country. Despite my hopes, I have great doubts the non-vaxxers will ever be treated fairly.
I also think this virus was created in the USA and probably at the University of North Carolina. It was then passed to China when Obama withdrew federal funding. Obama need to come clean about what he knew.
That is not Unz’s thesis. His thesis is that the spread of the virus outside China was a mistake, that the virus was used as a bioweapon attack by a rogue faction of [insert alphabet soup agency] against China and then leaked out by accident. At least when I checked a couple of weeks ago.
In other words, Unz’s thesis is not, as you pretend to have it be, that this rogue faction wanted the virus to spread over the world. The attack was directed against the PRC and no other country was a target, according to Unz.
Otherwise, big props for reading American Pravda. I hope you have read the earlier essays as well and not just those concerning the COVID pandemic.
Is there a study on how good the vaxxes are at creating other medical issues? If they do then its a major win for pharma and medical related industries especially if its a sustained and long term / recurring ilnesses.
Perhaps this is the major goal of pushing through improperly tested vaccines which are now proven to be useless against covid19?
Steve Kirsch looked at this from 3 data sets, including Pfizer’s own data – something like 2 to 6 excess deaths were incurred amongst vaccinate for every covid death prevented.
Yes but dead people don’t need medical interventions. Only profit is in long term sick but holding on to life.
Even if the vaccines themselves are harmless all of the issued restrictions have dire consequences to the public health.
Can you explain this relative risk more clearly. As I understand it, you are relatively more at risk of getting ill with Covid than if you have already had Covid. Well, that’s obvious isn’t it? What I want to know is whether having the vaccine reduces my risk of getting Covid compared to someone who has not been vaccinated.
It does for a limited amount of time. The further out you go, the less protection you have.
The jabs never gave you immunity. They mitigated some risk/symptoms/hospitalization. Who knows WHAT they do for future health. COVID isn’t the only virus around.
I so appreciate your absolute commitment to research and science. You are a calming and rational voice in the midst of Covid and vaccine chaos.
Sebastian, just looking at the data and the study. On page 29. What does the “-” (minus) mean in front of the effectiveness? Does it mean that it is less effective than having no vaccination?
It means that there were more cases of covid in the vaccinated group. However the confidence interval shows that the difference isn’t statistically significant.
“It’s unfortunate that the drug companies decided to end their trials early”: or, rather, was it cunning?
“It’s unfortunate that the drug companies decided to end their trials early”: or, rather, was it cunning?
It was their promise to the trial subjects, “if you were given placebo, and if the vaccine is found effective” (which it was), “then we will offer you the real vax. “
I am a happy receiver of the J&J vaccine.
I recently saw a similar study saying it’s more or less without efficacy two months after the shot. Additionally, you have to wait four weeks after the shot to be immune. So, in total about one month of immunity… Anyway, I got the QR code and noone is bothering me so I’m happy 🙂
Dansen met Janssen!
While my comment wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, I better give a reference and correct what I wrote.
This is the study:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.13.21264966v1.full.pdf
The J&J vaccine declined to almost 0% from March to August in the study (figure 1), so about 4 months of protection rather than 1 month as I wrote. And to be fair, surival function is bit better (figure 2) than without any vaccination.
True, but you actually have to catch Covid for any of these ‘vaccines’ to have any effect. I’ve had no ‘vaccine’ and no Covid in the entire time this virus has been circling the planet.
Will my luck hold? Who knows but I do know there’s no real point in trialing any of the current jabs.
I’ll review when there is a real immunity-providing whole inactivated virus vaccine if Covid is still a thing then.
Kalle,
As the vaccines are in trial till 2023 they have to give placebo to some to act as a Control group. I’ve heard on some sites, that people can find with a bit of research, that Placebos have been given to up to 95% of the population. Elsewhere I have read that only 5% of the vials are doing 100% of the damage.
So you may be happy with your vaccinated status, in order to travel etc, but if the above is true you are effectively playing Russian Roulette every time you take a shot.
Certain people in the know also say that with the boosters the percentage of dangerous vials is higher.
Some of the sites I visit may be labelled as conspiracy theories, but there are a lot of experts contributing on them.
Just look up Mike Yeadon, ex CEO of Pfizer , and listen to what he saying , and many others.
Look on mercola.com and link to the news articles from around the world and see all the adverse reactions. Also the effectiveness of Ivermectin. All hidden by mainstream controlled media.
Mike Yeadon is not the former CEO of Pfizer fyi, maybe fact check a bit better before spreading what you read on your conspiracy sites 😉
To Martin,
You have no answer to the comment except nit picking.
I just checked and technically you are correct. He is ex CSO, Chief Scientific Officer, not CEO.
Perhaps that makes him even more qualified to talk about the vaccines.
Is that the best you can come up with?
I too got the Janssen vaccine on 25th Aug . I live in France . A few weeks ago I got a letter saying Janssen vaccine was no good and telling me to get a Pfizer booster asap. I am waiting for them to take away my QR code!
Could there be any point in my awaiting the development of, say, a Pfizer booster aimed at the delta variant? Or will the variant-du-jour have changed by then?
Don’t wait for anything. It’s quite obvious by now the vaccines do not do what is stated on the tin. They don’t stop you catching the virus, passing it on, or the one thing the Government did say was they would help keep you out of hospital. Well they are not even doing that. More vaxxed than unvaxxed are now dying even proportionately.
Our Government are nothing more than VaccineSales people.
I saw an article in mainstream news saying Pfizer’s profits on the vaccine this year are now up to $36 billion.
Lastly remember the SARS 1 vaccine 10 or so years ago. It took a year after vaccines were rolled out before the side effects of Narcolepsy began to show in children, particularly Denmark which had been more keen to rollout that vaccine.
Not Sars-1 but Swine Flu.
Excellent information. Thank you for keeping us updated with the latest data.
Excellent article, thank you – Natural immunity to the rescue
Seeing as the current vaxxes are still formulated to produce an immune response to Alpha variants and not Delta variants, one would have expected the ‘protection’ to wane as Delta began to predominate. And it is indeed a plausible hypothesis that it was the vaccines themselves that created the selective pressure on the virus, leading to immune escape and the emergence of Delta. A hypothesis strengthened by looking at the geographical correlation between the original large trials and the location of the subsequent emergence of the Delta variants. Given the chronological lag in effectiveness studies, it may now today be the case that a current 99% incidence of Delta may correspond to a vax percentage effectiveness that is now actually way lower than even the reduced effectiveness figure that Sebastian cites.
The trouble is, the conclusion that Sebastian reaches (that you cannot vaccinate your way out of the pandemic), is not one that the global Public Health establishment is likely to reach! One suspects that that establishment will simply move to pursuing a policy of indefinite boosters, perhaps with in silico updated formulations. Mass use of reformulated boosters would simply create further selective mutational pressure on the virus, and give rise to new strains, and potentially, to a perpetual rinse and repeat. Nothing will reduce ‘case’ numbers, as long as countries persist in high-cycle PCR mass-testing. Many countries are testing in the region of 1% of population per day!
All of this was eminently predictable many months ago. And time has proven that the policy direction advocated by the GB declaration was an entirely rational and sensible one. But regrettably, rationality is not the order of the day…
A perfect restatement of warnings given months ago.
No the vaccines were developed against the original Wuhan strain not the Alpha or Kent variant. These have been superceded throughout the world now .
Delta, Alpha variants – how do these relate to the strains G, GH, and GR which are constantly increasing. Strain S can be found in some restricted areas in the US and Spain. The L and V strains are gradually disappearing.
Till today I had never heard of these strains. It is useful to know of them>
Dennis, do you truly believe all this garbage they spew out. As I said on another post the PCR tests cannot even distinguish between the flu and the Covid. So where do they find these strains. They can invent more strains than you could possibly be injected for. This whole stuff is an elitist fairy story. Wake up and smell the coffee everyone.
I understand they were less effective for Delta. I wonder if this study distinguishes for Delta?
Delta was the dominant variant in Sweden during much of the study period.
Several Counties including Spain and Canada have proved when challenged in Supreme Court that the actual SARS 2 virus has never been isolated.
And the PCR tests as they are now and since the beginning of the pandemic cannot tell the difference between Flu and Covid, testing only for presence of viral particles.
In their current format they are being withdrawn worldwide from 31st December 2021, to be replaced by a new test they say will be able to differentiate.
So in view of the above being true and researchable, my question is how on earth do they tell the difference between 1 strain and another.
The answer is that they don’t. It’s all made up to excuse the fact that the vaccines don’t work. Period
Lancet study published Thursday 28th October 2021:
People who have been vaccinated against COVID can be equally as infectious as the unvaccinated. The study used infection data from actual examples of household transmission, and it showed that the viral loads of both vaccinated and unvaccinated patients infected with COVID are “broadly similar”. The data showed that vaccination status doesn’t make a whole lot of difference in the ability to pass COVID on to others.
This was your most significant contribution so far. Couldn´t you to team up with Hanna Åsberg and help to bring some sense into the politics of this? It pains me to see how her well-informed and serious stand seems to inspire only invective and abuse.
