Reporters and health bureaucrats attack Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for doing the right thing (again)

The US government should immediately end all funding for all "test-negative" studies that supposedly measure flu or Covid vaccine effectiveness; they are worse than useless

Another day, another legacy media fit about Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Besides remaking the National Institutes of Health — a project he and I discussed last August — Bhattacharya now is acting director of the Centers for Disease Control,

So it was that Bhattacharya delayed releasing a CDC-funded study purporting to show that Covid shots worked last winter. Last week, agency employees leaked the delay to the Washington Post. “The acting CDC director cited concerns with the methodology, but the design has long been used to test vaccine effectiveness,” the Post harrumphed.

Yep, that’s the problem. Bhattacharya should end funding for all similar “test-negative” studies. They are nothing but bureaucratic full-employment programs that produce garbage data. Even their theoretical rationale makes no sense.

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So why are these studies such junk?

As UT readers know, I favor randomized controlled trials. Those are the gold standard of science. Groups of randomly chosen but evenly matched people are prospectively given either a treatment or a placebo, like a sugar pill. Then researchers track their results, following both safety and efficacy.

Even randomized trials can be manipulated, as drug companies know, but the design is theoretically sound. The treatment is probably responsible for whatever differences between the groups follow.

Sometimes, when a trial would take many years to conduct or require a huge number of participants, running randomized controlled trials is effectively impossible. In that case, real-world data can still be useful, but it must be viewed much more skeptically.

For example, in February I wrote about a paper suggesting that caffeinated coffee might help reduce dementia.

That paper did not come after a randomized trial, but it was based on data from 130,000 people who were followed for decades and provided detailed information about their health. Plus the researchers observed what is called a dose-response outcome. More coffee appeared to lead to lower risks.

As observational studies went, though it doesn’t prove anything, the coffee study was a good one.

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(Or maybe I just like coffee. Delicious, delicious coffee.)

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The “test-negative” studies the CDC uses to push Covid and flu shots? Not so much.

In a test-negative study, the CDC asks hospitals to test patients admitted for “influenza-like illnesses” for the flu (or Covid). Then they compare what percentage of the people who test positive were vaccinated compared to those who tested negative.

If a higher percentage of people in the “test-negative” group for the illness are vaccinated, the CDC concludes the vaccine has worked.

This is nonsense.

As the CDC itself explains in discussing these studies, these people are not being compared in any meaningful way either before or at the time of the studies:

[B]ecause factors such as underlying medical conditions and prior season influenza vaccination status were not modeled, the potential for unmeasured confounding exist…

In other words, the authors of these studies have no idea how vaccinated and unvaccinated people differ in their underlying health, much less their attitude towards medical care.

To take just one real-world, very plausible example, people who get vaccinated against the flu or Covid are probably more likely to look for medical care whenever they have the sniffles.

So they will have more negative tests over mild colds for which unvaccinated people do not get tested at all, making the vaccines seem to work. (Hey, look, another “test-negative” for a vaccinated person!)

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Another plausible reason “test-negative” designs might show efficacy: suppose repeated Covid mRNA boosters no longer work at all against Covid but at the same time suppress the immune system and make recipients more likely to get other respiratory illnesses.

In this case, the apparent “positive” efficacy would actually be a sign the shots are making people sicker.

Yep, you read that right.

So, yes, Bhattacharya was right not to publish the Covid study results. Let’s hope he goes further and end these ludicrous test-negative designs completely.

If the CDC wants to show Covid (or flu) shots work, it should commit to a major, placebo-controlled study that will put questions about their safety and side effects to rest. We spend billions of dollars vaccinating over 100 million Americans against the flu every year — and millions more still get Covid mRNA jabs.

It’s time to prove they work.

Or stop recommending them at all.