Following on from our expose of the most recent flawed Lancet paper claiming vaccine efficacy a reader contacted us saying:
"Recently I wrote to my State Chief Medical Officer (CMO) asking for an explanation of the approximate 10-15% excess deaths both in my home State and Australia wide. Regarding my specific question about the possibility of COVID vaccination contributing to excess deaths, the CMO fobbed me off saying that the published literature on COVID-19 and vaccination was vast but suggested I read the Lancet “paper by Bette Liu et al with Australian evidence on COVID-19 vaccination and COVID-19 and all-cause mortality among older Australians: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10579525/pdf/main.pdf.”
So, this is another Lancet paper which concludes that vaccination is effective and should be continued. Further, the Australian Deputy Chief Medical Officer (Prof Paul Kelly) under oath at a Senate (Federal Government) hearing referred to the very same paper as a 'World Class Study' published by the NCIRS which demonstrates that Covid-19 vaccine is highly effective and claimed that this study is proof of the benefit of COVID vaccination (https://fb.watch/pHVWUwdwbl/).
I know must be wrong but my epidemiology/stats is not good enough to dissect the paper. Thank you for your advice."
This is the Lancet paper (it was published in November 2023) that the Chief Medical Officer and Prof Paul Kelly cited to allay any fears of vaccine harms:
Having just looked through the paper, this reader’s instincts were spot on for the following reasons alone:
There is no comparison of never vaccinated against ever vaccinated. In fact, the authors do not even consider the 1-dose vaccinated in any of the vaccine efficacy tables. It is “unvaccinated” against different classes of vaccinated where the ‘least’ “vaccinated” category is at least eight days after second dose. So this is as bad an example as you can get of the efficacy ‘cheap trick’ we have reported.
The data are NOT made available, which we now believe should automatically disquality such papers from publication in journals like The Lancet. The authors say “The study investigators do not own the data. Requests for sharing of de-identified data should be directed to the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care” which is a very curious statement. This Government Department funded the study. It’s not clear why they cannot make an anonymised version of the data available to the public.
The authors are claiming that the unvaccinated were generally healthier (because they had fewer GP visits and were less likely to have had an influenza vaccine in 2021). This is an extremely curious observation because the most common defence that the covid vaccine proponents have consistently made (when inconsistencies in their data have been exposed) is that there is a strong ‘healthy vaccinee effect’ among the vaccinated. Moreover, because of this (let’s call it) ‘healthy unvaccinated effect’, the authors are applying some complex ‘adjustments’ to the results such that they favour the vaccinated.
Another reader cm27874 had also exposed multiple problems with this paper in a substack article concluding
To conclude: a bunch of government-adjacent authors, another vast government database we do not get to analyze, a paper that displays lots of figures without any chance for readers to verify, a statistical method that has become the standard way to replace thinking. That’s what gets you into Lancet.
Raphael Lataster has also been exposing for a while how vaccine efficacy and safety have been exaggerated in multiple studies as a result of the dodgy definitions of vaccinated and unvaccinated. His latest substack article provides a good overview of his work:
Page 1 of the published study: “This study was funded by the Health Economics Research Division in the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care.”
Page 12: “Declaration of interests”: BL declares funding from 3 sources, HG declares funding from 2 sources, RK declares funding from 1 source, SP declares funding from 1 source, NP declares funding from 2 sources, CV declares funding from 14 sources, JW declares funding from 1 source, KM declares funding from over 7 sources.
As the authors wrote: “All other authors have no declarations of interest.”
8 authors declared enormous interests (including GAVI, WHO and Welcome Trust), while “all other” 4 authors did not declare any interests.
You have to admit, taking money from 14 different sources for the same job is impressive.
It's not merely a "cheap trick".
There is actual disease enhancement occurring in individuals who become infected within ~5days of dose 1. This manifested as a population-level effect on case rates due to enhanced transmission dynamics, particularly in the second half of 2021.
Since vaccines are administered "in waves" as well, even those who did not fall ill within days had a lower chance to become infected after day 8 when vaccinated "in a vax/case wave" and even IF they become infected, chances are the dosage they are exposed to will be lower. Truly mind-bending.
It's so frustrating that nobody acknowledges this, except for Mary Beth Pfeiffer, Pierre Kory and a few statisticians who aren't writing about it, but even convincing them took me many months.