John Ioannidis is a very solid and well-respected researcher. He has published a lot of excellent health care analysis. Early on during the recent epidemic he pointed out official sources were exaggerating the case death rate for CV-19. The same people who applauded that research are now pillorying him for a recent paper on how many lives may have been saved by the CV-19 vaccines; a paper that uses the same basic method as he used to show that the case death rate estimates were too high. The study period is from the start of vaccination near the end of 2020 until the end of 2022. So it includes both pre-Omicron and Omicron periods. (Medrxiv Paper)
Critical assumptions are how many people were uninfected before vaccination, how many would have been infected absent vaccination and what the case fatality rate is. Those are all largely guesses. The population uninfected is unknown but far lower that suggested by official cases numbers. At the time, estimates were that two times to ten times the number of people had been infected than were given by those official numbers. Every infected person had some immune response that would give them protection regardless of vaccination. Almost everyone who was vaccinated, including me, subsequently got infected. Protection wasn’t great. And deaths attributed to CV-19 were grossly exaggerated. The “with” versus “because of” debate was very legitimate.
The study suggests that 2.5 million lives were saved globally, with a range of 1.4 million to 4 million, with the wide range indicating the poor performance of the assumptions used for the analysis. 82% of those supposedly saved were vaccinated before infection, but this fails to account for undetected infections of which there were a ton. 57% of these averted deaths supposedly occurred during the Omicron era, but that seems quite dubious to me. 90% were in persons 60 and over, which makes sense, but there was essentially no life-saving benefit to children and young adults, consistent with their extremely low risk from CV-19.
I suspect the vaccines may have saved some lives, especially among the elderly, more by limiting the seriousness of an infection than preventing it from occurring. But I seriously doubt it was near the numbers found by this study. But I am also sure that Ioannidis’ methods and estimates are as good as anyone’s, it just isn’t possible to get very precise. And for all you vaccine safety nuts, don’t bother me with the absolute lunacy about vaccines causing huge numbers of deaths. There is absolutely zero evidence of that, not one bit.
The Healthy Skeptic is a website about the health care system, and is written by Kevin Roche, who has many years of experience working in the health industry. Mr. Roche is available to assist health care companies through consulting arrangements through Roche Consulting, LLC and may be reached at 
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Spotify
Overcast
PocketCasts
Radio Public
Stitcher
Anchor
RSS - Posts
Insightful commentary. I would disagree on one point. If you follow Dr. Peter McCullough (cardiologist from Baylor with over 650 research papers) he talks about the young people who have myocarditis as a result of the Covid vaccine. Their mortality should be considered here. Some of these young people will die within a few years as a direct result of the vaccine.
Don’t trust McCullough
We should not have been vaccinating young people. We should have been vaccinating old people. The cut off age was just about my age at the time (55), so I got the vaccine but no boosters. A few years older or younger than me would have been a no brainer.
Based on the stock performance of Pfizer and Moderna, the public seems unconvinced the mRNA technology produces a worthy immune supportive product. Why would that be? One reason might be that a huge percentage of people tried the product and it did not yield the advantageous outcome they were told they would get.
I’ve seen enough adverse effects in people close to me to be skeptical of the shots. I never saw evidence that COVID represented a health risk that warranted the hysterical measures that were tried. I think people sense there was a massive mismatch between what was promised about the vaccine and what happened.
As I have previously stated on this blog and other blogs, I am of the opinion that covid vaccination did reduce death and serious illness to some extent, but nearly as much as has been reported in the multitude of pro vaccination studies have indicated. FWIW – those multitude of studies derive the conclusions using the same data bases, and those data bases appear to me to have some bad data.
One of the early principles of math learned in basic algebra is after solving for an equation, you plug the answer in and work the problem backwards to prove you got the right answer. I dont think the activist scientist adhere to that basic principle. That being said, there are several data points that strike me in a manner that would have any scientist to call into question the validity of the data base and their conclusions. Some of which are:
• During the Nov, Dec 2020/Jan 2021 wave when virtually no one was vaxed, the weekly death rate across the US was approx 50 people per 100k per week in the 65+ age group. During the Nov , Dec 2021/Jan 2022 Wave, the death rate for the 65+ unvaxed aged group ranged from 180 per week per 100k to 230 per week per 100k depending on the state. A 3x-4x increase in death rate for the unvaxed for a less deadly variant seems implausible.
• Approx 80+% of the covid deaths were in the 65+ age group which had the highest vaccination rates. There never seemed to have a sufficient number of unvaxed individual to have that high of death rates during 2021 and 2022.
• The 1918 spanish flu pandemic and covid 19 pandemic had very similar waves , ie each subsequent wave was a similar percentage of the prior wave. Most every pandemic had similar trends ie the death rates in the second major wave have historically been the highest while the 3rd major wave have historically had death rates ranging in the 50% -70% range. The covid19 death rates during the 3rd wave were in the comparable range. If the vaccination was really effective, the death rates in the Nov,Dec 2021/Jan 2022 should have been much lower.
Those are just of few of the data points that I am uncomfortable
I suspect there was a positive to the vaccine in the spring of 2021 however what occurred in the wave in the fall of 2021 into spring of 2022 needs to be explained if one believes the mass vaccination in the United States had a positive effect. In the area I live, garbage collection was suspended for a week in December of 2021 due to spread of the virus, businesses were closed, it seems the virus swept through my area with vengeance in that time period. At the time the Drudge website was comparing daily Covid deaths from a year early and when I started viewing site in late January February 2022 the death rates were double verses a year earlier. The problem is the comparison probably did not match the curve of both waves. For the virus to spread rapidly in the fall / winter 2021 / 2022 there had to be a large number of people that were hosts for viral replication. If there was a large immunity from infection and vaccination, I do not believe the wave would have been that extreme.
I wonder if one of the big mistakes made was the recommendation of the Covid vaccine be given to the Covid recovered. Is it possible a large portion the population that achieved a level of acquired sterile immunity from a Covid infection and for some reason that was loss due to being vaccinated. Any gain achieved from infection and recovery by people in the first wave was lost by taking the vaccine. There is a couple in our small group at church I attend who recovered from Covid in January 2021, the husband at a later date took the vaccine but the wife did not. They went on a cruise in July which had an outbreak of Covid. Most of the people on the cruise who were fully vaccinated. The fully vaccinated husband came down with a bad case of Covid, worse than the first time but the unvaccinated wife did not. I know this is only a sample of one. My wife and I both had Covid in December of 2020, both checked positive for antibodies, did not take the vaccine and for us it was once and done for Covid.
I know there are so many variables that can account for this but when the vaccine gets reviewed for effectiveness, I believe one must judge the effect on the individual level and population level.