The Real Risks of the COVID Vaccines

 Anyone following social media could be excused for thinking that the vaccines against COVID-19 are not just ineffective but extremely dangerous. Here are a few of the categorical assertions from a recent post on a nominally progressive news site:

"The COVID vaccines are the most dangerous vaccines in human history. They are 800 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine, which was the previous record holder. The vaccines have killed over 150,000 Americans and permanently disabled even more. They don't make sense for anyone of any age. The younger you are, the worse it gets. For kids, it is estimated that we kill 117 kids for every COVID death we prevent...”

Credit: Marco Vetch

"So we are 'saving' fewer than 10,000 lives at the expense of over 150,000 (vaccine) deaths. In short, we kill 15 people to save 1. That's incredibly stupid."

“The eminent Dr. Peter McCollough has emphasized: "You are about five times as likely to die of the vaccine than you are to take your risks with COVID-19.”

“A recent medical research article said: "A novel best-case scenario cost-benefit analysis showed very conservatively that there are five times the number of deaths attributable to each inoculation vs those attributable to COVID-19 in the most vulnerable 65+ demographic."

We can now test such frequently repeated claims against actual data:

Currently 454 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered in the US, and 195 million US residents have received two or more of the shots. Logically, if the vaccines were as dangerous as vaccine critics want us to believe, taking 5, 15, or, for children 117 lives for every life saved, those hundreds of thousands of deaths should be showing up somewhere. To put it crudely—show us the bodies.

Here's some striking new research that tells us that those bodies are never going to be found because they simply don't exist.

We already know that COVID-related deaths are consistently far lower among vaccinated compared to unvaccinated people. So the deaths supposedly caused by the vaccines must show up among deaths that are not COVID-related. Unfortunately for vaccine critics (but fortunately for everyone else), a large new study shows that the death rate from all causes other than COVID-19 is significantly lower among vaccinated compared to unvaccinated Americans.

If the hundreds of thousands of deaths from the COVID vaccinations don't show up as COVID-related, or as non-COVID-related, they don't exist. Period. The bodies will never be found because they were never there.

The new research appears in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) of October 29, 2021. It's open access, so you can read the entire article here. (I know from experience that true-blue COVID vaccine critics pre-emptively discount all information from the CDC, JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine and other "mainstream" sources. So they will doubtlessly discount this study too.)

Researchers at 9 large healthcare organizations across the US extracted anonymized data from the medical records of 6.4 million vaccinated people and 4.6 million unvaccinated people 12 years old or older. The data included vaccination dates, the kind of vaccine received, and subsequent health outcomes, including any deaths. In order to control for generalized vaccine or healthcare avoidance, the group who did not receive COVID vaccination was selected from people who had chosen to get flu vaccinations within the last two years.

 The researchers calculated and compared deaths per 100 person-years at risk between December, 2020 and July, 2021.

The results were striking:

After one dose of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, vaccinated people's risk of dying from all causes other than COVID-19 was just 41 percent of the risk of unvaccinated people.

After two Pfizer doses, that relative risk went down to 34 percent.

After one dose of the Moderna mRNA vaccine, the non-COVID death risk was 34 percent.

After two doses of the Moderna vaccine, that relative risk went down to 31 percent.

After a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson adenovirus-vector vaccine, the risk of death from all causes other the COVID-19 was 54 percent compared to unvaccinated people.

With the exception of children age 12 -17, for whom the risk of death was equally low regardless of vaccination status, these findings held for all age groups, for men and women, and for all racial and ethnic groups.

The study's understated, but extremely clear conclusion:

“There is no increased risk for mortality among COVID-19 vaccine recipients.”

To restate the implication of these findings from the actual medical histories of 11 million people across the US:

There have not been 363,000 deaths (expected if the vaccines were in fact “800 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine.”)

There have not been “over 150,000 Americans” killed by the COVID vaccines.

The vaccines are not killing 15 people to save 1.

You are not “5 times more likely to die of the vaccine than … your risks with COVID-19.”

There have not been 5 times the number of deaths from each inoculation compared to COVID among people 65 and older.

It's actually just the opposite. Not only do the COVID vaccines prevent deaths from or related to COVID, they are strongly associated with reduced deaths not related to COVID.

The researchers raise the intriguing question of just how the COVID vaccines lead to these additional lives saved. They suggest three plausible factors—it's possible that people who have chosen to get vaccinated have healthier lifestyles, they may be healthier in general, and perhaps there were some deaths from COVID in the unvaccinated cohort that were attributed to other causes. Further research is needed and is being planned.