If people are really interested in a vaccination control group to compare as the years pass against the vaccinated, then there is just such a study started up which is growing by the day. This study can only be joined by unvaccinated individuals.
Check out vaxcontrolgroup.com
Anyone worldwide can join provided they are unvaccinated. You receive a membership card with photo-Id and bold lettering stating ‘This Person MUST NOT be vaccinated,’ and that you are a member of an official vaccine Control group for medical follow up purposes.
There is a QR code on the membership card which links back to the website with full details of the study, in cases anyone questions it’s validity.
This in itself should gain you entry into anywhere wishing to verify your vaccination status.
Once a member you are reminded to log your health status monthly via a series of drop down box type responses.
There is a small joining fee of £4 , and then £6 per quarter going forward for the administration of the health records and the statistical analysis and collation of all the stats.
This control group is gathering momentum and has gone from a standing start to over 100,000 members in a matter of a few weeks.
It sounds good but who’s running it? How much legal clout will it have with individual govts and countries? Will flashing a plastic card allow me into a shop if the shop owner won’t recognise it?
In which country? I recovered from the Alpha variant (Feb.2020)
All countries covered, but only website is the U.K. one , vaxcontrolgroup.com
They are currently in process of converting everything into many of the major languages.
Good read. Unfortunately no mentioning of negative effect. Care to comment on that? UK has 132% more infected per 100000 in 40-49yearolds week 39-42. This effect is also mentioned in this study i believe.
Planned Obsolescence
In economics and industrial design, planned obsolescence (also called built-in obsolescence or premature obsolescence) is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that it becomes obsolete after a certain pre-determined period of time upon which it decrementally functions or suddenly ceases to function, or might be perceived as unfashionable. The rationale behind this strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as “shortening the replacement cycle”). It is the deliberate shortening of a lifespan of a product to force people to purchase functional replacements
Spot on!
Great! Thanks!
Thank you so much for bringing some clear and concise points in to this debate, again!
Sebastian,
There is also a funny fact regarding the method of calculating “efficacy” against covid-19 related deaths with covid-19 vaccines.
I’m sure you are aware of the study published in Lancet on May of 2021 reporting the effectiveness of mRNA vaccine in Israeli population against covid-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths. They used national surveillance data between Jan 24 and Apr 3 2021.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00947-8/fulltext#%20
The eyebrow rising result of the study was the vaccine’s reported 100% efficacy against covid-19 mortality in the age-group of 16-44. Think about it, a whopping 100% efficacy!! Now this should already alarm the bell and imply that a study is underpowered or something, as nothing in this world is absolute, not even a vaccine. Therefore, the study was either underpowered or the observed groups were not identical in size, or something with the method is wrong, or all of these aspects failed.
Now if you look at the results more closely, you realize that they used ‘person-days’ as denominator in their calculations for incidence rates, which, clearly, is a wrong number to be used in incidences such as death. Now, 1 person-day in epidemiology and in this case refers to “1 day that 1 person did not get ill or infected” by the observed cause. In this study, the cause of infection was covid-19 as detected by positive PCR-test and whether covid-19 was symptomatic or not (begs a question whether a large portion of cases were thus “false positives”, but anyway). If any individual gets infected by a disease, they are “dropped out” from person-days figure and hence stop accumulating healthy days even if/when healed from covid-19. Hence, the faster and more individuals get infected, the larger the incidence rate per person days is.
It is slightly problematic figure as it can bias the the results by “inflating the number of positive PCR-CASES” by simply having labs in the country increase the test rate. Bear in mind that both asymptomatic and symptomatic cases were included meaning that they could have simply increased testing rate for unvaccinated and even set up PCR-cycle thresholds to 45 and detect whatever number of PCR-positives they want. Basically, this is exactly what they’ve done in most parts of the globe, and with an intention to maximise the number of ‘cases’ in public records without any relevance to the number of seriously ill or even symptomatic cases. Most of the covid-19 cases have been mild or even asymptomatic.
When comparing the incidence rates of covid-cases between unvaccinated and vaccinated, we get somewhat sensible figures as in a short window of time, the rate at which people get ill in both groups, and when the groups are similar in size, gives an indication of effectiveness.
But what happens when we do the same for hospitalizations and deaths!?
Once you divide NUMBER OF UNVACCINATED HOSPITALIZATIONS by the same infection rate number and compare this to vaccinated hospitalization cases per incidence rate, you are NOT informing the reader about ‘What NUMBER OF UNVACCINATED INFECTIONS resulted in hospitalizations’ and then compare it against the Number of hospitalizations per total infections among vaccinated. You can follow me right? We do nothing with the INFORMATION OF HOW MANY DAYS PEOPLE WERE HEALTHY when trying to figure out HOW MANY PEOPLE AT ALL GOT INFECTED vs. Got hospitalized due to infection.
Now this same applies to DEATHS. We don’t care about how many unvaccinated die relative to the NUMBER OF DAYS THEY WERE INFECTION FREE. We care about how many unvaccinated got infected by covid-19 and died from it i.e. is it 0.1%, 1%, or 2%, and then compare that to the vaccinated number. And then define the efficacy.
This whole study was such a scam, but clever as such because infection rate is a figure used As a standard in epidemiology and not everyone really thinks about its meaning. As a matter of fact, there is an independent research “fact-checkers” who studied this study, and came into a conclusion that vaccine had absolutely no statistically significant effect or even helpful trend against death or hospitalizations.
Please read more about the analysis here:
https://drrollergator.substack.com/p/damned-lies-and-vaccine-statistics?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share
On various internet sites there is massive info on the remarkable stopping of Covid 19 of 90% + in Uttar Pradesh, Zimbabwe and Mexico with ivermectin.
I have heard or read nothing in MSM so is that all fake or what? Anyone know?
Pfizer now speaks of a ‘pill’, no mention of what that is, being very effective – it will be marvellous if it turns out to be ivermectin!
Merck makes ivermectin, but there’s no money in it as it’s out of patent. I first became aware of the effectiveness of ivermectin in May 2020 so I’m sure that every government in the world is aware too. The thing is, it ought by now to be clear that neither those governing us nor firms like Pfizer have our best interest at heart.
Big Pharma will tweak ivermectin a tiny bit, patent it and say it is superior to ‘ordinary’ ivermectin Scare stories about the usual stuff will help so with $100 or so a pill there’s moey in it.
I think it is important to note that 6 months after vaccination, vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization and death was 80% in people under 80 years of age.
Here is the original version from the study:
“Vaccine effectiveness (any vaccine) was 89% at day 15- 30 (95% CI, 83-93, P<0·001), which declined to 74% (95% CI, 47-87, P80 years old were excluded. In the remaining cohort, the effectiveness was 80% (95% CI, 41-93, P=0·003), from day 181 and onwards. If individuals with homemaker service were excluded, the effectiveness was 69% (95% CI, 2-91, P=0·04) from day 181 and onwards.”
It is interesting how the authors of the article try to spin this in the text. But they don’t provide a table with a detailed age breakdown so it’s impossible to do a proper analysis. When they say six months, are they talking 4-6 months or post six months? And what is the risk reduction like in the 60-80 age group, which is the only other age bracket (apart from 80+) for which the risk from the virus is significant enough that vaccination could possibly have a
meaningful effect on serious disease?
Watched an interview on Talk Radio yesterday with an “expert” telling us the vaccine is long lasting only 20% reduction after 6ths and we must vaccinated our way out of this – I do not know the truth of this but I know an agenda being pushed when I hear one – thank you for your objective analysis
Excellent article, probably not surprising for most people who seek scientific information outside of the mainstream media as well. It is horrible news for us in Australia, where we reached 90% vaccination rate in a very short time via the coercion of job losses and the exclusion from the economy for the unvaccinated. It would be unreasonable to think that the governments, their medical advisors and the pharmaceutical companies are not aware of this.
In Victoria, the State of Emergency ends on the 15th of December, by when the government can no longer impose lockdowns, masks or vaccination apartheid. To solve this problem, the government proposed a new bill that has already passed the Lower House. It will give the Premier more power, allowing declaring a 4 months State of Emergency at any time on a pandemic advise of his Health Minister. The pandemic does not have to be in Australia. The bill increases the penalties for not complying with the Health Minister’s regulations to up to $90,000 and 2 years in jail. It is so broad that it allows for jailing dissidents. But, does the government have any other option? Doing anything else would be admitting that what has been done so far was wrong. The premier is so sure of the bill passing that he has already announced that the unvaccinated will be excluded from the economy for the whole 2022.
So when our Australian fall approaches, the vaccines stop being effective, the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths increases rapidly we will be locked down again, even if we already hold a contemptible record of enduring the longest lockdown in the world.
Ouch. Canada is on that path. We’ve lost our democracies. What the f are these politicians who pass this nonsense thinking? A wise man told last June. This isn’t going away. We will have to shoot and fight our way out of it. Too many people are dead asleep still. It’s all so appalling and shocking.
I don’t know how it is in Canada but this is a land o sheep. The majority of people supports the Premier so he does not have to worry about the elections coming up next year, the labour party will win. He didn’t have to worry anyway because the bill allows for suspending the elections during the declared pandemic.
