The COVID-19 vaccination rate ranges from 1-in-10 for children and pregnant women to 1-in-6 for adults, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, suggesting the heyday has long passed for jabs known immediately by President Biden’s CDC to not completely stopping infection or transmission and yet portrayed as bulletproof the next two years.The medical establishment and mainstream media continue hyping the protective abilities of the jabs based on research they may have misread or misrepresented, however.
Last season’s immunizations worked wonders for veterans’ heart health, according to Department of Veterans Affairs research published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine.
Among more than a million vets who received a flu vaccine, those who also received a COVID vaccine – about a third – saw a 37.7% lower risk of “COVID-19–associated MACE,” or major adverse cardiac events, according to the first result in the study, used in JAMA IM’s social media. The abstract also touts a 23.7% “risk difference for all-cause MACE.”
What the study buries: COVID-associated MACE was only 1% of all MACE, drastically limiting the benefit, and COVID vaccine effectiveness against MACE as a whole was only 6.2% and slightly better against hospitalization (6.6%) and death (7.1%).
It would take 10,000 vaccinations to eliminate two COVID-associated MACE cases, the authors acknowledge, repeatedly calling that benefit “modest” and also describing the “absolute benefit” of COVID vaccination as “modest for the general cohort.”
Both general and medical news publications ran with the “nearly 40 percent” COVID-related reduction, as The Washington Post phrased it, and ignored or buried the caveats in the study, including the lack of statistical significance in that finding for ages 75 and under.
Critics were quick to point out the treatment and control groups didn’t appear to be well-matched, implying the former was healthier overall, and that the Post botched the core findings, overstating what the researchers said they found by more than sixfold.
Epidemiologist Vinay Prasad, who returned to the University of California San Francisco this spring after a contentious year as the Trump administration’s top vaccine regulator, dug into the supplemental tables and found data that “invalidates the entire paper.”
As an observational study rather than a randomized controlled trial, the researchers needed to create “two comparable groups whose only difference was COVID-19 vaccine receipt,” but the supplemental data show they failed, Prasad wrote in his newsletter Tuesday.
“All cause mortality curves separate by day 10. That is simply impossibly fast,” he said. “The MACE separates by week 5, and the all cause death separates by week 2. The only explanation is that the no vaccine group is fundamentally different from the outset of the study.”
The Sensible Medicine newsletter, to which Prasad contributes, reiterated that the outcome could represent only the “healthy vaccinee effect,” the well-documented phenomenon of healthier people being more likely to seek vaccination. “JAMA IM editor & peer review fail.”
The journal even published a Prasad opinion three years ago on interventions that “work too fast,” illustrating selection bias, as did the New England Journal of Medicine when Prasad and his more recently departed FDA colleague Tracy Beth Hoeg challenged a COVID booster study as possibly tainted by healthy vaccinee bias.
