Non-COVID hospitalization in the UK is FIVE TIMES higher among the vaccinated
A lesson in why 'they' should never publish the raw data
All of this based on a new pre-print out of the UK.
With its innocuous and boring title: “Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against Omicron and Delta hospitalisation: test negative case-control study” the purpose is (clearly) to support the ‘Vaccines Work!’ mantra.
However, they made the interesting choice to include their raw data in the paper (supplemental data).
Amanuensis over at the Daily Sceptic took their supplemental data and did his own analysis. That is what I will be summarizing here.
The paper’s authors use relatively confusing statistics for this retrospective study (i.e., they looked at patient records and tried to put them into appropriate groups instead of having a true random controlled trial where people are placed into the different experimental groups at the start of the experiment).
But…
They end up with a relatively large number of subjects - certainly enough that there is sufficient statistical power to be meaningful. If I understand it correctly, they poured over 6.7+ million hospital admission during the Delta and Omicron surges in the UK. Overall, they included over 400,000 patients, about two-thirds of whom were controls, in their analysis of vaccine effectiveness against COVID.
Here is a quick summary of the COVID-related results:
In all of these data tables, the results are
a) corrected for population (rate per 100k) and
b) the number in parentheses means ‘as compared to the unvaccinated’.
For example:
“(2.0x)” = twice as many as the unvaccinated (vax is worse)
and
“(0.5x)” = half as many as the unvaccinated (vax is better).
Also, ‘any dose’ combines everyone with 1-, 2-, and 3+ doses in one group. That is subdivided into ‘one dose only’ and ‘two dose only’ on the tables.
#1 The vaccinated were more likely to end up admitted and then released the same day.
(i.e., serious enough symptoms to warrant hospitalization, but that did not result in an overnight stay).
#2 The vaccines appear to show clear effectiveness at preventing more severe COVID:
The number of cases resulting in multiple days in the hospital and requiring oxygen was noticeably lower in the vaccinated groups. Strangely, the effectiveness of the vax appears to go down the more doses you have (or perhaps that the boosted had far superior outcomes?).
(Even here, the authors make some assumptions that maximize this ‘effectiveness’ - e.g., patients are excluded from the ‘COVID positive’ group if their first positive test is more than 14 days before they show up at the emergency room. How this might skew the data is difficult to parse.)
Summary of COVID data:
Vaccines appear to increase your likelihood of having moderate COVID symptoms, but decrease your chance of having severe ones requiring oxygen and an extended hospital stay.
You might have noticed on those data tables I pasted that the ‘tested positive for COVID’ was not the only information….
#1 The vaccinated were five times more likely to be admitted to the hospital for anything not COVID related.
Yes, the vaxxed were half as likely to end up in the hospital for COVID, but the ‘other than COVID’ numbers are astonishing. Only 8 more unvaxxed people per 100,000 ended up hospitalized with COVID, but 1,100+ vaxxed people per 100,000 were hospitalized for other reasons.
Doesn’t sound like a fair exchange to me…..
#2 More shots seems associated with greater non-COVID hospitalization risk.
Because the ‘any dose’ includes those boosted (or even double-boosted), it is interesting that those with only one mRNA jab performed the ‘best’ (‘least badly’ is a better way of saying it) of the vaccinated group.
#3 Those hospitalized specifically with acute (non-COVID) respiratory symptoms are much more likely to be vaccinated.
These are the same two tables shown at the beginning, but this time let’s concentrate on the non-COVID data.
As you can see, particularly among those who were ‘fully vaccinated, but not boosted’, their chance of being hospitalized and/or an extended hospital stay was 4-5 times greater than if they had never gotten the mRNA shot.
This non-COVID data could be indicative of disruptions to the immune system among the vaxxed.
We have long worried that this novel mRNA technology was not studied long enough or in-depth enough to be sure that it is truly “safe and effective”.
The FDA and CDC want us to look exclusively at the COVID hospitalization numbers and conclude that “Vaccines Work!”, but the apparent increased risk from diseases-other-than-COVID is many times greater than any reduction in severe COVID.
This is why we need the all-cause mortality (and hospitalization) data. Now.
(And it is likely why we don’t have it.)