Day 700: Fact Checking

Fact checking these days is hard to distinguish from body checking; you slam into unwanted facts with all the force you can muster, hoping to bash them out of your way. An intrepid PlagueBlog reporter, working from home while infected with the dread disease, reports that Reuters has gotten into the fact checking game, trying to body slam the negative efficacy numbers buried in a Danish study of Omicron with a lot of dancing around the fact that there were negative efficacy numbers buried in a Danish study of Omicron:

Users online claimed that the table on page 6, particularly negative VE estimates against Omicron 91 to 150 days following second mRNA dose, was proof that vaccines were harming immune systems with other claims that unvaccinated people were less likely to get infected with the virus.

Negative efficacy literally means that unvaccinated people were less likely to get infected with the virus. While it's also literally true that the study did not conclude anyone's immune system was damaged by vaccination, the anti-vaxxers harping on the study never claimed it did. The fact check reads suspiciously like some sort of missive from a Communist press that toes the party line while leaking the truth out between the lines.

In any event, negative efficacy data is not limited to the backs of Danish preprints; el gato malo find some in Omicron data from Germany:

to calculate VE, we need to compare the vaccinated cohorts to the unvaccinated. that’s the control group. there are probably some pretty significant error bars here, but this outcome is STARK. the risk ratios for all vaccinated groups are far, far higher than control.

boosting does seem to lead to a 2/3 risk reduction vs just being double vaxxed but still leaves one at 4.7X the risk of the unvaccinated.

He goes into some detail about how the window of immortal time post-boosting makes these numbers look worse than they are (and the booster look better than it is). See the bad cat for details.

P.S. Brian Mowrey has a different take on what's going on with negative efficacy: the suppression of innate immunity.

P.P.S. Massachusetts cases were up 2% again today.