edit: tl;dr: covid-19 mRNA vaccine was effective and did not contribute to increased deaths.
> study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals
These are the important bits for the non medical folks
"vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality"
Also significantly: "vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause."
not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
And the vaccine wasn't trialed or rolled out initially for all age groups. One major reason was because double-blind trials were done first.
For instance, here is the enrollment page for a double-blind study from 2020 for those between 18-55: https://studypages.com/s/join-a-covid-19-vaccine-research-st...
This one was was 18-59: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04582344 with two cohorts: "The first cohort will be healthcare workers in the high risk group (K-1) and the second cohort will be people at normal risk (K-2)"
Double blind studies were done. Then rollouts were done based on risk and need for further general-population monitoring of impact. What, concretely, are you proposing should have been done differently?
Did it get rid of all the homeopathic quackery?
They will always have an excuse. If all else fails it'll just be a vague generic "oh yeah, it's just something deeper your science can't measure yet" or something along those lines. The Queen was an amateur hand-waver in comparison.
Never mind it was never very likely to work in the first place, on account of defying basic logic on several levels: like cures like, the whole water memory business, the more you dilute the stronger it becomes – nothing about this makes any sense.
I miss the days when worry about the adverse effects of homeopathy was the top concern...
Edit: OTOH that pill will reduce your chance to suffer even more or even die, which is a good thing ofc
[1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
1 = https://www.kff.org/quick-take/fda-memo-linking-covid-vaccin...
While I grant there were many who were disposed to be irrational skeptics, lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging, coercive mandates, and punitive limitations on dissenting speech. Institutions took an end-justifies-the-means strategy, and many smelled a rat.
Even now, online, you see right wing users continuing to lament over vaccine injuries, and on the left, long COVID. Ironically the injuries are often similar. They are, of course, both right.
Rank bullshit or whining that people aren’t forced to associate with others against their will - not sure which basis for your statement is worse.
The more interesting studies will be about non-lethal adverse reactions. Changes to menstruation, heart problems, lymph node swelling to name just a few.
If the vaccine killed 1/100 people (again I don’t believe this but it’s the internet) but made the other 99 immune to dying over the 4 years, it would look really good on average even if it was directly responsible for the deaths of 1%.
It's only the case if the vaccine gave everybody slightly higher chances of dying from everything that it could hide in the weeds.
So in this specific example we can see from Table 2 that deaths/1 million are just lower for everything in the vaccinated so it's not the case that it lowered one kind of death drastically at the expense of another.
If you take the vaccine, you have a lower chance of dying over those 4 years. You also have an infinitely higher chance (specifically 1% vs 0%) of dying from the vaccine, but that doesn't change the previous sentence.
This is interesting because of "supposed" cardiovascular effects of the vaccine that many folks were worried about. Even more confounding is the gender differences. You'd think skewing women would skew away from cardiovascular issues.
An alternate interpretation is that the at risk cardio unvaccinated died of COVID for some reason.
It's very hard to interpret this data given the massive confounder of "antivaxxers are suspicious of healthcare and take more risks".
COVID causes myocarditis too (even for young people unlikely to die from COVID itself), at much higher rates. So you only need a 20% chance of contracting COVID for the vaccine to be net positive in the least obviously positive age group.
Your cite reads to me like a statement on the available data, which is interesting in its own ways but can be corrected for when it's irrelevant to the hypothesis.
I just hope this doesn't elicit some unhinged Truth Social post about evil Frenchmen trying to poison our bodies.
Particularly the "no increased risk of all-cause mortality". I mean, if we assume the vaccines worked, we'd certainly expect a decreased risk of all-case mortality (because "all-case mortality" certainly includes "covid mortality"). Reading "no increase" seems to imply "it doesn't change anything". Yeah, technically, the sentence does not say that ("no increase" can mean "no decrease" or "no change").
You have to read further below to get what should be the real message on all-cause-mortality: "Vaccinated individuals had [...] a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality". I think that should've been in the first 1-2 sentences.
Which seems to suggest that there was big differences between the groups other than the vaccination.