NZ is similar. It’s criminal negligence at best, potentially crimes against humanity.
I can’t fathom the end-game but our two countries seem to have signed up to something experimental. Are we test cases for global control? It sounds far-fetched and conspiracy-theory nutty but there has to be something underpinning this other that sheer incompetence.
Ardern’s record as PM screams incompetence but that’s too simple an answer. Under her watch NZ has been divided by race, jab/no jab, property owners/tenants, ‘rich pricks’/the rest, and a number of other artificial divisions. It may be too late already to restore democracy and harmony.
There was a chance to vote her out, it didn’t happen. It seems that in NZ like in Australia the majority supports the current regime which is very sad.
Off-topic, we are the only two countries in the world with fully enforced mandatory bicycle helmet law.
Yep, my husband and I will have endured 5 months lock down in Sydney by Dec 15. Not allowed more than 5km from home or into most shops, cafes etc.
We are 65 but in good health (ie none of the listed comorbidities). I would not have believed my country would ever have become such a totalitarian state. I am a little frightened of the virus but frankly terrified of my government. It is now a matter of principal; we have grandchildren.
Hello, Dr Rushworth.
Did you see this rebuttal to the Swedish study?
https://twitter.com/RajeevJayadevan/status/1454407234138501131
Dr Jayadevan seems to be saying the efficacy appears to decline to 0 because the “natural infection” group caught up with acquired immunity at about six months. But the vaccinated group actually shows no reduction in efficacy. So, I am confused!
H/T http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2021/11/are-covid-19-vaccines-useful-3.html
I would think that you could have a rebuttal of a trial by another trial showing contradictory results not by a conviction, no matter how important the person doing the rebuttal feels
That is an interesting alternate way to look at the data, and is a plausible alternate explanation for the findings, although the variation in absolute risk over time in the unvaccinated group could also be explained by seasonality, as the later part of the study was during summer and early autumn. If one goes with his explanation instead, then there is no case to be made for vaccinating or boosting anyone any longer in countries like Sweden that if his analysis is right have now clearly reached the point of natural population immunity.
Thanks for your continued efforts to keep us all better informed. I would like to point out a small, but important (IMO), error in your text. You say “So, if the trials had been required to run for six months before presenting results instead of only running for two months, then the vaccines would have been considered too ineffective to be worth bothering with, an would never have been approved.” However, it is my understanding that these vaccines are not fully approved (certainly not in UK/US/Europe) and have only been made available for use in the general population under an Emergency Approval. I don’t know how “emergency” is defined in this instance, but I don’t see that there is one that justifies use of a treatment that has undergone such a short trial period. There is also the fact that (certainly in the US, not sure about elsewhere) said emergency approval is subject to there being no other treatment available to reduce risks from the disease. It is my understanding that this is not the case. I think the distinction as regards use of the word ‘approval’ is important and should be highlighted whenever mentioned.
Keep up the great work!
You are right! It is a “conditional marketing authorisation” and more studies have to be supplied.
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory/overview/public-health-threats/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/treatments-vaccines/vaccines-covid-19/covid-19-vaccines-authorised#authorised-covid-19-vaccines-section
A german lawyer has written a whole book about the legal aspects of the covid19-vaccines. She says very distincly that the ongoing massvaccinations are a medical experiment/study that would require much more information about the gen supplements. And that what’s happening is violation of law (not only german law, but european). It isn’t legal either to impose compulsory vaccination as done in some countries. Many lawyers have taken legal action against the governments – no massmadia is reporting anything about that.
Sebastian,
Thank you again for article!
There is also a funny fact regarding the method of calculating “efficacy” against covid-19 related deaths with covid-19 vaccines.
I’m sure you are aware of the study published in Lancet on May of 2021 reporting the effectiveness of mRNA vaccine in Israeli population against covid-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths. They used national surveillance data between Jan 24 and Apr 3 2021.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00947-8/fulltext#%20
The eyebrow rising result of the study was the vaccine’s reported 100% efficacy against covid-19 mortality in the age-group of 16-44. Think about it, a whopping 100% efficacy!! Now this should already alarm the bell and imply that a study is underpowered or something, as nothing in this world is absolute, not even a vaccine. Therefore, the study was underpowered or the observed groups were not identical in size, or something with the method is wrong, or all of these issues together.
Now if you look at the results more closely, you realize that they used ‘person-days’ as denominator in their calculations for incidence rates, which, clearly, is a wrong number to be used in incidences of death. Now, 1 person-day in epidemiology and in this case refers to “1 day that 1 person did not get ill or infected” by the observed cause. In this study, the cause of infection was covid-19 as detected by positive PCR-test and whether covid-19 was symptomatic or not (begs a question whether a large portion of cases were thus “false positives”, but anyway). If any individual gets infected by a disease, he/she is automatically “dropped out” from person-days -figure and hence stop accumulating healthy days even if/when healed from covid-19. Hence, the faster and more individuals get infected, the smaller the total person day figure is, and the larger the incidence rate per person days.
It is slightly problematic figure as it can bias the results by being “inflated with the number of positive PCR-CASES” when labs in the country increase the test rate. Bear in mind that both asymptomatic and symptomatic cases were included meaning that they could have simply increased testing rate for unvaccinated and even set up PCR-cycle thresholds to 45 and detect whatever number of PCR-positives they want. As far as I’m aware, this is exactly what they’ve done in most parts of the globe, and with an intention to maximise the number of ‘cases’ in public records without any relevance to the severity of disease i.e. number of seriously ill, hospitalized or deaths with viral infection and no underlying morbidities. Most of the covid-19 cases have been mild or even asymptomatic.
When comparing the incidence rates of covid-cases between unvaccinated and vaccinated, we get somewhat sensible figures as in a short window of time, the rate at which people get ill in both groups, and when the groups are similar in size, gives an indication of effectiveness.
But what happens when we do the same for hospitalizations and deaths!?
Once you divide NUMBER OF UNVACCINATED HOSPITALIZATIONS by the same infection rate number and compare this to vaccinated hospitalization cases per incidence rate, you are NOT informing the reader about ‘What NUMBER OF UNVACCINATED INFECTIONS resulted in hospitalizations’ and then compare it against the Number of hospitalizations per total infections among vaccinated.
You can follow me right? We do nothing with the INFORMATION OF HOW MANY DAYS PEOPLE WERE HEALTHY when trying to figure out absolute numbers for hospitalizations per infection relative to HOW MANY PEOPLE IN TOTAL GOT INFECTED.
Now this same applies to DEATHS. We don’t care about how many unvaccinated die relative to the NUMBER OF DAYS THE OBSERVED POPULATION WAS INFECTION FREE. We care about how many unvaccinated got infected by covid-19 and died from it i.e. is it 0.1%, 1%, or 2%, and then compare that to the vaccinated number. And then define the efficacy.
This whole study was such a scam in these regards as far as I can understand the “logic”, but clever as such because infection rate is a figure used frequently in epidemiology and not everyone really thinks about its meaning.
There is an independent research “fact-checkers” who studied this study, and came into a conclusion that vaccine had absolutely no statistically significant effect or even helpful trend against death or hospitalizations.
Please read more about the analysis here:
https://drrollergator.substack.com/p/damned-lies-and-vaccine-statistics?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share
So we are discussing the effectiveness of a so called vaccine, that in reality is an injected drug, for a disease called COVID 19, that has no other way to be identified but for a RTPCR test that has no gold standard and is based upon a series of computerized genome sequence taken from a supposed virus, not properly isolated, called sars cov 2. Is that what we are talking about?
Yes, the one that looks just like the flu (and is about as dangerous), the one that just happened to appear when the flu decided to disappear.
Sebastian,
Stop using their terminology.
It is only a vax1nne if it is a protein.
Professor Nikolai Petrovsky – Vax1nne Adverse Events, Mandates and Secrecy in Australia
https://youtu.be/9x2ieHuj8zU
You conclude from analysing the data what some of us already knew from the start based on previous knowledge and experiences. These types of viruses that mutate fast and spread fast cannot become extinct by mass vaccination procedures or lockdowns. Individuals may be given a temporary protection that has to be continuously updated to be sustained but if you vaccinate large populations, you will prolong the process of reaching a stable heard immunity and select faster for vaccine resistant virus strains since these will be more favoured evolutionary in the competition process. This will make the protection period after vaccination shorter for those who need it and the risk of later epidemic spread with more effective virus strains that can reproduce better in humans. High virus loads make you more symptomatic, i.e., stronger immune response and thereby more ill upon infection. The only thing that can control the virus (including mutants) spread efficiently long term in this case is broad T-cell memory generated by natural infection in a large part of the population. High degree of natural immunity is probably why the situation in Sweden looks different.
Perfectly summarized, Ann-Cathrin, thanks! This is the approach to any pandemic before WHO changed its direction and started to support lockdowns. What happened on the way? Crazy times! But the good will always prevail. And the good is not the “new normal”, it is the well known mechanism. I hope we’ll get back to this realization soon. All will be good, eventually.
