Debunking the Booster Bias
Our heroes of Team Reality, Tracy Høeg, Ran Duriseti, and Vinay Prasad, have a letter today in the New England Journey of Medicine entitled: Potential “Healthy Vaccinee Bias” in a Study of BNT162b2 Vaccine against Covid-19.”
They point out a crucial statistical issue in a prominent study by Arbel et al., which reported a 90% decrease in Covid-19 related mortality among participants who received a Pfizer–BioNTech booster shot. In their letter, the authors call out unadjusted confounding factors that may have influenced the study's results, skewing the perception of booster effectiveness.
Using the data from the study and a subsequent letter, the authors calculated the mortality not related to Covid-19 among the booster and non-booster groups. Surprisingly, they found a 94.8% lower mortality unrelated to Covid-19 among the booster group, implying a substantially healthier cohort than the non-booster group.
The similarities in mortality reduction, both Covid-19 related and unrelated, in the booster group raises questions about potential "healthy vaccine bias" that might have confounded the results. Simply put, healthier individuals who are less likely to die, to begin with, might be the ones receiving the booster shots, which could lead to an overestimate of the vaccine's effectiveness.
These findings underscore the importance of considering and adjusting for confounding factors in observational studies. Moreover, they highlight the need to include mortality not related to Covid-19 as an essential context in all observational Covid-19 vaccine studies. Hence, while boosters could indeed be beneficial in the fight against Covid-19, it's crucial to interpret their impact accurately to make well-informed decisions.
Check it out! https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2306683
What a colossal mind fuck this whole shit show has been!
What I've read in a number of reliable articles that have done studies is that it's the boostered people, even more than the people who just got 2 jabs, who are dying and/or getting very sick with things like cancer. If they didn't include healthy individuals, then this study means absolutely nothing, as they aren't doing a comparison study. My husband is a virologist/immunologist who used to help in developing jabs (until he discovered what was being put in them and hasn't had one in 40 yrs) who has many decades of experience in those fields and who worked in Public Health Dept of PA - the ones who advise govt., schools, etc on how to manage pandemics, epidemics, disease etc. He has been carefully gathering info and studying this whole covid epidemic ever since it was first announced.