Let's ignore the vaccinations for a moment and see how many people died over time.
Here we see two spikes in the death curve.
Why would that be?
It is not a good match for covid deaths in USA at the time.
I have tried to reverese engineer the calculation of the rates. We have the deaths and we have the starting and final population sizes for each group.
The rest is estimated.
There is only a small range of possibilities for the population size of each group each week.
This is what the cumulative incidence chart looks more like in reality:
But cumulative charts can hide a lot of interesting information so I also plotted it as the actual number of deaths ocurring in each period.
e.g. Subtracting the penultimate column from the last column shows deaths in last 49 days of the study gives
32
9
27
12 deaths.
Plotting the deaths that occured in each period as a mortality rate gives this.
The high yellow point was only 2 deaths in a small population - it can be ignored.
What we see is that in the early period the deaths were seen in the unvaccinated population but as time went on deaths started in the vaccinated population.
By the end the death rate was the same in all groups.
This is evidence of what is called a "healthy vaccinee effect."
It is the phenomenon of the dying rejecting a vaccine. They then die unvaccinated while the apparent death rate of the vaccinated population seems low for a while.
What is the number needed to vaccinate and why does it matter?
The UK government have finally done the only calculation that matters to patients regarding vaccination and the answer is not pretty.🧵
To understand the benefit of a drug, the simplest way to present the data is to tell you how many people need to be treated for one to have the desired outcome.
For the covid vaccines, for healthy people aged 40-49, for example, 932,500 people would need an autumn booster in order to prevent a single intensive care admission.
Hope-Simpson used the term 'seasonal trigger' to refer to the factor that caused sudden surges simultaneously in places at the same latitude, whatever their longitude.