Just wondering.
The virus is seasonal with Winter surges and Summer declines: how is it that a decline in symptoms/hospitalisations/deaths (the three must go together) going into Summer can confidently be attributed to vaccination because it correlates with vaccination, whilst ignoring the correlation with the change of season?
Then we read that as we move out of Summer towards Winter there is a surge of symptoms/hospitalisation/deaths which is attributed to declining effect of vaccination, although the same would be expected anyway without vaccinations.
And given that the most vulnerable groups are excluded, leaving the least vulnerable who without vaccination recover quickly from symptoms, seldom require hospitalisation or die, putting seasonality and exclusion of most vulnerable, how on Earth can any meaningful, valid evaluation of these vaccines be made?
If the claim is that without vaccination the seasonal effect would be worse – prove it.
It’s like climate change. We are told that of course part is due to nature but part due to Man. However whenever the ‘scientists’ are asked what part nature, what part Man they answer – without any embarrassment or evidence or scientific ethic – ‘at least 50% Man and probably (probably?) more’. Really? How much more: any proof?
All ‘the science’ about SARS CoV 2 (like climate science) is based on conjecture, assertion, assumptions, bluster and vilification of any who do not concur.
J. Bowman – Good points – who can answer that?
Yes, very good questions. It’s all more to do with mass formation. A great interview on mass formation and its application to the Corona crisis can be found at https://youtu.be/uLDpZ8daIVM
Great point about seasonality and correlation.
Of course, we never get any of those questions answered by
health authorities.
It’s the same with NPIs (lockdowns, masks, social distancing, school closures, etc.).
Northern hemisphere is facing a combination of winter respiratory viruses season and
waning vaccine efficacy. If summer decline was attributed to vaccines, what will
potential winter increase be blamed on?
“Unfortunate” is rather an understatement in describing the early ending of trial. In view of the actions taken by governments to force the vaccines on us, it is a health scandal on a scale never seen before.
The sort of thing you would do if you had something nasty to hide.
You say “The vaccinated people were then matched individually against people of the same age and gender, and living in the same municipality, who hadn’t been vaccinated”. But you do not seem to specify whether those people *remained* unvaccinated for the rest of the trial’s observation period. Clearly, this question is fundamental in the context of this study.
The paper says (s.v. Statistical Analysis):
“Follow-up time in days was counted until date of confirmed outcome (symptomatic infection or severe Covid-19), date of first vaccination after baseline among unvaccinated individuals, death,or end of possible follow-up time (described earlier), whichever occurred first”.
Are we to understand that as meaning that the follow-up for any initially unvaccinated individual to took a vaccine stopped immediately at that point, but that the initially unvaccinated individual *was* still included in the study? This is not entirely clear.
Elsewhere (s.v. Study design and cohort), the paper says: “Matched unvaccinated individuals were excluded if they received a first dose of vaccine or died within 14 days of baseline, and a new individual was searched from the remaining total cohort.”
To me (a native English speaker who holds a PhD), this sentence is potentially ambiguous. Does it mean that an individual was excluded if they received a first dose of vaccine at *any* time, or does it mean that an excluded if they received a first dose of vaccine within 14 days of baseline (but included if they received a first dose later, with the observation period for them ceasing at the point of receiving said dose)? In the context of this study, the difference is extremely important; ideally, it would be the former (i.e.: excluded if they received a first dose of vaccine at *any* time during the observation period of the study), although the high vaccine uptake does make it harder to assemble a sufficiently statistically powered control group.
1. It means that they were followed until vaccination, and that period was included in the study.
2. It means that if they were vaccinated or died within 14 days from the beginning of their follow-up period in the study, then they weren’t included in the study. They were included if they received a firsr dose later, but their follow-up ended on the day they took their first dose.
In that case, I suppose the follow-up question would be what proportion of the population did get vaccinated, but at some point *after* late-May 2021? If a significant proportion of the Swedish population falls into that category, I imagine that the average follow-up period for unvaccinated (as of late-May 2021) persons in that study would be shorter than the average follow-up period for vaccinated persons? And if we have a significant discrepancy in the typical follow-up periods between the two groups (other than a discrepancy occasioned by catching COVID-19), it somewhat weakens the reliability of the results in connection with attempts to compare the durability of natural immunity to the durability of vaccine-based immunity… unless the ‘pairing’ process (the matching of a person in the unvaccinated group to a person of similar characteristics in the vaccinated group) somehow manages to correct such a bias?
The more I think about this, the more I appreciate the gravity of Dr Rushworth’s point (made in an earlier ’blog-post) about the ethical imperative of maintaining a control (placebo) group.
‘It’s unfortunate that the drug companies decided to end their trials early, by giving active covid vaccine to the members of the placebo group after just a few months. ‘
No, it wasn’t unfortunate, it was done deliberately to help hide the serious injury and death that these gene manipulating injections are causing.
For the same reason the vaccinators that conducted the initial trials expelled people who were injured after dose one and then hid the data showing that they had been harmed from the final reports claiming these people did not complete the trial so their injury could be ignored.
Vaccine injured speak out
https://www.bitchute.com/video/CBpw93cC8xoh/
These are accusations of criminal acts. Do you have any evidence to back this up.
By evidence, I mean facts, such as documents, emails, credible whistleblowers testimony, not anecdotes.
The book Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre is good example of the distortions of the medical evidence by financial interests, but the evidence is presented.
Could you be able to do the same? These allegations do not become true just because you assert them to be so.
“This is likely the reason why Moderna has been associated with much higher rates of myocarditis”
What in the Moderna vaccine causes the myocarditis?
Systemic inflammation is known to cause myocarditis; that’s why it’s recommended to avoid exercising while having a cold. Something in the body’s immune response causes the myocarditis, not the vaccine in itself..
It’s also recommended to avoid exercise for up to 2 weeks after getting a flu vacchine.
A long-term US study, paid for by the US Army across a couple hundred thousand soldiers, found elevated myocarditis following flu shots.
Therefore it’s not particular to COVID vaccine shots, and I don’t think the argument is, or should be, that only this group of drugs causes myocarditis.
The argument is that only for this group of drugs the causality is being suppressed by medical professionals, by governments, and by journalists.
Why?
In my opinion the risk from the Flu vaccine outweighs the reward.
Dr Mercola did some investigations using absolute risk reduction figures as opposed to the relative risk reduction favoured by Big Pharma.
The conclusion as I remember was that you would need to inject 74 people to prevent just 1 person catching the Flu.
But if you gave those same 74 people a high dose of Vitamin D3, 5000 International Units, you would prevent 50% catching the flu. The conclusion was that Vitamin D3 is around 30 times more effective than the vaccine. With effectively no risk.
Sweden is a case in point, where the population are encouraged to supplement with D3 during the long winter months.
And where are Sweden at right now.
Completely open with all restrictions ended. Food for thought.
1: The dose in the Moderna vaccine is three times higher as Sebastian stated above.
2: A potential lack of proper vaccination procedure, i.e. lack of aspiration? But that’s a wild guess, that comes up as a topic from time to time.
Bernd,
So a stronger immune response due to more spike protein production by host cells somehow results in myocarditis? Would there be more microclotting in the cardiovascular system for Moderna recipients?
Martin,
I don’t think that it’s appropriate to blame a host immune system for an immune response to a pathogen when there is no history of autoimmunity.
So many comments…
Without having read them all I would like to state that none of the conducted vaccine trials have optimized for longevity of immune response. That is probably after discussions with FDA and relevant other agencies, as the primary goal was to get an effective vaccine out quickly. If you want to optimize for longevity you would more likely wait 4-6 months for the body to better select IgA clones before giving a second dose. However, during those 6 mo you are probably at higher risk of disease since the titers are not high enough yet.
I am guessing most countries in the west will offer a third booster dose, then another dose yearly for all. Even though it is mostly the elderly and ill who would benefit from it. Young and healthy will probably not take the booster to any significant rate, which is also fine. This coronavirus will be reduced to yet another cold virus, perhaps with the benefit that we will se less post-infectious smell losses among coronavirus infected..
This recent Swedish study is real-world confirmation of findings from two previous studies (pre-print) showing rapid decline in immune response for the Pfizer vaccine. These other studies are based on measurements of immune factors over time:
USA: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.30.462488v1.full
— Results: “Our data demonstrate a substantial waning of antibody responses and T cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, at 6 months following the second immunization with the BNT162b2 vaccine. Notably, a significant proportion of vaccinees have neutralizing titers below the detection limit.”
JAPAN: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8351777/
— Results: “The average half-life of neutralizing activity in the vaccinees was approximately 67.8 days and the average time length for their serums to lose the detectable neutralizing activity was 198.3 days.”
Dr. Rushworth-
were the unvaccinated screened for prior infection or are they unvaccinated/never infected? Thank you.
Yes, people with known prior infection were not included.
Help me out – I have a friend who ALWAYS seems to point out that I am wrong in everything
I post. I posted a link to your article and this is what she comments:
“And yet the studies he refers to came to the conclusion that the vaccines were ‘an effective alternative to increase population immunity against Covid-19, including against the Delta variant which dominated the confirmed cases during the study period.’ Can’t imagine why he doesn’t mention that!