Whatever the reasons for the strikingly reduced rates of non-COVID-related death among these 11 million Americans, the fact remains that the vaccines emphatically do not put us at risk, or “only” reduce COVID-related deaths, they actually reduce our risk of dying from causes other than COVID.

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A slightly different version of this article appeared on OpEdNews on 12/1/21.

There is no increased risk for mortality among COVID-19 vaccine recipients.

Let's start with the claim that the COVID vaccines are “800 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine.” According to the National Library of Medicine, the death rate from smallpox vaccination was one death per million vaccinations. If it's true that the COVID vaccines are 800 times more deadly, then the 454 million COVID shots must have killed 800 x 454 = 363,200 Americans. That's about 45 percent of the 800,000 CoVID-related deaths that have dominated headlines, filled and sometimes overwhelmed hospitals and intensive care units, and orphaned 150,000 to 200,000 children.

If the vaccine critics want to be taken seriously—show us the bodies.

Another claim in the same paragraph: “It is estimated that we kill 117 kids for every COVID death we prevent.”

[TK—go directly to new data about deaths, put the discussion of VAERS, etc. below]

When pressed, the vaccine critics start by citing VAERS, the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. VAERS has received over 10,000 reports of deaths following COVID vaccinations. VAERS emphasizes that:

“FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS, even if it’s unclear whether the vaccine was the cause. Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.”

Despite that unambiguous warning, vaccine critics typically take the number of deaths reported to VAERS as definitely caused by the COVID vaccines, and then multiply that number by a large factor—up to 100--based on assumed under-reporting.

There are many reasons why the VAERS data can't be taken literally, but a basic one is the background rate of deaths that would be expected in the weeks following the 450,000,000 vaccinations Americans have received—or 450,000,000 events of any kind.

You can check the math at the end of this post, but the fact is that if you picked 450,000,000 random weeks in the lives of Americans, you would register more than 75,000 deaths. In other words, it's basically impossible to know if any of the deaths reported to VAERS following COVID vaccinations are caused by the shots, related to the shots, or just part of the much larger number of deaths that occur among hundreds of millions of people any given week. Clearly, multiplying a meaningless number by 15, 50 or 100 doesn't make it any more meaningful.

Vaccine critics perform another trick to minimize the effectiveness of the vaccines. They cite a CDC report that just 6 percent of COVID-related deaths are in people with no known risk factors (such as obesity) or co-morbidities (such as diabetes). They then assume that the remaining 94 percent of COVID-related deaths must actually be from something other than COVID. This trick reduces the number of COVID deaths by 94 percent, so currently from 770,000 down to 46,200.

So, with a little hand waving and a few abracadabras, the vaccine critics manage to “find” 150,000 or more deaths from the vaccines compared to only 46,000 deaths from COVID itself. Clearly we should be far more scared of the vaccines than by COVID, right?

Luckily, we have some new and much more reliable data about the alleged dangers of the COVID vaccines.

How many Americans can be expected to die in the week following a COVID-19 shot (or in the week following any given event)?

About 2,855,000 Americans die every year. That's 870 per 100,000 person-years or 16.7 per 100,000 person-weeks.

Let's suppose that vaccine administrators report any deaths that occur within one week following a COVID shot. That means that any deaths among 454,000,000 people for one week, or 450,000,000 person-weeks would potentially be reported. But we would expect 16.7 natural deaths per 100,000 person-weeks, or 167 deaths per million person-weeks, so 167 x 454 = 75,818 natural, but potentially reportable deaths.

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The world is closer than ever to eradicating polio forever

 As Zerospinzone readers know, the eradication of polio has been the target of a massive international effort started in 1988 and led by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children's Fund and the Rotary Foundation. The effort has been incredibly successful and in fact has pushed the deadly polio virus to the brink of extinction. So far this year there have only been 4 cases of poliomyelitis caused by the wild polio virus. As far as we know, the wild virus hangs by a thread in just two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Administering the oral polio vaccine

Credit: Michael Tsegaye, Flickr

However, the final eradication of the disease has been complicated by the fact that the weakened polio viruses used in the Oral Polio Vaccine occasionally mutate to a virulent, disease causing form. This kind of mutation is very rare, but with hundreds of millions of doses administered, in recent years there have been more cases of poliomyelitis caused by the mutated vaccine, especially the type 2 vaccine, than caused by the wild virus itself. (The polio virus comes in 3 varieties, each of which has its own vaccine. The type 1 and type 3 viruses appear to have been eradicated, and recent vaccine-derived cases have all come from the type 2 vaccine.

