Major whoops: JAMA paper shows the COVID vaccines didn't help the elderly at all

A paper published in JAMA nearly a year ago which purports to demonstrate a benefit of the booster actually does no such thing. But those lacking critical thinking skills won't see the issues.

Executive summary

The paper Infections, Hospitalizations, and Deaths Among US Nursing Home Residents With vs Without a SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Booster was published to show that the COVID boosters reduce your risk of death from COVID.

But if you are a critical thinker, you see that the “death benefit” simply does not exist. For example, the paper shows that the infection fatality rate (IFR) for the residents at 128 Veterans Health Administration community living centers increased by 28% in residents who got the boosters. That’s the WRONG way… they told us it was supposed to make things better, not worse!

So the attempt to show that the COVID boosters have a death benefit was an epic fail.

Introduction

Critical thinkers realize five things about this paper:

1. If the vaccine worked, the IFR (Infection Fatality Ratio) for those getting the booster would be lower, not higher.

2. If the vaccine worked to prevent death, the IFR for those getting the booster should begin to start diverging after a couple of weeks. The curves for the unboosted shouldn’t diverge!

3. You should always be suspicious when there is no data sharing of de-identified aggregate data.

4. You should always be suspicious when they don’t show you the all-cause mortality (ACM) of the treatment group.

5. You should always wonder why they don’t show you the IFR of each cohort starting on day 0.

Details

Check this out. The IFR for the unboosted in System 2 is 2.4/171.2=.014 whereas the IFR for the boosted is 1.3/72.5=.018.

The IFR for the boosted is 28% higher than the unboosted. In other words, in System 2, the vaccine made you more susceptible to die from COVID based on this data. It’s now out in the open and you can’t unring that bell. But the paper never pointed this out for some reason!

In System 1, however, the vaccine “appeared” to work. But did it really work? Look at Figure 1 in the paper (showing infections on top and deaths below) and you’ll see the benefit was a mirage.

Figure 1 from the paper shows that in System 1, the unboosted were IMMEDIATELY worse off than the boosted. That’s not how it works. The yellow lines for System 1 were supposed to track each other and then diverge gradually as the vaccine starts to work its “magic.” Why can’t we see the data from Day 0? And why hasn’t the data on a nursing home basis been made available ?

The unboosted group of System 1 (yellow dashed line) is clearly an outlier; it looks nothing like the unboosted group of System 2 (blue dashed line). The unboosted groups track each other for days 7 to 14, then mysteriously diverge on Day 14. WTF is that about? The unboosted groups should track each other if these are large, diverse populations. So we have a problem.

Also, note that the endpoints in Fig 1 (right side of graph) do not match the numbers in Figure 1, e.g., 11.3, 160, 171. That has to be troubling for any critical thinker that the graphs don’t match the tables.

If the vaccine really worked, the boosted and unboosted should track at the start in terms of slope and the boosted (solid line) should then diverge out where the slope is lower after around 2 weeks. There is no sign of this whatsoever in either boosted group. The System 2 line flattens out on day 35, but that’s most likely due to a non-lethal variant (Omicron) so we aren’t getting any data points to be able to compute a slope… we simply run out of deaths because COVID is such a non-problem at that point.

Summary

The COVID vaccines have been a massive fraud. They don’t help the elderly at all. This JAMA paper is evidence of that. There is no sign of a benefit because the slopes never decreased after the vaccines had a chance to “kick in” (Figure 1C solid lines).

But it does require some critical thinking skills to realize this. These skills seem to be in short supply nowadays.

It is also troubling that the data from day 0 is not available and that they are not publicly releasing the data. There is no reason for this if there is nothing to hide.