Oh and they concluded ‘This strengthens the evidence-based rationale for administration of a third booster dose.’
I guess he just assumed his readers won’t actually look at the studies!
Gah, so as I’ve said many times, you can’t look at the authors conclusions – you have to look at the actual results. Authors conclusions are usually aligned with whatever the dominant dogma is at the time of writing, and if the results show something unwanted, they will be ignored and the ”appropriate” conclusion will be reached anyway.
Approval of what is approved of
Is as false as a well-kept vow.
Keep it up, Dr Rushworth, you’re doing a fine job.
Hi Sebastian As most of us are being guilted into having the vaccines I am wondering if there is any evidence that the vaccine suppresses our own immune response. From you blog it looks like many will think they are safe being double vaxed but in fact are not so will our natural production of antibodies still function or have we blocked it with the vaccine chemistry.
This is my greatest fear with the vaccine and one that would drive me to decline. If my immune system is up to the challenge then I believe I will be better off suffering any illness and having my autoimmune system protect me…the way it was designed. I hope I am not wrong.
I think longer term follow-up is needed before that question can be answered definitively.
It seems plausible and logical that the vaccinated when they contract Covid and recover gain natural immunity and will no longer get infected with Covid. While we all, vaccinated and not, end up contracting it, we will all end up with natural immunity and this will be over. But what if it’s not. What if the vaccinated keep on getting reinfected and this will never end. Was there a case recorded where a vaccinated person who contracted Covid, recovered and contracted it again?
How come nothing is ever mentioned about the very strong effect from vitamin D3??
High levels of this vitamin seems to be a better protektion against Covid than any vaccin!
I’ve written multiple articles about vitamin D:
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/08/03/do-vitamin-d-supplements-protect-against-respiratory-infections/
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/09/11/can-vitamin-d-cure-covid-19/
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/01/31/update-on-vitamin-d-for-covid/
Thanks for the interesting study! I suppose people who are very ill are not offered a vaccination. These people are most likely to die in the short term. How does the study compensate for that effect?
The vaccine was offered even to people in nursing homes, who have a remaining life expectancy of about six months, so the group that was too sick to be offered the vaccine was very small, which shouldn’t noticeably impact the results.
Whilst I have not knowingly had Covid, is there a way I can find out if I have had it? I mix freely with people, including Grandchildren and do not wear a mask. I am triple jabbed with Pfizer and had no side effects. I agreed to be vaxxed so I could travel without hassle – not with any great expectation of immunity, but with some expectation of reduced syptoms. I have more confidence in my daily doses of Vits C and D as immune boosters than the vaccinations, to be honest.
I am I the only one who finds the main point of this article a little odd i.e. that the best way to get immunity to Covid is to have it? Vaccination is supposed to prevent a disease. The problem with the current ones is that they are ineffective at this and just prevent serious illness and only that for a limited period.
Having been double-Pfizered my interest now is in the wisdom of taking a booster jab. I’d love to see an independent scrutiny of the evidence on safety and efficacy of the booster. If there is much evidence, as distinct from wishful thinking.
mercola.com -Our Site is Currently Undergoing a Detox and is Unavailable
Dear dr Rushworth,
Thanks for posting your analysis of this data on the waning efficacy of the various vaccines.
Please be advised that, as to the duration of naturally acquired protection, the Dutch government announced this week (November 2nd, 2021) its decision to extend the duration of the natural immunity certificate (aka the “recovery certificate”) from 180 days to 365 days (https://www.eerstekamer.nl/behandeling/20211102/brief_van_de_minister_van_vws_ter).
The government’s decision is based on the advice of the Dutch Outbreak Management Team (OMT). In its advice, the OMT also refers to this German report of the German virology community, which also proposes to extend the natural immunity certificate to 365 days: https://g-f-v.org/2021/09/30/4411/ ).
Below please find an English translation of the government’s decision to extend the natural immunity certificate from 180 to 365 days:
“Further to the 127th advice of the Outbreak management advice, I have decided to extend the validity of a corona entry pass on the basis of a recovery certificate issued in the Netherlands from 180 to 365 days.
This decision is based on recent scientific findings about the longevity of natural immunity which occurs after an infection. Experts support the notion that this immunity continues for longer than previously assumed. As is the case for vaccination certificates, it is possible for recovery certificates that someone tests positive. People should then take their own responsibility and self quarantaine. With this decision, I satisfy the commitment made to MP Van Haga during the Budget session of the Ministry of VWS to inform this Chamber as soon as possible of the duration of a recovery certificate.
This decision has consequences for a Digital Covid Certificate (DCC) issued in another European country than the Netherlands. The recovery certificate issued in a DCC has for all EU citizens a validity of 180 days after a positive PCR test. For most countries the QR code then expires. As a consequence, it is technically impossible to use it thereafter. A visitor from another Member State, therefore, can between dag 180 and day 365 not use his recovery certificate for a corona entry pass. I subscribe the importance of equal treatment between Dutch and other EU citizens, but I accept that this is not possible for now.
I commit to make a hard case in the EU that the duration in the EU Regulation of a recovery certificate will be extended to 365 days. (..)”
The conclusion of the German virologists’ report ( https://g-f-v.org/2021/09/30/4411/)
reads as follows (in German):
Schlussfolgerungen:
Die nachgewiesene Dauer des Schutzes nach durchgemachter SARS-CoV-2 Infektion beträgt mindestens ein Jahr. Aus immunologischer Sicht ist von einer deutlich längeren Schutzdauer auszugehen, die auf Grund des begrenzten Beobachtungszeitraum aber noch nicht durch entsprechende Studien belegt ist.
Auf Grund dieser aktuellen Erkenntnisse sollten Genesene bei Regelungen zur Pandemie-Bekämpfung (z.B. Testpflicht) den vollständig Geimpften zunächst für mindestens ein Jahr gleichgestellt werden.
Eine Überprüfung des empfohlenen Zeitpunktes einer Impfung nach überstandener SARS-CoV-2 Infektion wird angeraten.
Dr Rushworth, thank you for this article. A lot of solid data, very structured. Is there data available on the effectiveness of person A passing the disease further if person A is vaccinated? Or if not vaccinated? And how this changes in time? Thank you
Dr Rushworth,
I’m not sure it’s all that enlightening to focus solely on protection against infection when making judgments about the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
Preventing infection isn’t the goal (and is rarely the goal of vaccines). Rather, the primary goal is to prevent symptomatic COVID-19 and especially protect against hospitalisation and death (if you get infected). If the vaccines began to rapidly fail over a short period of time with respect to these aspects there would be genuine cause for alarm.
My initial confusion about your argument prompted me to review the pre-print. I now see that their focus was symptomatic infection, not simply infection, along with other outcome measures for vaccine efficacy.
And what is a “relatively short period of time?” These shots don’t offer protection for a particularly long time. Less than a year, less than 6 months even! And for those whose age and health make them more likely to end up in the hospital or dying, the shot seems to lessen the symptoms, but also make it more likely that they spread infection to others since they don’t notice that they are actually sick.
Dr Rushworth, it has been sad in the media that unvaccinated are spreading the virus to vaccinated and that the unvaccinated are creating the variants like delta. Is there any truth in that or are they just trying to scare/shame people into taking the vaccine?
There are no truths to these claims, as I discussed in a recent blog post: https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/09/23/a-reflection-on-covid-mania/
Sebastian Rushworth says:
“The vaccines are much less effective than was initially believed, and effectiveness declines rapidly. With that being the case, the idea that it’s going to be possible for countries to vaccinate themselves out of the pandemic is clearly nonsense. The only way the pandemic ends is by enough people getting infected and developing natural immunity, which is the same way every prior respiratory virus pandemic has ended.”
Anders Tegnell says: (On UnHerd, 23 September 2021.)
“I think the big change, since we talked last time, is really the vaccinations. There, we really found the tool that’s going to make the difference. And all the other things we have tried are not going to be very important anymore, because reaching and achieving a high vaccination level is the one way we can get out of this pandemic. There does not seem to be any other way, really.”
https://unherd.com/thepost/anders-tegnell-sweden-won-the-argument-on-covid/
What is going on with Anders Tegnell?
Got to by someone. Bribed blackmailed or just threatened by powerful forces.
I also found Tegnell’s comment puzzling and confusing. Maybe he simply didn’t
know about this study.
Sweden’s cases have been rather low, but they also do not test much.
I have been looking at their vaccination campaign:
1. The majority of the people were vaccinated between May 2021 and September 2021
and the second dose was administered for majority in July and beyond.
So, majority of the vaccinated people (that got the dose in July, Aug, Sep) still have really
decent protection both from infection and very good protection from disease. But, December and January (6 months after the second dose) will be the months when this protection drops off the cliff.
2. The number of cases in Europe during the summer are very low (seasonality). Apart from the UK,
and a spike in France / Netherlands, nobody had any cases including Sweden. Now that the northern countries are entering the respiratory illnesses season, one would expect the uptick in cases and diseases in Sweden as well. Just in time for reduced vaccine efficacy.
