I really don’t see how anyone can make the “not enough data” argument at this point. We have an abundance of data. If there are any holes in it, that’s due to administrative failure, not a lack of subjects to look at.
5 billion doses of vaccines were handed out without even completing phase 3 clinical trials, and what limited testing was done was … uh, well, “fraudulent” is not too strong a word. Nobody said, ooh, we’d better proceed slowly, there’s not enough data.
So claiming now that we should wait and see what omicron does is a bit daft, not least because it seems close to burning itself out already - cases are on the downslope in most countries, so not much more data is likely to come in. It’s abundantly obvious, with a few million recorded cases, that it’s somewhere between a cold and the flu for 99.99% of those who catch a dose.
Interestingly, it appears not to be inherently more infectious - a Danish study put it at roughly the same as delta in the unvaccinated population, perhaps just a bit higher. Since children were at almost no risk from the other variants, it seems a bit of a stretch to claim that children are uniquely at risk from omicron and therefore they should all be vaccinated. Even for healthy adults, the risk profile of omicron infection is considerably less worrying than the risk profile for vaccination.
Vaccinated people under 60 in the UK are dying at twice the rate of vaccinated, and have been for over 6 months. That alone tells you that getting the jab isn’t as safe as they’re letting on.
I think there’s a bit of subtlety in that number - you have to adjust for the number of people vaccinated, and you have to do that very carefully (with fine-grained age-banding). Various statisticians have made that adjustment and there’s no discernible difference, ie., the vaccines aren’t doing anything useful in that age group. And you wouldn’t expect them to, because there was virtually no excess mortality in that age group in the first place: a small number reduced by a small percentage is still a small number.
There is a modest all-cause uptick in mortality in the 18-64 group (6%, IIRC) that may or may not be linked to vaccination. Since vaccine mortality is a subject that elicits zero interest in public research, there’s no way of knowing. My guess is that it’s mostly explained by a lack of access to healthcare and the harm done by lockdowns etc. The vaccine-related deaths in the Yellow Card system are almost certainly not just noise, but they are (relatively speaking) too small to show up clearly in the all-cause figures.
“Between Jan. 2 and Sept. 24, the report said, the age-adjusted risk of death involving COVID-19 was 32 times greater in unvaccinated people than in fully vaccinated individuals.”
“Between Jan. 2 and Sept. 24, the report said, the age-adjusted risk of death involving COVID-19 was 32 times greater in unvaccinated people than in fully vaccinated individuals.”
Nope. Key word - age-adjusted. Of course mortality rate is higher when you add all the old people into the mix. This still doesn’t address the key point in the data - that vaccinated people under 60 are dying at double the rate.
One of the commenters explains on Berenson’s page why the raw data doesn’t show what it appears to show:
“One reason not to draw too much of a conclusion is that 10 to 59 is a really, really broad age group, and the underlying death rate at the top of that group will be much higher than at the bottom.”
There’s actually a lot more than that to take into consideration, but a few analysts have done the heavy lifting and found that the (apparent) difference virtually disappears. That’s not to say that the vaccines aren’t killing people, it’s just that if they are killing people (and the Yellow Card reports suggest that they are) the signal-to-noise ratio is not good enough to see it in all-cause mortality data. What’s really frustrating here is that it would be easy for the government to collect data that would make it easy to spot a “vaccines kill people” signal if one existed … but they’re not doing that. I wonder why that could be? So we’re left to make the best of poor-quality data.
One statistician I follow did a very thorough analysis of all this - I’ll root it out. I also did my own analysis a couple of months back: I used the staggered vaccine rollout (which was age-stratified over a period of a few months) to attempt a synchronous-detection technique to pull a signal from the noise. There was no signal. The vaccines do not affect death rate either way in the 18-50 group at least.
As you may have noticed, I’m not a fan of COVID vaccines - I think they’re dangerous and pointless - but we have to be really careful with our facts here. If we get anything even slightly wrong the fanatics just won’t let it go.
I know some countries are restricting healthcare to the vaccinated, but that’s not the case in the UK. They basically shut down the whole of the national health service, for everybody, in order to switch all that manpower over to “boosting” people around Nov 2021. Even before that, all sorts of procedures were being cancelled or delayed. There’s now a massive backlog of people who had problems that were originally easy to treat, but are now serious or life-threatening.
Have you seen the surge of deaths in the US? 300,000 excess deaths in the 18-64 age group which are completely inexplicable (or at least, nobody’s making any attempt to explain them). Vaccines? Heart disease? Suicide? Who knows. Nobody cares. Nobody’s checking.