Devastating critique of the desperation becoming evident in UKHSA as they try to explain away data which suggests the opposite of what they’d like it to show.
People seem to forget that infections, defined as symptoms + a positive PCR, is the only endpoint shown in a controlled clinical trial to be reduced by the vaccines.
(That’s not to say the trials look well-conducted, or necessarily of clinical relevance to most healthy people.)
So it’s a bit rich to start deflecting from the implications of an apparently increasingly worsening position in respect of the very same clinical endpoint used to justify the entire vaccination rollout.
It should be noted that at the 6-month follow up point for the Pfizer trial, there was no benefit found for either severe disease or all-cause mortality.
In the middle of a deadly pandemic.
Go figure.
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All-ages cumulative mortality is now not too disimilar to last year.
That in itself would make this a rather unusual pandemic in that it would be expected to have a mortality deficit in the year following the main wave.
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Indeed, in the group which accounts for a very high proportion of Covid deaths - over 85 years - total mortality this year is now in line with other recent years before 2020.
I have been asked to explain, in a nutshell, why I and my fellow travelers appear to be less worried about the virus than the vaccine, when for everyone else it is the other way around.
Here is the simplest explanation I can think of.
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Basically, quite early on in the pandemic, we noticed that only a small proportion of those exposed got ill.
Take the Diamond Princess cruise ship for example. Only 20% developed any symptoms despite the elderly complement on board.
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In healthy people under a certain age, there appears to be very little chance of significant illness. The body seems to fight off the virus without incident in nearly all cases.
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The methodology is designed to enable comparisons between different interventions.
For example: how does the cost in £ of a hip replacement in a fit 60 year old compare to chemotherapy in a frail 80 year old, in terms of the number and quality of years of life saved?
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QALY analysis is established, sophisticated and whilst it may not be formally adopted in all cases, its principles are generally accepted to be desirable and even ethically imperative in a world of non-infinite resources.
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Aside from the fact they took away the graph they'd previously included (I wonder why?) which @ClareCraigPath has reproduced for us, there are some other real corkers.
Firstly, despite the fact that this was the methodology used in the phase III Covid injection trials, now we are told that apparently the entirety of the history of estimating vaccine efficacy needs to be rewritten:
Also, they give some truly bizarre excuses to try to explain away the negative efficacy data: