COVID-19 Vaccine Efficacy

The efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines can be viewed in multiple ways. These include metrics of infectivity, transmission, symptomatic disease, disease severity, hospitalization, death, and others. The most common ways are to view efficacies individual COVID-19 vaccines or COVID-19 vaccination programs as a whole. Many nations have used multiple vaccines both nationally and with individuals, which makes teasing apart individual data extremely problematic. However, observations on overall efficacy of national and international aggregate vaccination campaigns can still be revealing.

Pathologist Ryan Cole points out that the vaccinated still carry high viral loads of SARS-CoV-2 because the vaccines do not cause secretion of IgA antibodies and that the T cell infiltrates are tissue destructive.¹⁾ Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi and Dr. Arne Burkhardt concur, stating that the current COVID-19 vaccines elicit IgM antibodies and circulating IgA antibodies, but not the secretory IgA antibodies needed to protect the mucous membranes that line the respiratory and intestinal tract.²⁾

There are several forms of evidence with regard to vaccine efficacy, of which reports from trials and observational studies. It is worth noting that the trial reports are self-reported by the vaccine manufacturers with little outside oversight.

Evidence from both trial reports and retrospective analysis show similar results of increased infection and transmission among the recently vaccinated, though published efficacy computations seem to generally exclude these infections from efficacy computations. Including them dramatically changes efficacy results.³⁾

The first evidence for the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines came from self-reported trials conducted by Pfizer and Moderna. These trials reported highly similar efficacy results for their mRNA vaccines. However, these trials are fraught with data exclusions, whistleblowers, and secrecy that has resulted in tense court battles.

See more complete details at COVID-19 Vaccine Trials.

• April 15, 2021 - A retrospective analysis on Israel claims to show extremely high Pfizer vaccine efficacy rates from low to high 90s (percentages) for essentially all tested endpoints.⁴⁾
• May 5, 2021 - Another retrospective analysis on Israeli claims to show extremely high Pfizer vaccine efficacy rates.⁵⁾
  • There is a substantial conflict of interest as at least 8 of the authors admit to holding Pfizer stock and stock options.
  • The authors inexplicably failed to make an expected standard risk-adjustment in their calculations, inflating efficacy results.⁶⁾

According to Peter McCullough, the data from the UK Covid briefing of December 21, 2021,⁷⁾ “shows that the most effective product against Delta and the legacy strains is now near zero efficacy over time against the milder and more brief Omicron strain.”

• Aug 12, 2021 - Bernal et al: Effectiveness of Covid-19 Vaccines against the B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant ⁸⁾

Martin Neil et al wrote up a statistical analysis (in preprint as of December 14, 2021) suggestive of systematic mis-categorization of vaccination status making COVID-19 vaccine efficacy appear better than reality in retrospective analyses.

Pharmaceutical marketing expert, biotech analyst, and former Pfizer employee Karen Kingston argues that infections rose substantially after injection with COVID-19 vaccines.⁹⁾

The Canadian Covid Care Alliance published a critique of the safety and efficacy demonstrated in Pfizer's 6-month trial data published in the New England Journal of Medicine on January 10, 2022.^{10) 11)}

Strangely, multiple research publications purport to show COVID-19 vaccines broadly reducing non-COVID-19 risk of mortality. The extremely unlikeliness of such results point to the hypothesis that data definitions and statistical sorting is behind most or all of the efficacy reported in some trials and studies.^12)13)14)

In a retrospective analysis of New York state hospitals, researchers claim to see no real declining efficacy at preventing hospitalization from the various COVID-19 vaccines as the delta strain became predominant.¹⁵⁾

• Columbia University research Spiro Pantazatos and colleague Herve Seligmann produced a study showing an association between greater COVID-19 vaccination and higher all-cause mortality.
• Age adjusted all cause mortality trends 2000-2021 in Europe. An extremely detailed Substack piece from Orwell2024. Among the many conclusions are; 1) 2020: The age adjusted mortality demonstrates the overreaction in the Covid-19 crises; 2) 2021: Neither a positive nor negative impact of the vaccine can be seen; and 3) The observed excess mortality in Austria and Netherlands is dominated by mortality in the elderly age bins. Those are 95% vaccinated like in Sweden, Spain and France. The vaccine doesn’t reduce nor increase all cause mortality. It isn’t the underlying root cause. QR passports and the one dimensional panic driven C19 health focus has to stop.