The good news is that researchers have developed a new type 2 oral vaccine--nOPV2--that is genetically much more stable than the earlier version, and so much less likely to mutate to a disease-causing form. The new vaccine successfully snuffed out a recent outbreak of vaccine-derived illness in Tajikistan without leading to any new cases. This successful use of the novel type 2 vaccine provides hope that the few countries where either wild polio virus or disease-causing forms of the older type 2 vaccine still exist can soon join the rest of the world and be certified as completely free of polio.

Then--hopefully very soon--polio will join smallpox as once dread and deadly human diseases that have been permanently wiped from the face of the earth. 

Who shouldn't get vaccinated? The informed part of informed consent.

 Ten months after the vaccines became available, we now have meaningful data that can guide people deciding if they should or shouldn't get themselves or their children vaccinated against covid.

The best available data about the actual risks of the mRNA vaccines--specifically the Pfizer/BioNTech shots--come from a joint Israeli-Harvard Medical School study evaluating the medical records of more than 1.6 million people, half of whom received two Pfizer jabs while half remained unvaccinated. I reported on this study here, and you can find the peer-reviewed paper itself, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, here.

Of course. But what are the actual risks and benefits?

Credit: Nick Youngson

The study found that just five side-effects occurred more frequently in the vaccinated groups in the six weeks following vaccination relative to a comparable time period for the unvaccinated group. These included swollen lymph nodes (78.4 additional cases per 100,000 people), shingles (15.8 extra cases per 100,000), appendicitis (5 additional cases per 100,000), Bell's palsy (3.5 additional cases per 100,000) and myocarditis (2.7 additional cases per 100,000, almost all in young men).

If we add all those side-effects together we find an incidence of 105.4 per 100,000 fully vaccinated people.

It's worth noting that those symptoms vary in seriousness. The most frequent--swollen lymph nodes--is a predictable, rarely serious, reaction to vaccination, while the remaining four potentially more serious conditions represent a total of just 27 additional cases per 100,000 vaccinated people.

To keep things simple and clear, you can safely estimate that if you get two rounds of the Pfizer vaccine, your risk of suffering any reaction worse than a sore arm is around 1 in 1000, and your risk of a serious side-effect such as shingles or appendicitis is around 1 out of 3700.

We can compare these risks to the risks from covid itself in a variety of ways. Here are several that readers may find helpful:

Risks from covid in the Israeli-Harvard study: Among the 800,000 participants who remained unvaccinated, a significant number contracted covid. As is typical of covid, not all of those developed serious symptoms. However, far more did experience significant symptoms and sequelae from covid than were seen in their vaccinated peers. These included cardiac arrythmia (166 extra cases per 100,000), acute kidney injury (125.4 extra cases per 100,000), pulmonary embolism--a blood clot in the lung--(61.7 extra cases per 100,000), deep-vein thrombosis (43 extra cases per 100,000), myocardial infarction--a heart attack--(25 extra cases per 100,000), myocarditis (11 extra cases per 100,000), pericarditis (10.9 extra cases per 100,000) and intracranial bleeding (7.6 extra cases per 100,000).

So, in the same 6 week period, the unvaccinated group suffered serious, very serious or potentially fatal symptoms such as acute kidney injury, pulmonary blood clots or heart attacks at a combined rate of 443 per 100,000. That's more than four times the rate of all the vaccine side-effects combined, and 16 times the rate of the potentially serious vaccine side-effects.

Risk of contracting covid in the US as a whole. As of 10/18/21, there have been 45,798,599 recorded covid cases in the US. That's a case rate of 13,733 per 100,000 people, accumulated over 22 months. It's not possible to predict the exact course of the pandemic going forward, but for the average American the risk of contracting covid, say in the next 12 months, is probably 50 or 60 times higher than the risk of any side-effect from the vaccine, and several hundred times higher than the risk of any of the more serious side-effects.

As critics of covid vaccination point out, many covid cases are relatively mild. However, in the US over the course of the pandemic so far, about one out of every 20 people who contracted covid got sick enough to require hospitalization.

Risk of covid hospitalization in the US as a whole. As of 10/18/21, the cumulative covid hospitalization rate in the US reached 694 per 100,000. That implies that the average US resident is 6.6 times more likely to have been hospitalized because of covid than they would have been at risk for any negative reaction to the vaccine, and 26 times more likely to have been hospitalized from covid than to have risked a serious reaction to the vaccine.

Again, the first 22 months of the pandemic don't tell us what the next 22 months will bring, but the risk continues, especially among the unvaccinated.

Again, vaccination critics point out that "covid has a 99 percent survival rate." That's not quite true. In the US so far, 1.6 percent of recorded covid cases have resulted in recorded covid deaths. We can now compare that to the risks from vaccination.

Risk of death from covid in the US as a whole. As of 10/18/21 the cumulative rate of deaths from covid hit 224.5 per 100,000 people. That means that on average, a US resident is 2.1 times more likely to have died from covid since the start of the pandemic to date than to have risked any negative reaction to a vaccine, and 8.3 times more likely to have died as a result of covid than to have risked one of the serious reaction to the vaccine.

Risk of covid deaths state by state. As of 10/18/21, five states had cumulative covid death rates less than 105 deaths per 100,000 population. Those are Oregon (99), Utah (96), Hawaii (87), Alaska (59) and Vermont (55). For residents in those states, which comprise just three percent of the US population, the odds of having died from covid so far in the pandemic are somewhat less than the risk of having any negative reaction to the vaccine, but still two to three times higher than the risk of one of the serious vaccine side-effects. Even in those states, however, the risk of hospitalization from covid is significantly higher than any of the risks from the vaccine.

The remaining 97 percent of Americans live in states where the risks of contracting covid, becoming seriously ill, being hospitalized or dying from covid are greater than the risks of any negative sequelae from the vaccines.

Risk of covid deaths county by county. You can check your county's cumulative covid death rate on this map. If you're in one of the darker blue counties--most of which have very small populations--the cumulative death rate per 100,000 people is less than the risk of side-effects from the vaccine. Still, unless your county's cumulative death rate is less than 12 per 100,000, as it is in Orange County, Vermont (population 29,000) or Skamania County, Washington (population 11,066), your risk of hospitalization from covid is higher than any risk from the vaccine.

Risk of covid deaths from breakthrough infections: We now know that vaccine-induced immunity fades over time, and that the delta variant in particular is causing a significant number of fully vaccinated people to fall ill. However, the vaccines are still highly protective against severe illness and death. Perhaps the most striking statistic is that out of 187,000,000 fully vaccinated Americans, 7,178 have died from covid, or just 3.8 per 100,000. That's less than 6 percent of the 124,000 Americans who have died from covid since mid-July, when the delta variant became predominant.

In summary, for the large majority of Americans, the risks of getting covid, suffering one or more of the serious impacts of covid, having to be hospitalized because of covid, or dying from covid are all far higher than the risks of any side-effect of the mRNA vaccines, and, even against the delta variant, the vaccines remain highly protective against severe illness or death.

What about children?

There is one group, however, for whom this may not be true. As many critics of covid vaccination have pointed out, the risks from covid are significantly lower for young people. For example, the cumulative covid death rate for children under 15 is less than 5 per 100,000, comparable to the death rate for fully vaccinated adults. For 16 and 17 year-olds it's 9 per 100,000, and from 18 through 29, 16 per 100,000. If we were just comparing the risk of dying from covid to the much less serious but documented risks from the mRNA vaccines, one could potentially come down on the side of not vaccinating young children and teenagers.

The picture changes if we include the risk of children needing to be hospitalized because of covid. The cumulative covid hospitalization rate for children 0 through 4 is 87 per 100,000, and from 5 through 18, 51.8 per 100,000. These are less than the risk of any side effects of the vaccines, but higher than the risks of serious side effects. Luckily, young children are less likely to be severely sickened or to die from covid than adults, but a significant number do need to be hospitalized.

Safety and efficacy trials of covid vaccines for children from 5 through 11 are currently taking place, and the White House has announced plans to promote vaccination of children ages 5 through 11 once a children's vaccine is approved. We should have more data specific to that age group within the next few months.

Individual risks vs. social responsibility

The risk ratios discussed above refer to individual risks. That is, one could decide to be vaccinated or not based only on comparing one's own risk of contracting covid, or of requiring hospitalization, or of dying vs. the known risks from the vaccine. However, public health authorities point out that, much like choosing to wear a mask, getting vaccinated doesn't just protect the person getting the jab, it also protects others by reducing the likelihood that that person will infect others. This multiplicative factor becomes significant when large numbers of people in a population remain unvaccinated, and so provide a continuing medium for the virus.

Currently, 43 percent of the US population remain unvaccinated, or more than 143 million people. Around half of those are adults who would incur low risks from vaccination yet could protect themselves and others by doing so. As long as they choose not to get vaccinated, they remain a big, wide playing field across which the coronavirus can continue its advance.

Seven thousand steps is the new magic number

 If, like me, you've been trying for years to fit those widely recommended 10,000 steps per day into your schedule without great success, you may be able to breathe a sigh of relief. New research published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) shows that just 7,000 steps per day significantly reduces deaths from all causes among middle-aged Americans, regardless of race or gender. 

It's not that taking more than 7,000 steps per day would be bad for you--increasing benefits were found up to 10,000 steps per day. However, the benefits of moderate walking--just 7000 to 9000 steps per day--were massive, a 50 to 70 percent reduction in the risk of dying over the years of the study.

Credit: MabelAmber

"You see this gradual risk reduction in mortality as you get more steps," says Amanda Paluch, an assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and corresponding author for the JAMA study. "There were substantial health benefits between 7,000 and 10,000 steps but we didn't see an additional benefit from going beyond 10,000 steps."

(It turns out that 10,000 steps per day was not a scientifically determined goal, but a catchy number that gained traction because of an advertising campaign for a Japanese pedometer!)

Paluch and her colleagues utilized data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study. The study started in 1983 and is still continuing. It involved over 5,000 men and women from four US states, and is notable for both its duration--now approaching 40 years--and for its racial balance. 

Participants activity levels were measured over the course of one year, and they were re-assessed ten years later. Overall, participants who walked 7,000 to 9,000 steps per day at the start of the study were just 28 percent as likely to die as those who walked fewer than 7,000 steps per day--a more than 70 percent risk reduction. Women and Blacks showed the greatest benefits of higher activity levels, but men and Whites still showed a 60 percent reduction in mortality risk over 7,000 steps per day.

Interestingly, walking faster was not associated with decreased mortality. The number of steps turned out to be much more important than the minute-by-minute intensity of the exercize.

The clear implication is that no matter who you are, you can increase your odds of living a longer and healthier life simply by taking 7,000 or more steps per day. 

"Showing that steps per day could be associated with premature mortality is a new contribution to the field," says Paluch. "Preventing those deaths before average life expectancy--that is a big deal."

Let's all make Professor Paluch happy, and click off those 7,000 steps starting today!

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REA 9/30/21

Is there a Republican death wish? Check out this link.

In the social sciences it's  rare to see a simple, clear, unequivocal relationship between two variables. People are complex, issues are multi-faceted, categories are often fuzzy, good data hard to come by.

That's what makes the graph in this article from The Daily Kos, "A Simple Actuarial Analysis" so mind-blowing.

The x-axis is the county-by-county percentage of Trump voters in the 2020 election.

The y-axis is the number of Covid deaths per 100,000 residents in those counties between 7/10/21 and 9/7/21.

Please take a look and come to your own conclusion.

US Capitol, January 6, 2021

Credit: Brett Davis/Flickr

Best data yet on the actual risks of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine

Many people don't trust even repeated assurances from official sources that mRNA vaccines like the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid shots are safe. In fact it's not unusual for opinion leaders opposed to these vaccines, and their followers, to warn that the Covid vaccines are extremely dangerous and have already caused high levels of serious illness and thousands of deaths. Millions of Americans appear to be far more afraid of the vaccines than of the Covid virus itself, and continue to refuse vaccination.

                                                                 Anti-vaccine protester

Credit: Fibonnaci Blue/Flickr

A new, peer-reviewed study appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine injects solid data into this fraught debate. The study provides an accounting and analysis of adverse events that occurred among more than 800,000 people within 42 days of receiving the Pfizer vaccine in Israel between December 20, 2020 and May 24, 2021, compared to an equal number of carefully matched peers who remained un-vaccinated, and to 173,000 peers who were diagnosed with Covid during the same time period. All the data came directly from anonymized medical records.

It's the largest controlled, peer-reviewed study of the side-effects of the Pfizer vaccine to date--nearly 40 times larger than Pfizer's phase III study--and provides the most accurate and detailed evidence to date of its risks when administered to large numbers of people on a national basis.

Anyone interested in reading the full research paper, carried out by researchers at the Clalit Institute in Israel and Harvard Medical School, can find it here.

The study evaluated 25 potentially serious adverse effects that earlier studies and clinical experience since the vaccines were released had identified as possibly linked to the Pfizer or other Covid vaccines, or to Covid itself. It did not look at mild, short-lived symptoms that typically accompany many vaccinations, such as fever, tiredness, or soreness near the injection site. It also did not attempt to evaluate any potential long-term effects.

Results:

Of the 25 adverse effects studied, 5 appeared more frequently following vaccination than they did in the same time period in the group of matched, but un-vaccinated peers:

Myocarditis--inflammation of the heart muscle--was 3.24 times more frequent in the vaccinated vs. un-vaccinated groups. However, since the incidence was low overall, that meant just 2.7 extra events per 100,000 people. In this study 91 percent of cases occurred in young men.

Lymphadenopathy--swollen lymph nodes--were 2.43 times more frequent among vaccinated compared to un-vaccinated people, appearing in 78.4 more cases than expected per 100,000. Swollen lymph nodes can be a sign of a serious condition such as cancer, but usually are simply an indication that the body is mounting an immune response.

Herpes zoster--shingles--was 1.43 times more frequent in the vaccinated group, and accounted for 15.8 additional cases per 100,000 vaccinated individuals.

Appendicitis occurred 1.4 times more often in vaccinated than unvaccinated individuals, adding 5 cases for every 100,000 people.

Bell's palsy--dysfunction of a facial nerve--occurred 1.3 times as often among the vaccinated group, but was also rare, accounting for 3.5 extra cases per 100,000 vaccinated individuals.

An unexpected finding was that vaccination lowered the risk of some of the adverse effects being studied, compared to the un-vaccinated group. Those included acute kidney injury, intracranial bleeding, anemia, and lymphopenia--low levels of white blood cells. The researchers suspect that those benefits appeared because of un-diagnosed Covid cases among the 800,000 un-vaccinated participants, which raised the incidence of those conditions--known complications of Covid-- in the un-vaccinated group.

As is true of almost any medical intervention, this study shows that the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine is not risk-free. More importantly, the study gives us a clear measure of just what the vaccine's short- to medium-term risks are. Out of 25 potential side effects, 5 appeared at higher rates in the vaccinated vs. un-vaccinated groups. Of those, the most most serious was myocarditis, which added just 2.7 cases per 100,000, and the most frequent, which added 78 cases per 100,000, was not particularly serious--swollen lymph nodes.

In order to provide further context for those risks, the researchers looked at the same 25 potential adverse effects among 173,000 un-vaccinated study participants in the 42 days after they were diagnosed with Covid. The results reflect many of the all-too-well-known risks of Covid infection:

Cardiac arrythmia--3.8 times more frequent; 166 extra cases per 100,000

Acute kidney injury--14.8 times more frequent; 125.4 extra cases per 100,000

Pulmonary embolism--blood clot in the lungs--12.4 times more frequent; 61.7 extra cases per 100,000

Myocardial infarction--heart attack4.47 times more frequent; 25 extra cases per 100,000

Deep-vein thrombosis--3.78 times more frequent; 43 extra cases per 100,000

Myocarditis--18.3 times more frequent; 11 extra cases per 100,000

Pericarditis--5.39 times more frequent; 10.9 extra cases per 100,000

Intracranial bleeding--6.89 times more frequent; 7.6 extra cases per 100,000

Relative risks from Pfizer vaccination vs Covid infection

Credit: Noam Barda et al./NEJM

The vaccine is not risk free, but equally clearly, it does not cause anything like the degree or kinds of risk that anti-vaccination advocates and believers warn of. And the risks from the vaccine pale in comparison to the far higher risks from a Covid infection.

Here's what Dr. Ran Balicer, the study's lead author, concludes:

"These results show convincingly that this mRNA vaccine is very safe and that the alternative of 'natural' morbidity caused by the coronavirus puts a person at significant, higher and much more common risk of serious adverse events. These data should facilitate informed individual risk-benefit decision-making, and, in our view, make a strong argument in favor of opting-in to get vaccinated, especially in countries where the virus is currently widespread."

I'd add that the United States, which leads the world in Covid cases and deaths, qualifies as one of those countries.

