Establishing claims of effectiveness
Implausible Modelled Estimates of Covid Vaccines
The BBC reported that AstraZeneca and Pfizer saved over 12 million lives in the first year of covid vaccination. To substantiate this claim, the BBC refers to Airinifinity, a Disease Forecasting Company.
Airinifnity used an Imperial College London study, which calculated COVID vaccines saved 20 million lives between December 2020 and December 2021.
Using a mathematical model, they assumed that vaccination conferred protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection (the mmRNA vaccines were estimated to give 88% protection against infection after the second dose) and the development of severe disease requiring hospital admission. They also assumed that those who develop infection are less infectious than unvaccinated individuals.
We downloaded the supplementary data from GitHub to examine the country-specific estimates and assess the plausibility of the numbers for the UK, Italy, and the USA.
(The Excel sheet provides the country-level specific supplementary data).
In the UK, with vaccine coverage of 68%, 507,200 (382,200 - 789,900) deaths were estimated to be averted because of vaccination (52 deaths prevented per 10,000 vaccinated)
In Italy, the modellers predicted that, with a coverage of 73%, 491,300 (444,800 - 544,400) deaths would be averted (53 per 10,000 vaccinated). In the USA, with 61% coverage, 1,902,000 (1,737,000 - 2,069,000) deaths were averted (44 per 10,000 vaccinated).
The modellers fitted a model to all-cause excess mortality, using more modelling from The Economist. They also assumed that each country would follow the same time-varying reproductive number (Rt) trend since the start of the pandemic. Despite an absence of detailed vaccination data for most countries and an assumption that the relationship between age and IFR was the same for each country, the BBC still bought the numbers.
In 2021, there were 667,479 deaths in the UK, 22,150 fewer than the 689,629 deaths in 2020. By TTE’s reckoning, the modellers want us to believe that in the absence of vaccination, there would have been 1,174,679 deaths in the UK in 2021.
Similarly, in Italy, 701,346 deaths occurred in 2021; the model predicts the number would have been 1,192,646 - 452,329 more deaths than in 2020. In the USA, in 2021, a total of 3,464,231 resident deaths were registered, 80,502 more than in 2020. The modellers assumed there would have been 5,366,231 deaths in the US in 2021 if vaccination had not been implemented.
TTE is tired of the lack of professionalism in modern-day journalism. Journalists don’t check their numbers or facts; many of the assumptions in the model are incorrect, and the estimated number of deaths averted by vaccines is implausible.
This isn’t surprising. As in medicine, models do not fit anywhere in the pathway for establishing effectiveness. Regulators don’t use them for approval, and decision-makers like NICE don’t. They do not appear in the CEBM levels of evidence or the SIGN guidelines for grading evidence, as they are irrelevant to answering therapeutic questions. Clinical trials are the primary study type to determine the effectiveness of medicines or vaccinations; anything else is just a bad guess.
This post was written by two old geezers who will explain why observational data-based estimates of effect should be taken with a grain of salt. Models simply should not be used. Large, well-designed, well-reported, and data-accessible trials should be used for global public health interventions. So, why are we using models to justify decisions?
"Airinifnity used an Imperial College London study"
Enough said
"So, why are we using models to justify decisions?"
Because the Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Jeremy Farrar, Jeremy Grantham, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Tony Fauci etc etc of this world, will clutch at any straw to keep their thievery and control-of-the-plebs mission going. Additional deaths? A bonus.
More to the point, why (and by whom) was Professor Pantsdown Neil Ferguson selected for a star role in this scamdemic?
His previous prognostications had always been between one and six orders of magnitude exaggerated.
As genuine coders fetched in from Microsoft pointed out, he was using an obsolete version of Excel and didn't even know how to set up a spreadsheet properly.
Good enough for la Hallett, of course!