This of course does not change that the vaccine seems mostly safe, but it definitely calls in to question whether the protection against covid death was vaccine-mediated or due to some other difference between the groups.
Therefore this paper is moderately strong evidence for the vaccine being safe, but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious.
Sure, it's not a silver bullet but it's at least stainless steel.
There are other sources of evidence for efficacy. This paper is not a very strong source of evidence for efficacy due to some obvious uncontrolled difference between groups.
I hate it when blanket statements like this creep in.
Which Covid? The initial version was definitely more deadly than later versions.
What about future covids? Are you willing to guarantee every version of covid from here on out will be less deadly? It is the general case to be true, but it is not some sort of law.
Covid has long term health consequences, and these are proportional to the severity of the acute infection.
People who died of a stroke of a heart infarction 6 months down the line were not counted as "covid death", even though covid is known to increase their incidence in the next year.
> After standardizing the characteristics of vaccinated individuals to those of unvaccinated individuals, we observed a 25% lower standardized incidence of all-cause death in vaccinated individuals compared with unvaccinated ones…
> Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.
> All-cause mortality was lower within 6 months following COVID-19 vaccination, regardless of the dose administered, compared with the control periods...
If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%, you will still have a reduction in "all-cause" mortality yet your chances of dying by anything else has increased. I already said Table 2 does not show this is happening and in fact vaccinated individuals have better outcomes across the board. However, people are drawing this conclusion (even though they are correct) incorrectly without looking at the data.
It assesses persons "who were alive on November 1, 2021"
That tantamount to saying "for people alive January 1st 1950, the Second World War was not a significant cause of mortality"
Can you see how ridiculous that sounds?
I suppose the problem is that it was unlikely to be productive.
> A stronger association was observed among individuals aged 18 to 29 years, although the underlying reasons remain unclear and warrant further investigation.
You can see that in this chart (click the 5Y range): https://ycharts.com/indicators/france_coronavirus_full_vacci...
It's the full vaccination rate; as of Dec 1 2021 it was 69.89%. A month later (i.e. those Nov folks are getting their second dose) it's 74%; latest number on the chart is 78.44%.
You are aware of the "incentives" offered by the French govt?
Such wonderful options as the ability to go the shops without being arrested that came with, "take the mandated medicine".
From the chart, they picked a very reasonable spot to draw said line.
There are obvious negative and positive ways to interpret this but I don't actually know the correct one.
Remember, France was one of the wonderful countries where you couldn't legally shop or work if you were deemed to be 'not at risk' && 'unvaccinated' and achieved a very high rate as a result biasing the control group. (This is a purely statistical statement)
And for reference, I do think the vax is dangerous in terms of massive populations and we don't have mass graves due to mRNA problems (although several large cancer blips). In the same way in countries with low vaccination rates we don't have mass graves at 10% population or higher. Cv19 was always going to kill and an untested treatment is likely to kill those who were at risk.
(I'm willing to bet in the case of cv19 the ones who were hit hardest would have been hit badly by either vector, virus or mRNA. But we'll pretty much never be able to prove or disprove that...)
I'm sure both extremes will jump to the rallying cry of "2 more weeks..." So yes of course I'm wrong, I only worked on analysing early 'data' and pulling apart the models so what do I know.
I feel like you could have the same conclusion if you had groups that were people who go to the doctor vs people who do not in the same time period
they go into this themselves:
> It seems reasonable to assume that by early November 2021, 3 months after the introduction of the mandatory health pass39 (delivered when fulfilling one of these conditions: a negative COVID-19 test result, proof of COVID-19 vaccination, or a certificate of recovery from a COVID-19 infection) to enter and exit France as well as to access restaurants, theaters, and nonurgent hospital consultations, the majority of unvaccinated individuals were reluctant to get vaccinated.
> A study aimed at characterizing patient hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccination showed that categorical refusal of vaccination was associated with prior noncompliance with vaccination recommendations, a lower educational level, and a less severe perception of COVID-19.41
in any case i've yet to see a slam dunk study showing any negative effect of vaccination.
> For all individuals, vaccinated or not, follow-up time zero began 6 months after the index date.
basisword•1h ago