Hi Sebastian,
When you say natural immunity is broad and durable, do you have any good number estimates to compare with the vaccine-immunity Swedish study discussed above? For example what is the overall efficacy of natural immunity at 2, 4, 6, 9 months from an infection, severe disease and death point of view?
On a side note what is Sweden like with the social pressure to get vaccinated? If you’re not vaccinated, have many people tried to nudge you to get vaccinated and what do you normally tell them to justify your decision? All the best!
Can you comment on this thread of tweets:
https://twitter.com/RajeevJayadevan/status/1454407234138501131?s=20
I think this does cast some considerable doubt on the conclusions. There does seem to be a marked fall in the event rates of symptomatic infections in the unvaccinated group at around the 120-180 day range. This could well be the effect of a rising rate of asymptomatic infections in the unvaccinated group with a consequent rise in immunity from natural infection. One would assume the incidence of asymptomatic infections is likely to be lower in the vaccinated group. Asymptomatic infections are going to be missed by the method of data collection, and are a confounding factor, whose magnitude cannot be ascertained.
How can it be explained that the countries with a very high rate of fully vaccinated population like Israel and now Australia mandate boosters? Wouldn’t the boosters be unnecessary if the vaccines remained effective?
But the rate of asymptomatic infections should vary in step with the rate of symptomatic infections. My personal thinking is that the decline is due to seasonality, as mentioned higher up in the thread. The vaccinated infection rate should also decline as summer sets in if the vaccines continue to be effective, but it doesn’t.
Andre Socha
It is known that immune responses are weaker and fade more rapidly in the elderly, who are at most risk. Rising cases in the young are spilling over into the elderly, so like virtually all governments, they are putting all their eggs in the vaccine basket.
Sebastian.
You have made an assumption that the rate of asymptomatic infections has a constant relationship to symptomatic infections (ie those measured in the paper) and that this relationship is the same in vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. This may be true, but there is no data to support this in the paper. If it were not the case, that the rate of asymptomatic infections was much higher in the unvaccinated (eg. the vaccine was preventing asymptomatic infections), the the measurement of declining efficacy of the vaccine would be because the unvaccinated were ‘catching up’ the vaccinated.
If I understand your reply, you attribute the marked fall in event rate in the unvaccinated group to seasonal effects. The event rate in the vaccinated group remained essentially static over the same time period so I would conclude the opposite; the marked fall in the unvaccinated in not due to seasonality, as it did not occur in vaccinated group.
Like I wrote higher up in the thread, since this is observational data, it’s impossible to know just from this one study which alternative is true. Either the population reached herd immunity during the study or the vaccines lost effectiveness, or some combination of the two. However, I find it strange that there is no sign of the expected seasonal decline in infections in the vaccinated group, which to me suggests decreasing vaccine efficacy. Regardless of which explanation is preferred, the vaccines clearly provide little further benefit by the end of the study.
It is an omission in the paper that this alternative explanation is not mentioned. I think it should be, as it potentially negates the conclusion, that vaccine efficacy declines. Vaccine efficacy may be static and the unvaccinated have ‘caught up’. Clearly by 6 months if the alternative explanation is more correct, there is no advantage to being vaccinated, but only if you were originally part of the unvaccinated and now have natural immunity as a result of asymptomatic infection.
One thing that I still find confusing and unclear is natural immunity.
It’s clear (and supported by several studies) that by being recovered from *symptomatic*
COVID-19 gives you good immunity and that natural antibodies may work against future
variants as well (because it’s not just the spike S-protein antibodies that are being produced).
What is not clear at all is people who were exposed to the virus but were asymptomatic.
What is the level of immunity? Does your body even generate SARS-Cov2 specific antibodies?
Or has your innate immune system neutralized the virus (and you didn’t get sick), but no antibodies
and B-cells were actually produced. And therefore, if you were asymptomatic (and maybe didn’t
even know you had the virus), maybe you don’t have immunity.
I’ve been trying to find papers on this, but have come up empty-handed.
https://twitter.com/RajeevJayadevan/status/1454407234138501131?s=20
Some people point at this comment Sebastian. What’s your reaction?
To what extent does the vaccine reduce transmission? What about asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission?
Does the waning efficacy mean that after like one year of receiving the jab the immune system is “cleaned up”, so to speak? Or those S-specific abs introduced by the vaccine will be lurking forever in someone’s body?
Here’s a recent paper that discusses this:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04060-7
Why do we continue to refer to this nonsense as a PANDEMIC. There has been more lives lost to the collateral damage of a virus that, as you mentioned, often not much more than a flu. Let’s stop running away from a virus and naturally build up herd immunity as Sweden did.
The possible problem with Moderna, as you said, is that it’s basically several times the dose of the same ingredient that you get in the Pfizer. That means more risk of side-effects.
Dr Robert Malone, an expert in this field, seems to have taken the Moderna and to his shock had bad side-effects from it , although as far as I know not the permanent disablement which seems to have happened to some in the USA. He has been sceptical in recent months on its use in anyone except the very vulnerable and does not think that it was tested nearly enough.
I gather that, in the Pfizer trial, all-cause mortality was statistically the same in the experimental group as in the control group. How one gets from that to an emergency use authorisation is an interesting question.
I don’t know what happened with Moderna and all-cause mortality. However, since medicine is presumably an attempt to reduce deaths, it seems a highly relevant question.
Unfortunately, the past two years and reading Dr Kendrick’s book ‘Doctoring Data’ have made me more alert to medical ‘scams’ than I was. I think I recall reading that the most ‘vaccine-hesitant’ group in the population is now those who are educated to PhD level. This is followed by medics. Rather a striking point.
Sebastian,
the Swedish study you cited is unsuitable to make any assumption about vaccine efficacy.
Participants in the study were not blinded, i.e. those who had the vaccine knew that they had the vaccine, and those who did not have the vaccine knew that they didn’t have the vaccine. Therefore this fact informs their behavior, and we all know at this point that people who had the vaccine early in the vaccination campaign have a very different personality profile from the people who did not, or who to this day did not get a single shot.
The study is also confusing exposure and infection. In order to make any claims about protection through vaccine you’d have to compare a person vaccinated who then is exposed to an infected person to a person not vaccinated who is then exposed to the exact same infected person. The study clearly did not take any of this into account.
What is unique about this pandemic is the very low prevalence. It’s so low that not only were the clinical studies of the vaccine makers flawed, but this subsequent study of long-term efficacy is equally flawed because with low prevalence you’ll never get high-confidence statistics. There just aren’t enough infected people in the general population to draw any solid conclusions.
The prevalence is much much higher than for almost every single of the other diseases we have developed vaccines for.
Your argument is invalid.
Tim, if you are inclined to read my argument again you might notice that I said the prevalence is low for a pandemic, not low in comparison to other diseases for which vaccines might or might not exist.
But even on its merits your argument is wrong. We’ve had for many decades an obesity pandemic throughout the developed world. I’m not seeing much being done about that. To the contrary, most governments seem very keen to exacerbate the obesity pandemic by closing gyms or putting entry restrictions in place, and in places like Australia or Germany even ask their populations to stay at home and do absolutely nothing to counter obesity.
I could go on. According to Our World in Data, 1 in 5 adults on this planet are smokers. Smoking causes cancer and various diseases that permanently damage organs. 15% of all global deaths are attributed to smoking. The fix would be very simple: ban smoking and ban the import and trade of tobacco products. But not a single government is lifting a finger to tackle this – real – pandemic.
Niko, re your comment:
“What is unique about this pandemic is the very low prevalence. It’s so low that not only were the clinical studies of the vaccine makers flawed, but this subsequent study of long-term efficacy is equally flawed because with low prevalence you’ll never get high-confidence statistics. There just aren’t enough infected people in the general population to draw any solid conclusions.”
Consider this information from an article published on the UK Telegraph in May last year:
“But Professor Hill, director of the university’s Jenner Institute, revealed that his team now faces a major problem, throwing the September deadline into doubt.
In short, their adversary is disappearing so rapidly in the UK that the next phase of trials has only a 50 per cent chance of success.
Without Covid-19 spreading in the community, volunteers will not catch the disease, leaving scientists unable to prove that their vaccine makes any difference.
Professor Hill said that of 10,000 people recruited to test the vaccine in the coming weeks – half of whom will be given a placebo – he expected fewer than 50 people to catch the virus. If fewer than 20 test positive, then the results may be useless, he warned.
“It is a race, yes. But it’s not a race against the other guys. It’s a race against the virus disappearing, and against time,” Professor Hill, 61, told the Telegraph from his university laboratory, long emptied by the lockdown.”
Ref: Exclusive: Oxford University Covid-19 vaccine trial has 50 per cent chance of ‘no result’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/23/oxford-university-covid-19-vaccine-trial-has-50-per-cent-chance/
Eizabeth,
thanks, I’m aware of these findings. I remarked a year ago that all three big studies actually proved that there is no pandemic considering that across more than 100.000 participants so few tested positive over severall months.
Thanks Niko.
