The dumbest, most dishonest argument for Covid jabs yet

A computer model claims they prevented 3 million American deaths and almost 19 million hospitalizations. Imagine what they would have done if they actually WORKED against Omicron.

Yesterday, the Commonwealth Fund released a paper purporting to prove Covid jabs had saved almost 3.3 million lives and prevented 18.6 million hospitalizations - in the United States alone.

I didn’t plan to write about it. The figures are absurd on their face. The hospitalization number is particularly stupid, implying that almost 6 percent of Americans would have been hospitalized for Covid without the vaccines.

Yet the usual suspects in the media are writing about this study as if it is something other than a joke. In fact, they’re using it in a desperate effort to prop up the faltering campaigns for Covid boosters and shots for kids.

CNN: Covid-19 vaccines have saved more than 3 million lives in US, study says, but the fight isn’t over

The Hill: Covid vaccines saved 3.2 million U.S. lives, researchers say

Et cetera.

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So, in the interests of science - as opposed to The Science - I will demolish this absurdity in three minutes or less.

Set aside the obvious problem that the researchers did not provide the specific inputs that they used to calculate these figures - what Covid infection fatality rate did they use, what hospitalization rate, et cetera?

Here’s all you need to know. The study Commonwealth released yesterday makes estimates through November 30, 2022. But is actually an update of an earlier paper that made the same calculations through March 31, 2022.

The earlier figures are below. As you can see, in the earlier work, the Commonwealth Fund claimed that as of the end of March, the vaccines had saved 2.26 million lives (and stopped 66 million infections).

SOURCE

Thus the updated paper is claiming that the mRNA jabs prevented an additional 1 million Covid deaths and 54 million infections in the last eight months.

THIS IS A JOKE.

First, no one even bothers to argue anymore that the vaccines stop infection with the Omicron variant. At best, they are marginally effective for a few weeks or months, and their effectiveness goes to zero - if not below - afterwards. Don’t take it from me, take it from The New England Journal of Medicine:

The effectiveness of vaccination [against Omicron] with two doses of BNT162b2 and no previous infection was negligible…

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Second, let’s pretend for argument’s sake that the paper’s claim that the vaccines stopped 54 million Covid infections between April and November 2022 is correct, rather than absurd.

Fine. The paper then claims that avoiding those 54 million infections prevented 1 million deaths.

In other words, Commonwealth is estimating an infection fatality rate from Omicron almost 2 percent (1 million deaths out of 54 million infections).

That estimate is at least 20 times the actual infection fatality rate for the Omicron variant - and not because of vaccines. In 2020, before vaccines existed, the original Sars-Cov-2 had an infection fatality rate in the range of 0.3 percent - and Omicron is significantly less lethal than the original.

Claiming Omicron has a death rate of 2 percent is worse than a joke.

It’s dishonest, and the only reason to do it is to produce numbers that friendly reporters can paste into headlines and post on Twitter. One last point: Omicron has killed fewer than 500,000 people WORLDWIDE since April, even though most of the world does not use the mRNA jabs. How could it have killed 1 million Americans in the last eight months under any circumstances?

So.

This paper is an embarrassment, and so is anyone who repeats what it says without checking it.

Which won’t stop CNN.