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Ron Jon held a covid summit [1]

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Date: 2022-12-15

I got a newsletter forwarded to me from my very conservative brother-in-law. Actually he sent it to my wife; I think by now he knows better than to send it to me. Anyhow, it seems that there was a recent summit, of sorts, and that they tried to show — these are from the headlines of the report —

Vaccinated Have 26% Higher Mortality Rate

From UK Government Data Presented to U.S. Senator Ron Johnson

and it had charts breathlessly showing that people who took vaccines were dying at higher rates than the unvaccinated. All of the right’s favorite COVID doctors — Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Ryan Cole — were there. (Fun fact — they all have wikipedia pages labeling them as super-spreaders of covid misinformation). So just in case any of you Kossacks out there get hit with this same report by your relatives, I thought I would share my own research with you.

Well, one of the big problems was that they never actually identified the report. A “UK study”. The chart did have a tag that said “May 2022”, a clue. The graph axes were labelled as “Deaths per 100k person years”. And with the magic of google I was able to track down this paper, which is a report from the UK Office of National Statistics (what we Americans would call a Census Bureau), concerning deaths in the UK between January 2020 and May 2022 (!). And it has datasets you can download, with person-years labels. I am reasonably sure it is the original study.

So I downloaded it. And, I am shocked to tell you, it did not seem to say what the nice man in Ron Johnson’s summit said it said. Well, maybe it did, sort of. I will concede that the evidence plainly shows that the death rate was higher for vaccinated subjects than it was for unvaccinated. I do feel compelled to point out the fact that the average age of the vaccinated people in the study was 55, while the average age for the unvaccinated was 35, just in case that makes any difference.

The summitteers apparently reached their conclusion by using by dividing total deaths by “person years”. Person-years is a concept kind of like “man (person) hours”, combining a number of people with a concept of time. In many studies it can be quite important to know whether a person has been involved in some activity for six months or six years, but in this one I just don’t get why the original authors used it at all. I am reasonably certain — although I cannot find an unequivocal definition — that the person years in this case is the age of each individual, summed up.

This is such a wrong number to use in the denominator that I don’t even know where to begin. It would be like basing your car’s gas mileage on how far you went on each car trip. It allows the authors to treat 1 death in 100 10-year-olds (which is 1000 person years) as having equal mortality to 1 death in 10 100-year-olds (also 1000 person years). I think it is a way to minimize the very real age-related differences in the data, while telling the gullible that they are in fact taking age into account. This isn’t massaging the data — this is the full on Ramsay Bolton treatment of data.

However, if you work with narrow age bands, then the person-years concept becomes essentially equivalent to “number of people”, and comparisons can make sense. And table 6, in that downloaded data, very helpfully has the data broken down into 5-year age groups, from 10-14 on up to 90+. Summed up, the value of the vaccine could not be clearer:

Age % Vaccinated Deaths per 100k Vaccinated Deaths per 100k UnVaccinated Deaths per 100k Ratio Unvax/vax 10-14 15% 7 8 6 0.75 15-19 42% 15 16 15 0.94 20-24 56% 23 21 25 1.19 25-29 57% 33 29 38 1.31 30-34 60% 48 44 54 1.23 35-39 64% 70 62 84 1.35 40-44 70% 108 98 132 1.35 45-49 74% 182 158 252 1.59 50-54 80% 288 246 458 1.86 55-59 82% 446 390 704 1.81 60-64 85% 724 633 1221 1.93 65-69 88% 1176 1034 2177 2.11 70-74 91% 1889 1691 3808 2.25 75-79 93% 3229 2917 7460 2.56 80-84 95% 5919 5364 16366 3.05 85-89 95% 10665 9725 27700 2.85 90+ 94% 22517 20881 46661 2.23

For those under age 20, the vaccinated do have higher mortality than their unvaccinated brethren — which is almost certainly explained by vaccines in that group being given to those in much worse health than average. After age 20, the unvaccinated always had higher death rates, reaching double the vaccinated rate by age 65 and triple the rate by the mid-80s.

Also — you can tell by this chart that the average death rate for a 55 year old was about 350 per 100k, while for 35 year olds it was about 60, about a sixfold difference. A vaccinated 55 year old is around 310, while an unvaccinated 35 year old was around 70; still a fourfold difference. And they only claimed a 26% increase in mortality? Pikers.

Also note how vaccine rates, and death rates, rise steadily with age.

Bottom line — COVID vaccines save lives. The data presented at an anti-vaccine summit clearly shows it — even if the participants were too stupid, mendacious, or both to recognize it.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/15/2142170/-Ron-Jon-held-a-covid-summit

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