So…what does this mean…in light of what’s happened over the past 22 months of this ‘pandemic’?
For example, Our World in Data reports that, as of today, 51.6% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, with
7.45 billion doses administered globally.
What do you think about this?
Ref: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
You don’t say what the test was. If a SARS-COV Antigen Rapid test which gives up ‘negative’ altho the testee is positive does not give the result you posit, that so few tested positive.
Yes. He made those remarks shortly before the trial went further afield and recruited in India, Brazil, and S Africa. And the trial was looking for subjects that were at high exposure risk.
And lo and behold, a few months later the ‘Indian variant’ was born, which was subsequently renamed Delta.
Seems like many are aware of selective mutational pressure, except those running the show…
Response to Kevin Quinn, 15 November, 2021 at 22:38
Kevin you say: “Yes. He made those remarks shortly before the trial went further afield and recruited in India, Brazil, and S Africa. And the trial was looking for subjects that were at high exposure risk.
And lo and behold, a few months later the ‘Indian variant’ was born, which was subsequently renamed Delta. Seems like many are aware of selective mutational pressure, except those running the show…”
In regards to the trials going further afield and selective mutational pressure…
In January 2021 I forwarded a rapid response to The BMJ raising questions about this.
My rapid response wasn’t published by The BMJ, which I suggest was very questionable on their part.
I referred to the new coronavirus variants, and their emergence in the UK, South Africa and Brazil, where AstraZeneca vaccine trials were underway, and noted that, with the possibility the experimental coronavirus vaccines might not prevent transmission of the virus, was it possible that these could be ‘leaky vaccines’, i.e. “anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission” which “can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts”? This is described in Andrew F. Read et al’s study re Marek’s disease in poultry, i.e. Imperfect vaccination can enhance the transmission of highly virulent pathogens, published in 2015.
As The BMJ decided not to publish my submitted rapid response, I wrote directly to Andrew Read on this matter, on 27 January 2021, FYI see my email via this link:
If Covid-19 vaccines don’t prevent transmission, can they facilitate the evolution of more virulent variants? https://vaccinationispolitical.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/covid-19-vaccines-can-they-facilitate-the-evolution-of-more-virulent-variants.pdf
Here’s some more information to consider Kevin…
An article from the Australian Financial Review, titled: ‘I’m 79, I won the Nobel Prize and I don’t give a s—‘, 8 May 2020.
This is an interview with Peter Doherty, Nobel Laureate, and patron of the Doherty Institute in Australia. It was modelling from the Doherty Institute which put Australia into lockdown in March 2020, influenced by Neil Ferguson et al, Imperial College London, e.g. their Report 9, which recommended a ‘suppression’ response against the virus (aka lockdown), “until a vaccine becomes available…”
Quoting the interviewer Patrick Durkin talking about Peter Doherty:
Despite the fact I follow the news closely, it comes as a bit of a surprise to me when he says he thinks the world might have a COVID-19 vaccine as early as September.
“The Jenner Institute have a chimp virus vaccine,” he says. “It went through pre-clinical testing here in Geelong on ferrets.” Doherty is referring to the testing at CSIRO’s high-security animal health lab, although he admits because ferrets are in short supply, they are also testing on transgenic mice.
“It then went into six monkeys. In both cases, they were challenged with the virus and showed it prevented infection. They have already put about 600 people out in the community with it in Britain.
“What we’re going to see from those is whether there are any untoward effects. I would be surprised if we do.
“But there are 60 million doses of this thing being made right now. It’s perfectly feasible we will see this vaccine rolled out in the United Kingdom in September. It’s exactly the way the Ebola vaccine was tested.”
September? I ask again, just to make sure I haven’t misheard.
“The British vaccine, which is the one that could be going into people’s arms, it’s already going into people, but it could be going into large numbers of people as early as September,” he confirms.
I would like to know what you think about Tegnells point of view: he says, the vaccines brought the salvation?
In light of all the data that’s available, I think it’s an absurd statement. The vaccines came in too late in the game and their effect is too temporary for them to play much of a role in how the pandemic is playing out.
Sebastian, I’m very curious to hear why – assuming that the official numbers out of Sweden are not being falsified – by now more than 72% of the Swedish population are fully-vaccinated. I’m puzzled.
Sweden saw 15’000 fatalities being attributed to COVID-19 between March 2020 and now, and hardly any restrictions were put in place. Why would 72% of Swedes choose to get vaccinated with an experimental drug when there is so little risk and so little pressure?
Because that’s what the authorities tell them to do and in Sweden trust in the authorities is high.
I am afraid you are not considering the huge amount of side effects these jabs bring into your risk benefit analysis. Please see Steve Kirsch and collaborators analysis of the topic.
https://www.skirsch.io
Good article nonetheless.
Niko, you ask: “Why would 72% of Swedes choose to get vaccinated with an experimental drug when there is so little risk and so little pressure?”
It doesn’t make sense does it?
To put this into context, please consider this email I forwarded to Anders Tegnell on 22 December 2020:
Sweden, coronavirus, vaccination – ethical considerations:
https://vaccinationispolitical.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/sweden-coronavirus-vaccination-ethical-considerations.pdf
‘
‘In short, their adversary is disappearing so rapidly in the UK that the next phase of trials has only a 50 per cent chance of success.’
That Telegraph article was written more than a year ago – nothing has changed? Covid is still fast disappearing?
The fundamental question is why were people not at threat of covid-19 included in the covid-19 vaccine trials, i.e. healthy people aged 18-55 years, and children?
The ethics process should have rejected these trials…or have vaccine manufacturers been getting away with this for years? Well it’s way past time for scrutiny.
In this regard, please see my email to Robert Malone, Geert Vanden Bossche and Peter McCullough titled: How could defective covid-19 ‘leaky vaccines’ be ethically approved? https://vaccinationispolitical.files.wordpress.com/2021/11/how-could-defective-covid-19-leaky-vaccines-be-ethically-approved.pdf
Time to track this back now, check out the whole email thread, including my emails to Andrew Pollard, Chief Investigator on the Oxford/AstraZeneca covid-19 vaccine trials, and Chair of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
I’m pursuing this matter further.
Yes, this sort of thing has been going on for years, I’m afraid to say. Often, but not solely in vaccine trials.
Take cancer, for example. Many, if not most, cancer drug trials have extensive exclusion criteria, that typically disallow subjects that have other co-morbidities, or low blood counts, or are simply too old.
Thus many drugs are approved on the basis of data coming from trials where the trial subjects are somewhat unrepresentative of the ‘real world’ actual patient population (for any particular indication).
And again, in many randomised trials (often seen in cancer trials); if the drug in question shows signs of efficacy at a pre-planned interim data analysis, then a ‘crossover’ component comes into play, and the subjects in the placebo arm are able to cross over and start receiving the investigational drug.
This is usually described as an ethical provision. And sometimes it is used as an aid to recruitment, by letting the subject know at the outset, that he or she can ‘cross over’ if the investigational drug shows signs of efficacy at an interim analysis stage.
What this means is that long-term comparative data on arm v arm efficacy (and safety) is lost forever.
Again, many Big Pharma trial sponsors use the interim analysis to secure an accelerated drug approval (usually on a surrogate endpoint), and possibly cut years off development time (and save a few hundred million dollars). The justification is always that much-needed treatments should be made available at the earliest juncture. One could argue that in the case of high mortality cancers this may indeed be justified. But that is not what we are talking about here. As Sebastian has pointed out, we will never know about comparative (treatment v control) long term outcomes in these vaccine trials. Yet the intention is to vaccinate (repeatedly) the entire world as fast as possible.
I recall a Pharma exec stating that his company needed a liability waiver for their Covid vaccine candidate, in case an adverse effect came to light after, for example, four years, that they couldn’t have anticipated….
Some people say that the whole body starts to produce the spike protein, in the ovaries etc. after mrna- vaccination and that could be dangerous.
If the pfizer vaccine doesnt give any protection after 9 months, can one draw the conclusion that there is no spikeprotein anywhere left in the body? And that the fear of the production of the spike protein is exaggerated?
That claim is based on a misinterpretation of a biodistribution study in Japan where the test subjects were mice (not humans), the injection was intravenous (not intramuscular), and the dose was by an order of magnitude higher in relation to body size than you would administer to a human.
Not applicable to any mRNA vaccine on the market. I have no insight why the study was done this way, but could be regulatory requirements in Japan. Many similar claims originate in such setups, e.g. the claim that fries contain carcinogenic acrylamide, which again is based on a study where a large dose of acrylamide was injected directly into the veins of mice.
I guess this way you could also prove that injecting politicians into mice also causes cancer.
The British government has spilled the beans about that fact that once you get double jabbed, you will never again be able to acquire full natural immunity.
In its Week 42 “COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report,” the U.K. Health Security Agency admitted on page 23 that “N antibody levels appear to be lower in people who acquire infection following two doses of vaccination.” It goes on to explain that this antibody drop is basically permanent.
What’s this mean?
We know the vaccines do not stop infection or transmission of the virus (in fact, the report shows elsewhere that vaccinated adults are now being infected at much HIGHER rates than the unvaccinated).
