The fictional "lives saved"
The recent withdrawal of AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine has promoted the talking heads to again start trotting out the “lives saved” line in order to suggest that COVID vaccination was a triumph of Big Pharma - Big State cooperation despite the evidence to the contrary. The latest offender was Jacob Rees-Mogg, who recently claimed that the AstraZeneca vaccines “saved 6.5 million lives”1.
As some of you will remember, we started this initiative in order to expose the staggering dishonesty of many “statistics” circulated by the State and amplified by the mainstream media. I thought it might be worth again repeating the dishonesty that underpins these fictitious “lives saved” numbers. The “lives saved” claim is the numeric equivalent of a lucky rabbit’s foot, used by politicians to ward off bad luck associated with real world data. The mantra also helps to ensure that many elements of the damaging COVD response are likely to remain in place for the next pandemic.
It is claimed that COVID vaccines saved 20 million lives in one year (essentially 2021)2, a claim reported ad nauseum by the media and taken from a June 2022 paper written by researchers from the conflicted MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London.
The details of the maths behind the claim are somewhat complicated, but the core idea is relatively simple and involves comparing the number of excess deaths (they also used COVID deaths) against the number who theoretically would have died in the absence of vaccination, the so-called counterfactual. Since there is only one set of observed real world data, the counterfactual is constructed based on various assumptions and modelling approaches.
The best way to illustrate this would be via a simple example where post-vaccination 1 actual case of COVID is identified in a group of vaccinees, since the assumed vaccine efficacy of Pfizer (for example) against infection was 95%, then the counterfactual in the absence of vaccination would have been 20 cases (1/1-95%). So in this case the vaccine “saved” 19 infections (counterfactual – actual observed).
This Imperial paper summarises the assumed effectiveness they used in a handy 206 page appendix to get to their 20 million figure (actually 19.8 million), notice the key word in an extract from their table below is “assumed”.
These figures are themselves based on yet another series of papers, many of which were based on the results of the very limited vaccine trials carried out by the pharmaceutical companies. We know for a fact that the claimed efficacies against infection were never observed in the real world data and as pointed out in Peter Doshi’s BMJ article, protection against infection was the only result (or endpoint) of the vaccine trials3. Certainly, by the time that the Imperial paper was published in June 2022, there were mountains of real world data which showed that by the end of 2021 these assumed efficacies against infections were hopelessly wrong.
Specifically, Public Health England (PHE) regularly published data on the incidence of COVID cases in the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. Avoiding for the moment the debate over the correct population size for England (NIMS or ONS), you can see that the incidence of COVD was higher in the vaccinated group for all age groups over 18 by the end of 2021. That means that real world data was showing that vaccine efficacy against infection was negative and not at the level of 88% assumed in the Imperial College paper (mRNA second does for delta variant).
The picture for various types of hospital admissions was marginally better, but even there the incidence of A&E admissions was comparable in older age groups between the vaccinated and unvaccinated cases by early 2022. The assumptions used by Imperial College were not supported by actual data and actual data should always trump assumptions.
Public Health England (PHE) used a similar approach to generate their “lives saved” fiction. Their counterfactual calculation was obviously ludicrous, they calculated that in the absence of vaccination the COVID death rate would have been around 500 deaths per day in England in July 20214. Actual deaths in the previous year in July 2020 when there was no vaccine were around 26 per day. This outlandish result, was manufactured by taking a small number of actual daily deaths in July 2021 and then back-calculating an unrealistic counterfactual using a high number of vaccinations together with high effectiveness assumptions. So the theoretical counterfactual for 2021 was around 20x higher than the actual level of COVD deaths observed a year earlier with no vaccines. The July 2021 counterfactual lacked basic credibility.
If the Imperial claims were credible, you would also expect to see countries with the highest levels of vaccination having the lowest levels of COVID deaths, but looking at population level data you do not see this result, in fact you see really the opposite picture. We discussed the real world data with Professor Fenton in June 20225.
There are of course some important confounding characteristics, specifically that countries with low levels of vaccination tended to have lower income and also a lower life expectancy. That being said, these real world observations refute the assertion that vaccines “saved lives” since countries with low levels of vaccination often had lower levels of COVID deaths.
Conclusion
The 20 million “lives saved” figure is a fabrication using circular maths, based on demonstrably false assumptions about vaccine effectiveness. Real world data available at the end of 2021 clearly showed that the assumptions being used in the “lives saved” calculations were wrong.
In fact there is a lot of evidence to indicate that, if anything, vaccines have caused a number of deaths6. Death figures can be estimated either by analysing yellow card reporting data and/or by looking at the strong temporal correlation between vaccine roll-out and changes in excess mortality. A claim that vaccines destroyed lives is much more credible.
The 20 million “lives saved” fabrication provides cover for the politician and media talking heads who pushed the “safe and effective” narrative. Furthermore, maintaining this fiction also helps to keep the plans in place to enormously increase the powers of the WHO, as well as justifying the alleged need for enormous global purchasing and distribution of vaccines by public-private partnerships such as COVAX in order to achieve global “equity”.
Readers should remember Albert Camus’s wise observation when looking at claims of lives saved:
Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model7, he is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach (www.thinkingcoalition.com)
https://x.com/CartlandDavid/status/1788685907207323920
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1473-3099%2822%2900320-6
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/60dad8e38fa8f50abc106bd3/Impact_of_COVID-19_vaccine_on_infection_and_mortality.pdf
https://rumble.com/v1aladz-all-cause-mortality-analysis-vaccinated-v-non-vaccinated-with-prof-fenton.html