If you want to compare your own risks from the vaccine with your risks from Covid, here's an approach:

If you're in the US and you're not vaccinated, as a rough approximation you have about a one percent chance--1000 out of 100,000 people--of getting Covid in any given six-week period. 

If you're vaccinated, your odds are somewhere between 10 and 20 times better, depending on where and with whom you live, work and recreate.

Six weeks is the same length of time used in the above study, so you can get an idea of your chance of developing any or all of the Covid complications that the study quantified.

To those conditions you can add yet another risk. Over the course of the pandemic in the US, 1.6 percent--1600 out of every 100,000 people--who were diagnosed with Covid died from it.

So, as a first approximation, your chance of coming down with Covid during a given six-week period--and dying from it--is about the same as your chance of getting a case of shingles within six weeks of a Covid vaccination.

From what I hear, shingles isn't fun, but dying is worse.

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REA 9/8/21

STILL DEBATING A COVID VACCINE? HERE'S SOME CRYSTAL-CLEAR DATA FOR YOU

As of the end of August, 2021, 51 percent of the US population have been fully vaccinated for Covid-19. That means that 49 percent have not, despite the vaccine being widely available and free. Still, 61 percent have gotten at least one shot, so that leaves "only" 39 percent of the US population who have so far chosen not to seek or accept Covid-19 vaccination.

That means that more than 129 million Americans remain un-vaccinated, giving the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and especially the highly contagious delta mutant more than enough unprotected targets to continue to cause widespread illness, hospitalizations and death. Those 129 million unvaccinated people also comprise an enormous human petri dish in which the virus can continue to multiply and mutate.

Vaccination vs. hospitalization by state

Credit: NYT

Just in case some of those 129 million might be amenable to real-life, on-the-ground data about the life-saving benefits of the vaccine, here are some brand-new, nation-wide county-by-county research findings:

                                                                          Credit: Jeffrey Harris, MD

Jeffrey Harris, a physician and emeritus professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gathered data on vaccination rates, Covid-19 case rates and Covid-related hospitalizations in the 112 most populated US counties, a total of 147 million people. He used vaccination data as of mid-July, 2020 and compared them to Covid cases and hospitalizations between July 30 and August 12. You can read a pre-print of the research report here.

The results are striking. 

In the 56 counties in the lower half of the vaccination range, there were 548 cases per 100,000 population during the two-week study period, but just 281 cases per 100,000 in the 56 counties in the upper half of the vaccination rates. 

People in the less-vaccinated counties suffered 1.95 times as many diagnosed Covid-19 cases than people in the more-vaccinated counties.

A ten percent increase in vaccination rate correlated with a 28.3 percent reduction in Covid-19 cases.

The difference in Covid-caused hospitalizations in less- compared to more-vaccinated counties was even more dramatic. In the 56 less-vaccinated counties there were 55.4 hospitalizations per 100,000 people during the two-week study period, compared to 20.5 per 100,000 in the more-vaccinated counties. 

That means that for every hospitalization in the more-vaccinated counties, there were 2.7 hospitalizations in the less-vaccinated ones.

A ten-percent increase in vaccination rate correlated with a whopping 44.9 percent decrease in Covid hospitalizations.

So what's the bottom line of this large, detailed nationwide study? Basically, any region that can get 10 percent more of its citizens to get vaccinated can expect to cut its Covid case rate by 28 percent and its Covid hospitalization rate by 45 percent.

Lets translate those reductions in Covid cases and hospitalizations into lives saved:

In the US to date, we've suffered 39,662,129 confirmed Covid-19 cases. Among those, 2,675,000 have been hospitalized and 654,668 people have died. 

That means that for every 100,000 US cases, we're likely to see 1650 deaths. 

Thanks to an incredibly quick learning curve within the medical profession, the percentage of Americans who survive after being hospitalized for Covid-19 increased from 78.9 percent in early 2021 to 93.5 percent in August. Still, that means that even now the death rate for hospitalized Covid patients is 6.5 percent, meaning that out of every 100,000 Americans hospitalized for Covid, 6500 are likely to die.

As of the end of August, 2021, the US is registering more than 140,000 new Covid cases per day, or 980,000 per week. We're seeing an average of 12,297 new hospitalization per day, or 86,079 per week, and 1163 deaths per day, or 8,141 deaths per week.

Looking just weeks into the future, this study tells us that if just 10 percent of the 129,000,000 un-vaccinated Americans were to get vaccinated, we could avoid approximately 275,000 new Covid-19 cases, prevent 38,650 hospitalizations, and save at least 2500 lives--every week!

