Did vaccines save 3 million lives? Very unlikely

A popular blog post has been making the rounds claiming that the vaccine saved an estimated 3 million lives. This would mean that you would have to find another 120 million more infections to identify those who were saved and most of these would be RE-infections.

It just doesn’t make any sense.

Rational Ground team dispels this nonsense assertion.

El Gato chimes in here.

it’s honestly both jarring and disheartening that even at this stage of the game the same shabby tricks keep getting trotted out to try to make the abject failures of covid vaccines appear to be victories.

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just by mathematical necessity, they are clearly assuming VE’s in the 85%+ range. it’s the only way to get to this kind of number given the 70% US vaxx rate (or even 90%+ in high risk) over such a short interval and when around half of US deaths occurred before vaxxes hit even 20% penetration.

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think about what this means.

let’s assume they are assuming 85% vaccine efficacy (they likely went higher, but this is for illustration). it’s a built in parameter. so if you take it out, deaths spike by 6.7X. this is programmed into the model. it’s not some law of nature. it’s just an assumption based n studies that have long since been invalidated.

the whole rest of the backfit takes this into account. all the assumptions about viral attenuation, population dynamics, resistance from prior infection, you name it. and if your 85% is too high, in there somewhere, you either missed a huge variable or you vastly underestimated one. if you didn’t, it wouldn’t backfit.

so, if it does backfit and your major parameter assumption is wrong, it means the whole rest of your model is garbage.

you have loaded this model to show you what you presumed when you run the “counter factual no vaccine case.” it’s pure GIGO and the minute you assumed “vaccines worked well” then “vaccines saved huge numbers of lives” will pop out.

but if this assumption is wrong (as it appears so clearly to have been in the israeli palestine natural experiment comparison where death rates in the two places were near indistinguishable both before and after vaccination despite wide divergence in vaxx rate) then you’ve just “proven” nothing at all apart from the fact that models express the assumptions of the modeler.

wanna bet this model cannot backfit both israel and palestine while using the same parameter assumptions?

because that would be an interesting test.

these guys literally read the pfizer marketing materials and presumed them true (despite the fact that they clearly never were). even 50% functional risk weighted efficacy early on was a stretch and that eroded rapidly as virus evolved to be vaxx advantaged and to infect the vaxxed at far higher rates.

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Our colleague Phil Kerpen lays it out:

The Commonwealth blog post claiming vax saved 3M+ US lives is pretty weird. How do you prevent 119 million infections with vaccines that have very little effect on infections? During a period where most of the population was infected anyway?

They try to dismiss their basic sanity check problem with this rather absurd claim: "Many of the prevented infections would have been reinfections, which have higher risk of death compared to initial infections."

But the link is to the Veterans Affairs Nature study of reinfection compared to single infection, and so by design can tell us nothing about whether reinfections carry a higher risk of death than initial infections.

nature.com

And that reinfection study they lean on to justify a model that claims 119 million averted infections finds no vaccine effect at all. If anything, negative efficacy for death and hospitalization upon reinfection.

This has been tried before and apparently the numbers keep going UP!

Bret Swanson disabused us of this nonsense a month ago:

The One Million Lives Saved Claim

The “1.087 million saved” claim implies that without vaccines, 1.562 million Americans would have died from Covid-19 in 2021. This would have required a shocking acceleration of Covid-19 deaths – nearly 4.5 times the number who died in 2020. In a world where many of our most vulnerable citizens had succumbed to Covid-19 in 2020, where presumably we were getting better at treating the disease, they assert four-and-a-half times more people were going to die in 2021. Does that seem plausible?

Implausible Acceleration

Using the conservative 1.087-million-saved-in-2021 figure, consider what 1.562 million total U.S. Covid-19 deaths implies:

• That’s 4,279 Covid-19 deaths every day for the entire year.

• Back in the real world, no single day ever reached that level.

• Only seven days ever topped 4,000 deaths in the U.S.

• All seven of these days occurred after the vaccine rollout began. (January 8, 12, 20, 27, and December 22, 2021; January 28 and February 4, 2022.)

• Zero days pre-vaccine topped 4,000 deaths.

• The model’s counterfactual peak during August-October 2021 generates unprecedented daily death rates over many weeks, more than double the very highest seen anywhere in the world – even for a day or two, let alone a multi-week period – from the beginning of the pandemic.

• During this peak, the model generates daily death rates for several weeks four to six times higher than anything seen in the U.S. throughout the pandemic.

• Total all-cause U.S. deaths for 2021 were 3,457,517. The 1.087 million claim implies, without Covid vaccines, the U.S. would have suffered 31% more total deaths from any cause, on top of the worst year ever.