Questions we need answers to

How did the vaccines save 20,000,000 lives?

People from one school of thought believe there is a problem with this particular generation of vaccines. Dr Aseem Malhotra published his findings on these products in a peer-reviewed journal, as did Peter Doshi, Dr Peter McCulough, Dr Ryan Cole, Vinay Prasad and many others. Rarely does the actual data get debated, instead, smears arrive that call these researchers’ character into question.

Can we avoid that, please?

Instead, let’s stick to the data and see if together we can work out what is going on. I request assistance in answering this question:

If the vaccines have saved 20,000,000 lives “in their first year”, why did we see no reduction in death in the 6-month-long Pfizer trial?

1. The Economist cited this 20,000,000 lives figure

2. The New England Journal of Medicine cited it

3. The Guardian cited it

4. Sky News cited it

5. I then stopped looking, since this fact is everywhere.

Is it true? It’s usually used to sure up the risk/benefit ratio of the vaccines, so its accuracy is paramount. I don’t believe the figure is anywhere close to accurate, and I’ll explain why. I’m open to being wrong, can you show me how such a figure can be arrived at? Please read the case below.

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We had a trial which was investigating the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine before it came to market. It was a decent-sized trial with 43,847 participants. As you can see from Table S4 below, after six months of follow-up, there were 15 deaths in the vaccine group and 14 deaths in the placebo group. At best, this is zero reduction in deaths, and at worst, we’re expecting an extra death for every 21,926 people we vaccinate.

There’s no evidence that the product reduced deaths across a six-month period, and this was a trial specifically looking at “higher risk” people. So if no benefit was seen in a large reflective sample across 6 months, how can we credibly estimate something very different happening in the real world?

Let’s focus on another number I believe to be inflated because we can use it to demonstrate the principle of why I believe these large ‘lives saved’ numbers are wrong.

The UK Government published an estimate that the vaccine had saved the lives of 105,900 people between December 2020 and August 2021. But how can this be? By that moment in time, there were 38.4 million people fully vaccinated in the UK and around eight months of time had transpired since the start of the vaccination program. We have trial data indicating zero benefits in reducing death. In fact, it shows us to expect one more death per 21,926 people over a six-month period.

Imagine a group of 21,926 ‘typical’ double vaccinated people in the UK. We can say, ok, how many times can that sample of “21,926” people fit into the real number of double vaccinated in the UK at that time? This is one reasonable way to estimate the reduction in deaths we expect. Our sample would fit into those 38.4 million people 1,753 times, therefore we might expect the vaccine to have been associated with an additional 1,753 deaths. More generously, we expect to see zero reduction in deaths.

So how do we go from data showing no benefit whatsoever, or possibly even an association with increased deaths, to a “saved hundreds of thousands” kind of estimate?

The UK government wants us to believe the vaccines saved the lives of 105,900 people between December 2020 and August 2021, but if that’s the case, we should have seen this life-saving effect in the Pfizer trial. We didn’t. There’s absolutely nothing in the trial data that indicated the vaccine could save lives at anything even close to that rate. So why can a modelled estimate supersede and exaggerate the real-world data we have from the trial’s impressive sample?

In fact, we can even go one further here. Let’s get more detailed on this. If you look at the MHRA reports from August 2021, they tell us exactly how many people were double vaccinated with Pfizer at that time. There were 16.6 million people double vaccinated with Pfizer in August 2021. What happens if we divide our sample into that number? It suggests we’d expect to see 747 additional deaths associated with the Pfizer product.

Examining the Yellow Card data until that moment, what did the MHRA find? “The MHRA has received 508 UK reports of suspected [fatal] ADRs to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in which the patient died shortly after vaccination” That’s a direct quote from the MHRA themselves.

See how close that is? We’re expecting to see 747 deaths, and we have reports of 508 deaths ‘shortly after vaccination’ with that exact product. Why these large reports of deaths were never considered cause for alarm is a troubling reality. These were novel products which had never been used before at this scale, and our regulator had 508 deaths associated with the product “shortly after vaccination”. Doesn’t that seem like something worthy of investigating? Autopsies perhaps? Alas, I digress.

Let’s return to the UK government’s ‘estimate’ of 105,900 lives saved in eight months. To see a reduction in death of 105,900 people out of 38.4 million, we should have seen that reflected in the Pfizer trial data over six months. We should have seen a much larger reduction in deaths in the vaccine wing of the study of 43,847 people. We saw zero. And arguably, we saw one more death.

I’m assuming that all the vaccinations here were Pfizer, but I’m using the number to indicate the principle of why the estimate is wrong.

So, if the vaccines have saved 20,000,000 lives “in their first year”, why did we see no reduction in death in a 6 months period in the Pfizer trial? I’ll add to that, if the Pfizer trial was indicative of the performance of the product, how many fewer deaths should it have shown over 6 months to accommodate the claimed 20,000,000 lives saved over 1 year? Or even the UK government’s claim of 105,600 saved lives in eight months?