Pfizer and Moderna have claimed that their COVID-19 vaccine is on the order of 95% effective. Where does this number come from?
Well, Pfizer did a study with a vaccine group and a placebo group, both of which were composed of about 22,000 people. Pfizer told the FDA that eight volunteers in its vaccine group developed a PCR-confirmed case of COVID-19, whereas 162 of 22,000 volunteers in the placebo group developed a confirmed case. Similarly, Moderna reported that only five out of 15,000 in its vaccine group versus 90 out of 15,000 in the placebo group developed a confirmed case.
So the vaccine reduced the relative risk of getting COVID-19 by about 95%. If you were in the vaccine group, your chances of getting COVID were about 95% less than if you were in the placebo group.
But what about absolute risk? What jumps out at you is that the absolute risk of catching the WuFlu was less than one percent regardless of vaccine or placebo. In the Pfizer study, the absolute risk without vaccine was 0.736 percent; with the vaccine the risk was 0.036 percent. So the reduction in absolute risk was 0.70%.
How compelling your stats are depends a great deal on how they are presented. If you present relative risk reduction of 95%, that sounds amazing, but if you tout an absolute risk reduction of 0.7%, that doesn’t have quite the same punch.
But if you are worried about side-effects of the jab, absolute risk reduction is the more pertinent statistic, because you’ll want to balance the potential harm from vaccine side-effects against the potential harm from the WuFlu itself, including the possibility that you will never contract the disease.
Looking at Pfizer numbers, 22,000 people got the vaccine to keep 154 people from getting the virus, with no indication of the severity of the illness in the placebo group. Since the death rate is about 1% (actually far less than that for people under 80, and essentially nil for ages 1 to 18), that means that 44,000 people would have to get the vaccine to save three people from dying of the WuFlu.
The vaccine is not without risk. According to VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, over 3,300 people have died after receiving the vaccine, through April 23rd, an average of 30 people every day. 3,300 people is more than all other vaccines deaths combined between 1997 and 2013, a period of 15.5 years. But some say that fewer than 1 percent of adverse vaccine events are eve reported to VAERS.
So weighing the risks of the vaccine against the risk of living without it is not as simple and one-sided as the powers that be want you to believe.
A couple of caveats: First, during this period of time about half a million people per day were receiving the vaccine, so thirty people per day dying is not a statistically significant number; it is less than 0.01% of those who got the jab.
Moreover, just because someone died after getting the jab, it doesn’t mean that the vaccine killed him. That’s the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. If someone gets the vaccine and then dies of a heart attack the next day, the timing of those two events could be entirely random and unconnected; it certainly doesn’t mean that the vaccine caused the heart attack.
Tucker Carlson points out that the 1976 Swine Flu vaccine program, in which 45 million people had been vaccinated, was discontinued because of the deaths of just 53 people. But that is a misleading comparison, because very few people were dying from Swine Flu, and the vaccine was clearly linked to Guillain-Barre Syndrome, which is why the Swine Flu vaccine was such a fiasco. Worldwide, millions of deaths have been linked to COVID-19, so taking the vaccine might make sense even given a much higher number of adverse vaccine events.
Another caveat is that the Pfizer and Moderna studies show a much lower risk of contracting the WuFlu (<1%) than what actual population statistics show. In the U.S., there have already been over 33 million PCR-confirmed cases, which is about 10% of the population (and given what the anti-body studies showed, the likely total number of infections is vastly higher); this suggests that your chances of getting the virus are far higher than 0.736 percent. On the other hand, the cumulative historical total of cases does not reflect what is going around right now; currently there are 6.4 million active cases in the U.S., which is less than 2% of the population. Worldwide, total current infections are less than 20 million, which is only about 1/4th of 1 percent of the world’s population. So your chances of never contracting the disease are quite substantial.