STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- One of the most commonly used tricks to make a drug look more effective than it is in a real-world setting is to conflate absolute and relative risk reduction. While AstraZeneca boasted a relative reduction of 100%, the absolute reduction was 0.01%. For the Pfizer shot, the relative risk reduction was initially 95%, but the absolute risk reduction was only 0.84%
- In AstraZeneca’s trial, only 0.04% of people in the vaccine group, and 0.88% in the placebo group were infected with SARS-CoV-2. When the background risk of infection is that low, even a 100% absolute risk reduction becomes near-meaningless
- Research shows the majority of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies in obese COVID-19 patients are autoimmune and not neutralizing. This means that if you’re obese, you’re at risk of developing autoimmune problems if you get the natural infection. You’re also at higher risk of a serious infection, as the antibodies your body produces are not the neutralizing kind that kill the virus. Does the same hold true for antibodies made in response to the COVID jab?
- At nearly 72%, Vermont has the highest rate of “fully vaccinated” residents in the country, yet COVID cases are suddenly surging to new heights. During the first week of November 2021, cases increased by 42%. The hospital admission rate for fully vaccinated patients increased by 8%, while the admission rate for those who were not fully vaccinated decreased by 15%. Local health authorities blame the surge on the highly infectious delta variant, which would be odd if true, since the first delta case in Vermont was detected back in mid-May
- Data from physician assistant Deborah Conrad show vaccinated people — counting anyone who got one or more shots, regardless of time since the injection — are nine times more likely to be hospitalized than the unvaccinated
In a November 12, 2021, blog post,1 Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., reviews how the benefits of the COVID-19 shots have been exaggerated by the drug companies and misrepresented to the public by an uncritical media. She has previously given many lectures on how the drug companies conflated absolute and relative risks for statin drugs.2
Demasi was a respected Australian science presenter at ABC television until she produced a Catalyst report on the dangers of Wi-Fi and cellphones. In the wake of the controversy it raised, she and 11 of her staff members were axed and the episode retracted.3 That was 2016. Today, Demasi is one of the few professional journalists seeking and publishing the truth about COVID-19.
According to Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Harding Centre for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute, only quoting the relative risk reduction is a “sin” against transparent communication, as it can be used as a “deliberate tactic to manipulate or persuade people.” Demasi also quotes John Ioannidis, professor at Stanford University, who told her:6
“This is not happening just for vaccines. Over many decades, RRR [relative risk reduction] has been the dominant way of communicating results of clinical trials. Almost always, RRR looks nicer than absolute risk reductions.”
Demasi continues:7
“When asked if there was any justification for misleading the public about the vaccine’s benefits to encourage uptake, Prof Ioannidis rejected the notion.
‘I don’t see how one can increase uptake by using misleading information. I am all in favor of increasing uptake, but this needs to use complete information, otherwise sooner or later incomplete information will lead to misunderstandings and will backfire,’ says Ioannidis.
The way authorities have communicated risk to the public, is likely to have misled and distorted the public’s perception of the vaccine’s benefit and underplayed the harms. This, in essence, is a violation of the ethical and legal obligations of informed consent.”
The authors point out that the relative risk reduction really needs to “be seen against the background risk of being infected and becoming ill with COVID-19, which varies between populations and over time.” This is why the absolute risk reduction figure is so important:12
“Although the RRR considers only participants who could benefit from the vaccine, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a vaccine, considers the whole population …
ARR is also used to derive an estimate of vaccine effectiveness, which is the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) to prevent one more case of COVID-19 as 1/ARR. NNVs bring a different perspective: 81 for the Moderna–NIH, 78 for the AstraZeneca–Oxford … 84 for the J&J, and 119 for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.
The explanation lies in the combination of vaccine efficacy and different background risks of COVID-19 across studies: 0.9% for the Pfizer–BioNTech … 1.4% for the Moderna–NIH, 1.8% for the J&J, and 1.9% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford vaccines.
