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…
