Did the Covid-19 vaccines save many lives?
Claim There is no evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines saved a single life. Full Fact – False Full Fact say: Research by the UKHSA and Cambridge University suggests that the Covid-19 …
Claim
There is no evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines saved a single life.
Full Fact – False
Full Fact say:
Research by the UKHSA and Cambridge University suggests that the Covid-19 vaccines saved more than 100,000 lives in England alone.
https://fullfact.org/health/covid-vaccines-saved-many-lives/
Our Rating – True
Justification
There is no evidence that Covid-19 vaccines saved lives, only estimates and modelling suggesting so. The safe and effective vaccines appear from personal observation not to be. Can I prove this? No, but the reverse case is also not provable and is certainly not fact, with testimony and statistical numbers going the wrong way around the world in 2023. As an unvaccinated individual I can attest to the unnecessary mandating of Covid-19 vaccines, because I am still alive and this result is an embarrassment to the establishment.
Let’s start at at the conclusion of the Full Fact fact check:
Research by the UKHSA and Cambridge University suggests that the Covid-19 vaccines saved more than 100,000 lives in England alone.
Breaking this down, we can see that it is research, rather than empirical evidence that is being used to prove the other position as negative.
Secondly Cambridge University “suggests” that the vaccine saved lives, that is also not empirical evidence. Yet Full Fact use this “hearsay” put out by the UK government to “prove” their case. I say their case is no better than the facebook posts.
Full fact go on to write:
Although it is hard to know what would have happened in an alternative world where a specific person wasn’t vaccinated, it is possible to show that the vaccines provided a high level of protection against death from Covid-19—because the risk was so much lower in vaccinated people.
Breaking this statement down, we can see that Full Fact acknowledge it is hard to know what would have happened in an alternative world. They are of course correct at the level of the world, but we do know by country what the Covid-19 vaccination rates were and how many deaths they had.
They jump around in this statement with regard to the topic of the point being made too. An alternative world is one thing, with billions of people on it. However their argument switches to one, just one, individual straight after. I could be that one alternative individual they talk about! Is that enough proof?
Certainly every individual case at the beginning of the pandemic seemed to be used as propaganda to scare the masses, and the establishment went that route repeatedly, extrapolating from a single case to us all!
Coronavirus: first UK death confirmed as cases surge to 116
Now at the back end of the pandemic every “one death” from a vaccine perhaps as shown in the Yellow Card reporting system, is dismissed as coincidence
how can researchers distinguish between a true side effect and an adverse event that occurred due to coincidence and/or bad luck?
The last part of the Full Fact statement above uses the term “risk” as a justification for the vaccines being effective. Now i’ve been trained in risk analysis and have risk assessed many situations without any of those risks coming to be, due to the contingency measures I put in place. I know risk is a vague estimate itself, and is again not empirical evidence, rather it is a subjective view of a risk assessor and depends on whether that risk assessor is any good.
For the record, the definition of risk from the Cambridge Dictionary is:
risk
nounUK /rɪsk/ US /rɪsk/
the possibility of something bad happening
This statement ends with the risk being so much lower in vaccinated people. Where is the evidence for this? “so much lower” is just opinion and perhaps a political one at that.
The article then moves on to state:
Overall, the vaccines have therefore saved vastly more lives than they have cost.
I don’t think that Full Fact can make this statement based on their assessment of what appears to be guesswork. The figures have been presented by the UK government, and represent an appeal to authority. An authority who are known to have lied about the cabinet’s own conduct during the pandemic and fines were given to a number of them for breaking their own lockdown rules.
So the government are hardly in a position of taking the moral high ground, nor are they an infallible authority to cite.
We are also not at the end of the debacle yet, so to weigh up the two positions now seems foolish. There may be many more that die post 2023 because of the pandemic actions taken in prior years. Oh look, I can speculate too!
What follows is a look at what else is presented in the fact check above and a critique of it.
The fact check provides two links to the same government document but to different chapters. This is the COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report – week 5 and can be found here:
This is from 22 February 2022 and these documents ran for many months past this one, and are still being created in 2023, so I don’t know why the latest/last report was not referenced, but anyway the first link is to page 12 for “Effectiveness against mortality”
This link indicates that a VE value for Vaccine Effectiveness is being cited and this is given by the UK government as 95%, two weeks after a third dose of the Covid-19 Vaccine (brand not stated)
VE is a calculated value and is itself an estimate, so again it is not empirical evidence and there are multiple ways of calculating it. Using the WHO document “Evaluation of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness” which is found here:
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-2019-nCoV-vaccine_effectiveness-measurement-2021.1
It can be seen in section 9.3.6 Final analyses of VE of this document that final “VE” referred to by the UK government is calculated from ratios and modelling is also used to provide a calculated estimate, and not a measured value.
