by Will Jones, Daily Sceptic:
Fall is coming and the Covid propaganda machine, fuelled by manufacturers of Covid vaccines, is already here. Without a single trial of the effectiveness against death, lipid nanoparticles that contain mRNA and perhaps more (remnant DNA?) will likely be added to regular flu vaccination every winter. Perhaps as soon as this winter they will no longer be called booster doses.
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It is therefore an appropriate time to revisit the claims of high effectiveness of the first booster, which was added to the two-shot protocol two winters ago. Using empirical data from three sources, I will examine here what is left after accounting for the healthy vaccinee bias (to be explained) and show peculiar features of the data that indicate even deeper estimation problems. Then, I will discuss another bias, called differential misclassification, which cannot be easily removed.
Considering these two biases (there may be others), the true effectiveness of the first booster was somewhere between mediocre and zero, and it is impossible to narrow that range. Therefore, all those observational studies of the booster effectiveness were useless.
Taking a new Covid shot every winter, whether called booster or not, has no empirical basis. The burden of proving effectiveness against death squarely rests on public health officials, and anything short of a randomised trial is unacceptable.
The healthy vaccinee bias
I devoted several articles to this topic, which may be summarised as follows:
A naïve comparison of Covid mortality in vaccinated people and unvaccinated people, even if age-adjusted, is grossly misleading because the former have a lower risk of death to begin with. At least part of their lower Covid mortality, if not all, has nothing to do with the vaccine. They are simply healthier people than their unvaccinated counterparts. That’s called the healthy vaccinee bias.
Or vice versa: unvaccinated people are, on average, sicker than their vaccinated counterparts, and therefore have higher mortality in general, including mortality from Covid.
Biases have been studied extensively by epidemiologists, biostatisticians and others. But if you run a search for “healthy vaccinee bias” on PubMed, a well-known website for biomedical articles, you will not find many publications. There are only 24 (August 31st), including recent correspondence in the New England Journal of Medicine on the booster effectiveness.
The healthy vaccinee bias, which many mistakenly call selection bias, is a type of confounding bias. Moreover, it is not restricted to a comparison of vaccinated with unvaccinated but is carried forward with additional doses. Those who took the third dose were healthier, on average, than those who took only two doses. We’ll see the evidence shortly. Shifting of healthier people along the sequence of doses has another peculiar effect. For instance, the ‘leftover’ cohort of two-dose recipients becomes relatively sicker than (more comparable to) the cohort of unvaccinated.
The healthy vaccinee bias can be removed, at least partly, but little has been written on the method. As far as I know, two research groups independently developed a correction method for biased risk ratios: one group from Hungary; another from the U.S. Unaware of that work until recently, I also proposed a method. Interestingly, it turns out that it’s the same trivial maths, expressed in two or three forms.
Regardless of the maths, the common underlying principle is simple. We know that vaccinated people are healthier, on average. Let’s use data on non-Covid mortality to estimate their Covid mortality, had they been as unhealthy as their unvaccinated counterparts. In other words, we estimate the risk in a counterfactual state, which is not observable. Indeed, one of several ways to define confounding and deconfounding is based on counterfactual reasoning. (There are other ways.)
To correct the bias, we need data on non-Covid mortality by vaccination status. That type of data has been consistently hidden. So far I am aware of three sources of data on non-Covid death of recipients of the third dose: England, Wisconsin and Israel.
Data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), England
The ONS is the largest of the three sources. That agency periodically publishes an extensive dataset with many levels of stratification, from which I extracted monthly data for those who received the third dose versus those who received only two doses. In both cases, I chose only those people who received the last dose at least 21 days ago, avoiding sparse data for some other categories and ensuring comparability. The time period I examined was November 2021 through April 2022, shortly after the initiation of the booster campaign till the next (fourth dose) campaign.
