One of the most pressing issues facing the scientific and medical communities is the catastrophic loss of the public’s trust in accepting their advice and/or recommendations. And it’s overwhelmingly due to their own actions and statements.
There are books’ worth of examples worth of examples. Such as the early part of the pandemic when they flip-flopped on masks, from claiming that they didn’t work to stating that getting 80% of the public to wear them would end the pandemic in a matter of weeks, to their claims that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy theory, and all the way to absurdities such as predicting the Super Bowl in Florida would be a “superspreader event.”
Or the mass panic when states like Mississippi and Texas ended their mask mandates, or when the mandate on airplanes was lifted…and nothing happened afterward.
But certainly nothing may have damaged their trust more than the steadfast assertions that the COVID vaccines were able to stop infection and transmission. And one study and analysis from a heavily credentialed group of experts on the vaccines shows how committed they were to misleading people in order to suit their political and ideological aims.
An analysis conducted by extremely experienced academics published at the Commonwealth Fund exemplifies this practice. Claiming that COVID vaccines were miraculous treatments that prevented millions of cases and millions of deaths. But first, it’s important to define what the “Commonwealth Fund is” and how organizations like this serve a very specific purpose.
Directly from their website they describe their mission as to “promote a high-performing, equitable health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society’s most vulnerable, including people of color, people with low income, and those who are uninsured.”
Equity, of course, means equal outcomes, not equal opportunities. It’s a key tenant of left-wing organizations. And knowing that about this organization, you may already be able to guess what the results of this study will be.
Sure enough, their writers are a near-perfect exemplification of the NGO industrial complex.
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Hard to imagine a better group of “experts” than that to work on an NGO funded study on COVID vaccines, right? Well, therein lies the problem. The organization seeks a specific outcome, “COVID vaccines saved millions of lives and millions of cases,” and sure enough, they got exactly the one they wanted. And boy oh boy is that outcome a doozy.
This crack team of highly experienced academics created a model, of course they did, to estimate the effectiveness of COVID vaccines at preventing infection, hospitalization, and deaths. With some stunning results.
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“From December 2020 through November 2022,” they write, “we estimate that the COVID-19 vaccination program in the U.S. prevented more than 18.5 million additional hospitalizations and 3.2 million additional deaths.”
That’s impressive enough already, but it gets even better!
“Without vaccination, there would have been nearly 120 million more COVID-19 infections,” they continue. “The vaccination program also saved the U.S. $1.15 trillion (Credible Interval: $1.10 trillion–$1.19 trillion) (data not shown) in medical costs that would otherwise have been incurred.”
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It’s seriously worth diving into their claims, but put simply, these numbers are not possible. And they purposefully ignore data and evidence that makes them impossible in order to get the outcome they and the Commonwealth Fund wanted to see.
Let’s take their most important claim, that there would have been 3.2 million “additional deaths” from COVID if not for the COVID vaccines. Sure enough, there’s a very easy way to debunk that claim.
While the vaccines hit the market in December 2020, uptake was extremely minimal until early in 2021. Which means virtually all COVID-related deaths that occurred in 2020 happened pre-vaccination, with little-to-no natural immunity among the population, and a more virulent original strain that had not yet mutated to become less dangerous.
Well, the CDC estimates that there were roughly 350,000 COVID-related deaths in the United States. That started in February-March, so it wasn’t a complete year, but it’s relatively close. There is no possible outcome on earth in which there were 350,000 COVID deaths in 10-11 months before natural immunity and that there would have been an “additional” 3.2 million in just 2021 and January-November 2022.
In fact, the World Health Organization reports just over 7 million deaths total – from 2020-2026. Not in the United States, but the entire world. An additional 3.2 million implies a level of severity that COVID simply does not possess.
But that’s how models work. The authors told the model to assume COVID would kill a certain percentage of people, they also told the model that the vaccines had a certain percentage of effectiveness, and thus got the outcome they wanted.
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In 2021, the CDC estimated approximately 460,000 COVID-related deaths in the United States, with roughly 244,000 in 2022. This assessment implies that over 4 million people would have died from COVID in less than two years. That’s 1.22% of the entire U.S. population in 2021-2022. Except we know, from actual data-related research, that the infection fatality rate from COVID was far below that.
As that study concluded, “The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years.”
It’s simply impossible for 1.22% of the US population to die in two years from COVID because COVID is not deadly enough for that to happen.
The other claim, that 120 million cases were avoided is, again, impossible. Why? Because COVID infects everyone, regardless of vaccination status. Which is why places like South Korea confirmed nearly 70% of their population got COVID, the vast majority in 2021-2022, despite 90+% vaccination rates. Or another study from Denmark which found that nearly 70% of the population got COVID in a matter of months from 2021-2022, despite 90+% vaccination rates.
The hospitalization estimates are equally absurd, implying that one in 18 additional Americans would have required hospitalization for COVID from December 2020–November 2022. The actual number was roughly 4.6 million, meaning that their total estimate of hospitalizations would have been 23.1 million hospitalizations or nearly 7% of the US population. 1 in 14. That’s obviously insane.
This is the problem with academics, experts, and NGOs. They all wanted a headline. They wanted an outcome. They made sure they got it. These experts placed inputs into their model that were simply not supported by any reasonable data or evidence, because they wanted the model to show that the COVID vaccines saved an enormous number of lives, hospitalizations, deaths, as well as money. That’s what they got. And they discredited themselves in the process.
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Oh, and speaking of money, the entire outlay of the U.S. government in 2021 was $6.82 trillion and $6.27 billion in 2022. They thought that the vaccines saved $1.15 trillion in healthcare spending alone in that timeframe.
This has to be one of the worst models ever created.
Of course it came from highly credentialed health experts and a powerful NGO.
Of course it did.