ARR (and NNV) are sensitive to background risk — the higher the risk, the higher the effectiveness — as exemplified by the analyses of the J&J’s vaccine on centrally confirmed cases compared with all cases: both the numerator and denominator change, RRR does not change (66–67%), but the one-third increase in attack rates in the unvaccinated group (from 1.8% to 2.4%) translates in a one-fourth decrease in NNV (from 84 to 64) …
With the use of only RRRs, and omitting ARRs, reporting bias is introduced, which affects the interpretation of vaccine efficacy.
When communicating about vaccine efficacy, especially for public health decisions such as choosing the type of vaccines to purchase and deploy, having a full picture of what the data actually show is important, and ensuring comparisons are based on the combined evidence that puts vaccine trial results in context and not just looking at one summary measure, is also important.”
The authors go on to stress that comparing the effectiveness of the COVID shots is further hampered by the fact that they use a variety of different study protocols, including different placebos. They even differ in their primary endpoint, i.e., what they consider a COVID case, and how and when diagnosis is made, and more.
“We are left with the unanswered question as to whether a vaccine with a given efficacy in the study population will have the same efficacy in another population with different levels of background risk of COVID-19,” the authors note.
One of the best real-world examples of this is Israel, where the relative risk reduction was 94% at the outset and an absolute risk reduction of 0.46%, which translates into an NNV of 217. In the Phase 3 Pfizer trial, the absolute risk reduction was 0.84% and the NNV 119.13 As noted by the authors:14
“This means in a real-life setting, 1.8 times more subjects might need to be vaccinated to prevent one more case of COVID-19 than predicted in the corresponding clinical trial.”
In plain English, if you’re obese, you’re at risk of developing autoimmune problems if you get the natural infection. You’re also at higher risk of a serious infection, as the antibodies your body produces are not the neutralizing kind that kill the virus. As explained by the authors:16
“SARS-CoV-2 infection induces neutralizing antibodies in all lean but only in few obese COVID-19 patients. SARS-CoV-2 infection also induces anti-MDA [malondialdehyde, a marker of oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation] and anti-AD [adipocyte-derived protein antigens] autoimmune antibodies more in lean than in obese patients as compared to uninfected controls.
Serum levels of these autoimmune antibodies, however, are always higher in obese versus lean COVID-19 patients. Moreover … we also evaluated the association of anti-MDA and anti-AD antibodies with serum CRP and found a positive association between CRP and autoimmune antibodies.
Our results highlight the importance of evaluating the quality of the antibody response in COVID-19 patients with obesity, particularly the presence of autoimmune antibodies, and identify biomarkers of self-tolerance breakdown. This is crucial to protect this vulnerable population at higher risk of responding poorly to infection with SARS-CoV-2 than lean controls.”
Now, these findings apply to obese people who develop the natural infection, but it makes one wonder whether the same holds true for the COVID jab. If the antibodies produced in response to the actual virus are primarily autoantibodies, will obese people develop autoantibodies instead of neutralizing antibodies in response to the COVID shot as well?
For clarity, an autoantibody is an antibody that is directed against one or more of your own body’s proteins. Many autoimmune diseases are caused by autoantibodies that target and attack your own tissues or organs.
So, this is no small concern, seeing how the mRNA in the COVID shots (and subsequent SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is what your body produces antibodies against) gets distributed throughout your body and accumulates in various organs.17,18
Overall, the case rate in Vermont is FAR higher now than it as in the fall of 2020, when no one had gotten the “vaccine.” According to Vermont health commissioner Dr. Mark Levine, the surge is occurring primarily among unvaccinated people in their 20s and children aged 5 through 11 — a curious coincidence, seeing how the shots are just now being rolled out for 5- to 11-year-olds.
Levine blames the surge on the highly infectious delta variant, but delta has been around for months already. The first case of delta in Vermont was identified in mid-May 2021.21 Surely, it wouldn’t have taken six months for this most-infectious of variants to make the rounds and cause an unprecedented spike?
Two clues are given by Levine, however, when he admits that a) Vermont has one of the lowest rates of natural immunity in the U.S. and b) protection is waning among those who got the COVID shot early to mid-year. Breakthrough cases among the fully vaccinated shot up 31% during the first week of November.22
