Introduction
Since the registration trials of the Covid-19 vaccines, there have been no randomized studies to track the efficacy of these vaccines. The virus kept mutating and the convalescent fraction of the population has been growing. Thus, the original efficacy figures reported in the registration trials – dubious to start with – were clearly not valid when the mass vaccination campaign started in early 2021. Moreover, in the meantime we learned that the registration trials tested a different product than the one used in the mass vaccination campaign. This cast further doubt on the advertised 95% efficacy against symptomatic infection.
The Israel 2021 summer wave of infections clearly demonstrated to the whole world that the “vaccines” do not protect against symptomatic infection in any meaningful way. Consequently, the goal posts were moved and the authorities started claiming that the “vaccines” may not protect against infection but they protect against severe course of infection, hospitalisation, and death from Covid. However, there were (and there still are) no data from randomized trials to support this causal claim.
This embarrassing gap in evidence was filled by a trove of papers that estimated the effectiveness of the “vaccines” from observational data. Most of these studies claimed the vaccine effectiveness was very high, often close to 100%. Rogue governments all over the world used these studies to force people into vaccination.
Readers of this forum know very well that observational data are loaded with the so-called Healthy Vaccinee Effect. This is a type of indication bias that originates from healthy people having easier access to the vaccine. For example, people on their deathbed are usually not vaccinated, which means that deaths tend to concentrate in the unvaccinated group, making the vaccinated group much “healthier.”
At the same time, those frailest individuals who are close to the end of their lives are also those most susceptible to die from/with Covid. Healthy Vaccinee Effect (HVE) thus causes observational studies to vastly overestimate vaccine effectiveness against any endpoint (and vastly overestimate vaccine safety as well). The now legendary paper by Tracy Hoeg, Ram Duriseti, and Vinay Prasad showed that the reported 95% effectiveness of Covid vaccines against Covid-related death in Israel in 2021 was entirely due to HVE. In other words, had HVE been removed, the true vaccine effectiveness would have been zero. I still can’t figure out how they got this published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Try to Explain HVE to a Professor
We first noticed HVE in the middle of 2021 when Angelika Bazalova – an investigative journalist – had the brilliant idea to FOIA her way to the records on all-cause mortality of the clients of several health insurance companies in the Czech Republic. Readers (with an AI translator from Czech) can still see our initial confusion as we were reporting the data and proposing possible explanations (one of the articles was titled “The elixir of youth”). After some time, we made sense of all the data and reported it in a paper for the International Journal of Infectious Diseases and in a further paper in a Polish journal.
My original conclusion that “this paper invalidates all estimates of vaccine effectiveness based on observation data” was changed to “In view of the presence of HVE, the baseline difference in the frailty of vaccinated and unvaccinated populations in periods without COVID-19 must be taken into account when estimating COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness from observational data.” But that is the Newspeak we all had to learn during the past years in order to get anything published in official journals.
Since then, we have been trying to explain HVE to medical professionals, policymakers, researchers, and the public. It has been frustrating. Most people think that the vaccines work because they keep hearing it from all the media. So, when they see data which seemingly confirm their prior belief – the unvaccinated are dying at a much higher rate than the vaccinated – they cannot make themselves think about any other explanation apart from the convenient one – that the vaccines have prevented these deaths.
When you suggest that it is weird that the vaccines seem to protect against deaths unrelated to Covid, they usually acknowledge that it is weird, but the “Aha” moment of understanding rarely comes that HVE invalidates everything they “knew” about vaccine effectiveness.
Three Illusions of Vaccine Effectiveness
In order to better understand HVE and to be able to explain it more clearly to everyone, we proposed a simple simulation model that can help us to understand three important and common types of misinterpretation of observational data that originate from ignoring the HVE:
1. An illusion of vaccine efficacy
2. An illusion of vaccine waning efficacy
3. An illusion of vaccine-related mortality
We first present a simple model (Model 1) of a placebo vaccine (i.e., a vaccine with zero efficacy and no adverse effects) with no HVE as a sanity check and baseline. Then we make a slight amendment to the model (Model 2), introducing the Healthy Vaccinee Effect controlled by two parameters, the HVE duration, and HVE magnitude. We will still assume the same placebo vaccine as in Model 1. We will show how the three illusions described above naturally appear in the observational data.
Hellbound and Down 