The second link is to page 55 of the government document and covers “Summary of impact on hospitalisations, infections
and mortality”. It is being used to prove that a number of deaths were prevented by vaccination.
“Cambridge Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit suggests that roughly 127,500 deaths were prevented by the Covid vaccination “
However as you can read above, this again is a suggestion and in the document it states:
“Estimates suggest that 127,500 deaths and 24,144,000 infections have been prevented”
So again we are in the world of guesswork, and no empirical evidence has been presented, only probabilities seem to be on the table. Thus this may be prestigious guesswork, but guesswork none the less.
The document suggests that the numbers of deaths in a world where no vaccinations were given cannot be calculated due to the the divergence of the two realities, and the distance one has moved from the other. This is of course vary convenient for the government, isn’t it.
What evidence is there that other populations faired better than highly vaccinated countries?
So staying on familiar territory, the BBC put out an article comparing countries of the world when it came to deaths vs vaccinations:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51235105
Now this is just speculation based on the BBC’s numbers, but I don’t think this is any worse than what Full Fact do, so:
The UK with a population of 67,886,011 as of 2020 had to the date of the article, 177,890 deaths from coronavirus (don’t get me started on how this was measured, that is for another article) and they had 149,397,250 individuals who received some number of Covid vaccinations.
Nigeria, the most populated country in Africa with 206,139,589 individuals, had 3,144 deaths from coronavirus and had 50,619,238 people with some number of coronavirus vaccinations.
So we have a UK death rate of 266.2 vs a Nigeria death rate of 1.6. Now I know these are estimated numbers and the two countries and peoples are very different, but the numbers are scarily different, more different than should be expected for a “human” response to Covid-19 and to the Covid-19 vaccination. There is a correlation that can be made between the numbers of people vaccinated and the number of deaths post vaccination roll out. I’ll leave you to make your own mind up and to go and compare other countries yourself.
What evidence is there that people were harmed by the safe and effective vaccines!
If the vaccine had been effective, then it would have worked with the first shot, it has been accepted by the CEO of Pfizer that it was not as effective as promised. You can compare the effectiveness from these two articles, one from february 2021:
“Pfizer vaccine ‘highly effective’ in reducing coronavirus
transmission, study suggests”
and this viral video statement by the Director of Pfizer, from January 2022:
“Two doses of the vaccine offers very limited protection, if any,”
It can be seen by the very fact that multiple doses plus boosters have been administered to people and they still are not protected from catching, spreading, or getting ill from coronavirus, that the vaccines do not work as they were advertised.
So with the effectiveness covered, what about safety?
If the vaccine was safe, I believe that post vaccination the excess deaths from causes other than coronavirus would not be at the levels they have been over the last couple of years in the UK. The overall numbers should be coming down, and they are not. 5 year trends show that this explosion of excess deaths only started after vaccinations were rolled out for Covid-19.
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
In a recent article the Telegraph reports:
Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths gripping Britain is only tip of
the iceberg
The BBC writes:
Excess deaths in 2022 among worst in 50 years
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64209221
These deaths are of the “unexpected” and “died suddenly” kind that only started appearing after the administration of multiple doses of the Coronavirus vaccines. Again this is only correlation, and you can make your own mind up as to causation.
Lastly I wanted to mention the veiled accusation in the Full Fact article that the use of the the term shot is not correctly referring to the Covid-19 vaccination. This is used to sow doubt in the mind of the reader that people on facebook are talking about something else. Well let’s look at the history of facebook. People were quickly silenced and then banned for using the correct terms, this was seen by facebook as mis/disinformation. So people got creative and started using alternative terms which they hoped others would understand to be the same thing, e.g. shot, jab, stabby, clot shot, gene therapy, etc. The media too seemed to distance themselves from the term vaccination and used similar terms, so to suggest that these words, used to avoid censorship, mean something else is subterfuge.
For example the Daily Mail reported:
Two prominent Oxford University researchers — renowned in the field of evidence-based medicine — branded one of the systems used to collate adverse side effects from the jabs as being a ‘mess’.
Conclusion
The truth of any matter can be found from the available evidence. It can be understood and learned from, and it can be passed on to others. However it will likely never be confirmed or agreed by the vast majority of people who have alternative truths they wish to believe and share.
One must learn to know the signs of truth without it being told, in fact one will likely be forcefully told the opposite case is true so be careful!