Koren et al showed little difference in SARS-CoV-2 positive rates among airport travelers in Israel. https://pecc-il.org/pdf-doc/green-pass-and-covid-19-vaccine-booster-shots-in-israel-a-more-realistic-empirical-assessment-analyzing-the-airport-data/

• Harvard University researcher S.V. Subramanian and colleague Akhil Kumar published a correlation study in the European Journal of Epidemiology show positive correlation between COVID-19 vaccinations and COVID-19 cases worlwide (a broad subset of 68 nations), and essentially zero relationship in the United States. (study)
• Mathew Crawford wrote at Rounding the Earth about the positive global correlation between COVID-19 vaccinations and COVID-19 cases and deaths among all nations. (Systemic COVID-19 Vaccine Efficacy, Part 2)
• Nov 3, 2021 The Expose: A Deadly Pandemic of the Fully Vaccinated – Worldwide data from 185 nations proves the highest Covid-19 Death rates are in the most vaccinated countries
• Mathew Crawford wrote at Rounding the Earth about the positive global correlation between COVID-19 vaccinations and COVID-19 cases and deaths among all nations over numerous time periods. (Systemic COVID-19 Vaccine Efficacy, Part 3)
• “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States” by Subramanian & Kumar appears on PubMed Central dated September 2021. The Findings section begins, “At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days. In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people. Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days.”
• A letter in The Lancet from November, 2021, suggests, among many other startling statistics, that “Recent data […] indicate that the epidemiological relevance of COVID-19 vaccinated individuals is increasing. In the UK it was described that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated vs 23% for unvaccinated).

* Mathew Crawford wrote at Rounding the Earth about how COVID-19 cases and deaths are going up in far more nations than in where they are going down since vaccine rollout. (Systemic COVID-19 Vaccine Efficacy Basics) The article reports that as of October 20, 2021, according to the Our World in Data COVID-19 dataset,

• Cases have increased 26.1% in Africa.
• Cases have increased 169.6% in Asia.
• Cases have increased 690% in Australia.
• Cases have increased 56.6% in Europe.
• Cases have increased 67.6% in North America.
• Cases have increased 59.9% in South America.
• Cases have increased 76.3% worldwide.
• Deaths have increased 27.1% in Africa.
• Deaths have increased 122.8% in Asia.
• Deaths have increased 155.3% in Australia
• Deaths have increased 30.2% in Europe.
• Deaths have increased 37.3% in North America.
• Deaths have increased 55.7% in South America.
• Deaths have increased 46.3% worldwide.

* Mathew Crawford wrote at Rounding the Earth about how there is no distinction in any COVID-19 vaccine trials data or subsequent retrospective analyses that is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the vaccines are ineffective. (Systemic Vaccine Efficacy, Part 4)

• Oct 24, 2021 Aaron Siri: The obvious wins again: natural immunity superior to vaccine immunity.

• Nov, 2021 - A study on 133 participants including 53 immunocompetent participants show that patients with chronic inflammatory disease (CID) produced two-thirds less antibodies after vaccination.¹⁶⁾

• Nov 6, 2021 - Despite a 99.5% double-vaccination rate, Co Waterford, Ireland had the highest case rate in all of Ireland.¹⁷⁾

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00448-7/fulltext

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.15.21251623v1

https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab229/6167855

https://www.authorea.com/users/332778/articles/509881-single-dose-bnt162b2-vaccine-protects-against-asymptomatic-sars-cov-2-infection

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm7013e3_w

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vaccines-highly-effective-against-hospitalisation-from-delta-variant

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e1.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/covid19_vaccine_safety.html

https://dkfynn.substack.com/p/have-we-gotten-anywhere

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/96412

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410

https://thenationalpulse.com/2021/12/31/vaccinated-21-times-more-likely-to-get-omicron/

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114228

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114583

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2114255

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32384142/

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620

https://archive.ph/EWnmO (Alex Berenson Alberta data)

https://doctorsandscientistsdeclaration.org/home/supporting-evidence/#children HUGE list of links here under three headings:

• Early COVID Treatment Works
• Vaccinating Children Means Unnecessary Risks
• COVID-Recovered Immunity is Durable