What does saving lives actually mean?
I’ve been obsessed with finding the all cause mortality data in pharmaceutical studies as an easy “aha! got ya, bitch” when it comes to sniffing out bullshit claims in medicine. This served me well in the past, as well as more recently when the Pfizer COVID vax data came out showing the all cause mortality over the, albeit brief, study period was essentially the same. I interpreted this as either COVID is so mild for the study demographic (mostly middle aged and relatively healthy) that the number needed to treat would be astronomical if any mortality benefit existed, or the vax was roughly equally harmful as beneficial, or some combination of both.
But then I read Dr. Malcom Kendrick’s Doctoring Data and realized that even all cause mortality is not the magical calculation I thought it to be. Kendrick’s point is that:
lives cannot be saved, only death can be delayed.
Makes sense! If you’re Jimmy Fucking Neutron and save the world from the ice age that you caused, you didn’t net jack shit. If you saved every nursing home resident from COVID but they all died the next day, you didn’t save millions of lives, you evaded death for an average of one day for each person who was treated.
Fundamentally, every patient taking a “life saving drug” wants to know deep down inside if the medication will keep them from dying prematurely. (Who gives a fuck about quality of life! We are talking epidemiology, people! Numbers! Get with the program.)
I would say a great example of a death delaying treatment (not quite the same marketing appeal) would be HiB vaccine. Prior to campaign in the 1980s, roughly 12,000 annual cases of HiB bacterial meningitis in the US occurred in babies and children with a mortality rate of 5%. That case load quickly jumped down to a few hundred after the HiB Vax, preventing the deaths of hundreds of babies who potentially went on to live long normal lives. That’s a lot of days of delayed death. We allowed thousands of soon-to-be-dead cute babies to die much later as ugly annoying adults! Huzzah! Take that death!
Now for my personal take on things…
During the first semester of medical school (sometime around September 2021), one of our pathology PhDs asked the class “roughly how many people worldwide have died from COVID?” No one knew.
Well I knew, but like Pavlov’s dog, I was trained to go into V Tach and shut the fuck up whenever COVID was mentioned in a professional setting.
The answer was roughly 5 million. Apparently CNN had stopped the doomsday counter after the election since even the most vocal classmates didn’t jump at the opportunity to correctly answer the softball question publicly.
One of the most appealing arguments for the success of vaccines has always been, look at the infectious disease burden pre-vax and look at it now. However, this argument is full of correlational mysteries like the vanishing of measles mortality (along with many others likely due to sanitation and basic nutritional needs) but not morbidity (still lots of infections), prior to the measles vaccine. But one thing that is hard to argue with: lots of people died of smallpox and now nobody dies of smallpox. Polio was a thing and now it’s not for the West. Although the correlation must be investigated to support causality, that correlation dick slaps you in the mouth. Dead people V. no more dead people! No more iron lungs! No more crippled presidents! (well maybe not that last one)…
Along comes the “live saving COVID vaccines” primary rollout Dec 2020 - April 2021
Now take a gander at the worldwide COVID deaths pre vax and post vax. And before the cerebral artery that supplies your cortical center for advanced statistics has an aneurysm, understand I know this will be a comparison of apples and oranges. But if the claim that the vaccine has saved millions of lives is true, we should expect the last 6 months of 2020 and the last 6 months of 2021 to be drastically different.
That is unless the wishes of the pro-lockdown folks came true and all those who were anti-lockdown got slaughtered by the virus in 2020. THEN the wishes of the vaccinated came true and the virus preferentially slaughtered the unvaccinated minority (who happened to be devastated already by the anti-lockdown seeking nature of the original strain) after the primary vaccine rollout during the first half of 2021. This would mean the vaccine and virus worked together to take out the most morally disgusting of society. Yay for us!
Holding off on that possible scenario described above, the moral of the story is that the only large randomized trials showed no statistical COVID mortality or all cause mortality for the couple months they were conducted. Surprise surprise, the same medical treatment did not put a dent in the trajectory of the disease if you compare July-December of 2020 to the same period in 2021.
1,383,051 v. 1,478,047 respectively. Ya it went up.
And as many are aware, the all cause mortality looks even worse. People can claim that there were so many factors differentiating the second half of 2020 from the second half of 2021. For starters, I was a lowly EMT making minimum wage and then I was a first year medical student. Who knows how many times over I would have died if I were still on the ambulance during the second half of 2021. At least 10 according to the models.
The claim of saving lives (the euphemism for postponing death) at a very minimum should show an all cause mortality benefit in the RCT (and ideally maintains randomization for a long period) or at least show some sort of deflection in the epidemiological burden of that specific disease.
Final thoughts…
Best case scenario billions of people were given a treatment that did almost nothing for long term survivability from COVID, but hopefully didn’t kill too many people along the way….
You gotta find Jesus or Allah or Buddha if you want to experience anything life-saving. (Be careful praying to the COVID modelers of today as they might become the over-population modelers of tomorrow)
This is the ranting of a pissed off medical student and should not be taken as the gospel. Once again that’s the big guy upstairs’ job
Did The COVID Vax Save Millions of Lives?
I would recommend the books Dissolving Illusions by Suzanne Humphries as well as Turtles All the Way Down (authors are anonymous) to get a broader view of the historical statistics regarding vaccination.
As an RN of 23 years, both books were revelatory to say the least.
Very well put, by coincidence I was looking at “before and after” for a number of successful vaccines this week. The difference is very stark.
You summed it up perfectly:
“Best case scenario billions of people were given a treatment that did almost nothing for long term survivability from COVID, but hopefully didn’t kill too many people along the way….”
I began to suspect this to be the case about August 2021 here in Australia and was pretty sure in about September 2021. I actually predicted the “game changer” Omicron at about the same time. I didn’t know it would be a new variant, I just knew they needed some excuse. It certainly wasn’t working “as advertised.”
I wrote this in February 2022 to explain to my friends what I was talking about for the last 6 months. Figure 1 is real data from surveillance reports. Figure 2 is modeling a placebo with the same vaccination rate as the Australian roll-out.
https://krap.substack.com/p/vaccine-rollout-how-the-covid-meal?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Took me a while to accept there could actually be a quantifiable risk. I’d just put it down to “Dolts botching shit” and didn’t ascribe any malice to it.