What the British are saying is they are now finding the vaccine interferes with your body’s innate ability after infection to produce antibodies against not just the spike protein but other pieces of the virus. Specifically, vaccinated people don’t seem to be producing antibodies to the nucleocapsid protein, the shell of the virus, which are a crucial part of the response in unvaccinated people.
In the long term, people who take the vaccine will be far more vulnerable to any mutations in the spike protein that might come along, even if they have already been infected and recovered once, or more than once.
The unvaccinated, meanwhile, will procure lasting, if not permanent, immunity to all strains of the alleged virus after being infected with it naturally even just once.
Read it for yourself.. Page 24.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1027511/Vaccine-surveillance-report-week-42.pdf
Gerard, I don’t think that this interpretation is valid. The report simply says that vaccination is training the immune system to attack the S antigen and not the N antigen, hence a lower count of N antibodies.
There are also sub-unit vaccine candidates in the pipeline that target N antigens.
In general I’d advise to be very sceptical about such broad readings. I recall a number of highly respected scientists – or, rather, former – who claimed as early as April 2021 that “the vaccines”, i.e. all of them, would lead to ADE and by winter the vaccinated would be dropping like flies. This was easily refuted by Australia which already had > 25% vaccination rate in June, i.e. during Australia’s winter, and no ADE signal was detected. Now we’re in Europe’s winter, and I’m not seeing ADE even though > 300 million Europeans are double-jabbed at this point.
Same for an alleged impact on fertility. If that were true we’d already be seeing a sharp drop in pregnancies across the globe. 7.5bn doses were administered worldwide.
Correction:
The increased absolute mortality for the Pfizer vaccine is 0.0093%.
4 out of 43,000
Correction #2:
I was correct the first time.
Niko,
My vascular surgeon buddy is seeing about two patients a week who are exhibiting novel clotting issues, like massive clotting in brachial arteries. These people are in the 20-40 y.o. range. All vaccinated. No history of abnormal clotting. Not covid-related.
Older people are likely just dying from clotting issues caused by vaccines.
Gateway Pundit just reported on new Pfizer data. Out of 22,000 people, there were four more deaths in the vaccine arm for an increased rate of 0.018% mortality. This looks higher than the mortality for covid for people 18-40. The trial participants were young, so we would expect a much higher rate of mortality in older people receiving vaccines.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/huge-breaking-news-pfizer-hid-public-number-deaths-covid-clinical-trials-actual-number-21-6-reported-4-unvaccinated-group/
Senator Ron Johnson held a public hearing about vaccine safety and it was interesting and poignant to hear the testimonies of those who were impacted by adverse events. One man lost his son. World class athletes can no longer compete. Sometimes we forget the human impact when we focus on statistics.
Peter Doshi also talked at the hearing.
https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/2021/10/media-advisory-sen-johnson-holds-expert-panel-on-federal-vaccine-mandates-and-vaccine-injuries
I hear you, and I’m not dismissing the reports, i.e. I don’t doubt that this is exactly what happened.
I’m approaching it from a different angle. I was and I am an opponent of so-called lockdowns. Not the one where government says restaurants must close at 7pm-ish, like in the Netherlands at the moment. but the one where government prohibited even going outside, where gyms were closed, where people basically watched tv all day long.
Among relatives and friends I see the result every day: obesity has gone up, increased joint pain, muscles disappeared, and an increase in casual drinking. Plus we hear from the US that deaths of despair have gone up massively, i.e. suicides and/or overdoses.
So the vaccination campaign has met a population that was already in bad shape.
Then there’s reports in the UK, warning signals, actually, of CVD doctors reporting a steep decline in consultations even after lockdowns ended. But CVD incidence has not gone down, which means people who should have seen their doctors didn’t. Same with cancer. Incidence has not gone down, but fewer people had their check-ups, which means many more people now have developed later stages of cancer that went untreated.
Plus facts like athletes, contrary to popular opinion, are more likely to have strokes, and are more likely to have kidney damage. In professional football in major leagues throughout Europe it’s customary to inject players with painkillers before each match in anticipation of injuries, which results in many players in their mid-30s needing kidney transplants.
I could go on. Again, not dismissing that these reports are true, but we should also look at the general health of the vaccinated before assuming that they were truly healthy before the shot.
Niko,
The new Pfizer data showed that there was no benefit from the covid vaccines as regards the primary endpoint–mortality. Surely, they seem to prevent progression for a while, but at the cost of fatal heart attacks and other serious adverse events.
Isn’t it a little bit (strange) that the CDC isn’t interested in conducting autopsies on the bodies of those reported to have died from covid vaccines whose reports are entered in VAERS?
The CDC reports 9,549 covid vaccine VAERS deaths as of Nov. 8 without issuing any autopsy reports. There was a paper about covid vaccine deaths in VAERS where death certificates were mingled with autopsies in the analyzed data, which looks like burying data (autopsies) inside opinion (death certificates). That is an old statistical trick used to deceive. And the CDC has yet to submit its rationale for its underreporting factor to expert scrutiny.
Why no autopsies? I have a guess–if you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question.
It might be as well to follow trends in both all-cause mortality and live birth-rates for some considerable time to come, before making any definitive conclusions on the most important outcomes of this unprecedented global intervention.
I find this article interesting, any comments?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted
Crappy review article that focuses on mole hills.
E.g., the article mentions Borody and focuses on symptom clearance whereas Borody’s primary endpoint was death.
One thing to understand about early treatment is that all these gp’s know to only treat high risk patients and they can tell if treatment is working or not even without statistical analysis or control groups. Let’s say that 1.5% of one doctor’s symptomatic high risk covid patients end up hospitalized. Let’s also say that generally 2.5% of all symptomatic covid patients end up hospitalized. Let’s also say that the doctor publishes his findings and has no control group. Is his study worthless? Clearly not, because high risk covid patients have greater than average likelihood of being hospitalized, so having only 1.5% hospitalized shows benefit prima facie. Even having 2.5% of high risk symptomatic covid patients being hospitalized still likely shows benefit because we’d expect the risk to be north of 5%. Nursing home studies are especially valuable for this reason.
Regarding India. Different States go their own ways, with KERALA leaning towards Remdisivir etc, and Uttar Pradesh favouring Ziverdo Kits, Ivermectin, Doxy, zinc and given out at first suspicion / symptoms.
Uttar Pradesh looks good at the moment, whereas Kerala despite being the smallest State, contributes around 50 to 60% of Bad News Numbers !
Has anyone picked up on this paper which identifies a dramatic increase in endothelial inflammatory markers and ACS risk due to mRNA vaccines?
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.10712?fbclid=IwAR1ZI_RriOEP6XToTER7xe6UAvKrEDKc0SB5utjc34vSwHMEa2eymeb1Bko
The author, Steven Gundry, published a very similar paper in 2019 where he claimed that eating soy beans also leads to an increase in the same markers.
There’s an interesting interview here where it’s stated there have been similar, but unpublished findings in the UK
https://twitter.com/i/status/1463926037889396736
I must ask, why do they say that people older than 65 should take the so called vaccin? If you are healthy and have no problems with your health
I dont see why. Can anyone explane?
So that people get the vaccine passport, a global ID system that’ll tie bank accounts and social welfare to vaccination status. It’s basically an employee badge, and the relationship between citizen and government in a democracy is changed to employee and employer in a corporatist system as postulated by none other than Mussolini.
If you want to know where this road leads to have a look at Singapore:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkxf4SC_SBk
I am aware that the majority in Western countries would be ok with that, hence why the G7 has decided to implement this under the pretext of a pandemic. A permanent transformation of democracies into scaled-up versions of Singapore, where elections have no consequences and every citizen is treated like an employee being paid money in exchange for loyalty and productivity.
Of course if you refuse to play along they’ll terminate your contract and you become a pariah. That’s where the vaccine passport comes into play: as access to everything, from trains to planes to social benefits to access to public spaces – remember, we’re in 2030 and there’s still a pandemic going on – is dependent on that employee badge it can be switched off remotely. You quit, and they’ll isolate you at home, invalidate you driver’s license, and freeze your bank account so that you can’t even buy food in the cashless society.
That is precisely the reason why the WEF elite chose Singapore for this and next year’s meetings. (Been cancelled.)
Nothing to do with a vaccine.
Can anybody comment on this article? https://rocs.hu-berlin.de/publication/maier-2021-germany/maier-2021-germany.pdf
Is it indeed a strong argument for vaccination duty (here in Germany) or does this model just yield what the researchers entered as ingoing assumptions?
That study is a complete fabrication. Easily proven by the first paragraph: “incidence started growing exponentially”. There is nothing exponential about the growth, it’s not even quadratic.
The sole purpose of that study is to cast everyone involved as being so-called pandemic fighters, which will grant them certain immunity, eg. unrestricted travel to other countries. This is a major incentive for so-called scientists to publish pieces like this one. Other perks are school and kindergarten attendance even when the institutions close due to lockdowns, with exemptions being granted to so-called pandemic fighters.
Thanks for your reply. Are there other studies that state the opposite? On an equally serious level?