Dr. Harris believes we can do this. He says that among his patients he has encountered many "reasons" for not getting vaccinated. He recognizes that some people are "encapsulated in a misinformation bubble from which there seems to be no escape." Others, however, may be reachable, especially if there are tangible, real-life consequences to not be being vaccinated, such as loss of a job or not being able to enter restaurants or other businesses. 

"I expect many will come around," he says. Let's hope he's right.

Worth getting the jabs? You decide.

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REA/8-29-21

Vaccination rates ranged from below 30 percent in three counties in Georgia to over 65 percent in several counties in Maryland, Massachusetts, California and Washington. 

Want to see what an advanced humanoid robot can do? Check out this video from Boston Dynamics

 Just take a look:

 Atlas | Partners in Parkour - YouTube

Atlas | Partners in Parkour - YouTube

SOME ACTUAL DATA ABOUT BREAKTHROUGH COVID INFECTIONS

By now we've all heard about breakthrough covid cases--fully vaccinated people who still end up testing positive for covid. The standard line is that such cases are rare, that even if vaccinated people do catch covid, they are likely to have only mild symptoms. 

I've now come across some actual data, from Oklahoma and the District of Columbia, the two US state-level entities that publish detailed information about overall case rates and case rates among vaccinated citizens.

   Credit: Healthwatch Lambeth

Here's the lowdown:

In Oklahoma to date, 506,020 people out of a population of 3,956,971 have tested positive for covid. That's 12.8 percent of the population.

Of those 3,956,971 Oklahomans, 1,979,236 are fully vaccinated, either with the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine--almost exactly 50 percent. Of those nearly two million vaccinated citizens, just 2,514 have suffered a breakthrough covid infection. That's just 0.127 percent of the vaccinated group.

So, if we compare a case rate of 12.8 percent with a case rate of 0.127 percent, it looks as though unvaccinated Oklahomans are slightly more than 100 times as likely to come down with covid as their vaccinated peers.

Let's see how the stats for DC compare:

DC has a population of 705,749. Of these, to date, 52,005 have tested positive for covid, for an overall case rate of 7.37 percent.

Among the DC population, 299,020--42 percent--are fully vaccinated, again with one of the same three vaccines. Among that group there have been 546 breakthrough cases; a vaccinated case rate of 0.183 percent.

Comparing 0.183 percent vs 7.37 percent, it looks as though unvaccinated residents of DC are 40 times more likely to have had covid than their vaccinated neighbors.

As reported by Nicoletta Lanese of LiveScience.com here, the three vaccines vary consistently in their effectiveness. Here's a breakdown of the breakthrough percentages:

                         Oklahoma             DC             

Moderna              0.12                0.13            

Pfizer                    0.17                0.20

J & J                     0.21                0.32

Overall                0.127              0.183

(Note that the overall case rates for vaccinated people are not exact averages of the rates for the three vaccines because different numbers of people received each of the three vaccines.)

Based on the data from Oklahoma and DC, it would be fair to conclude that fully vaccinated people are somewhere between 40 and 100 times less likely to catch covid than are their unvaccinated fellow citizens. In addition, as has been reported, those who do have a breakthrough case are far less likely to progress to severe illness, hospitalization or death. 

Of course, further data could modify this, but for now, I'm extremely glad to be fully vaccinated, congratulate everyone who has gotten their shots, and strongly urge anyone who has not yet been vaccinated to get vaccinated as soon as possible. Being 40 to 100 times safer is a very big deal.

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REA 8/12/2021

KIDS URGENTLY NEED TO BE PROTECTED FROM COVID TOO

 If you have children or grandchildren, or if you just care about kids, please read this piece from the Washington Post:

Children with covid can get very ill, as I have seen in my hospital - The Washington Post 

It's still rare, but kids too can get severe cases of Covid

Credit: vperemen

The latest statistics show that children now account for 15 percent of new covid cases in the US. Since they can't yet be vaccinated, their protection must come from adult vaccination, facemasks, social distancing, testing and tracing--all the sensible public health measures that we're familiar with (and of course very tired of). But let's do it for the sake of the children.

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REA 8/11/21

IF WE'RE TALKING JOBS, PAINT THEM GREEN

I'm constantly adding research reports to an already bulging computer file labeled CLIMATE-ECO-TOPIA. The thrust of these findings, dating back many years, is that transitioning to a sustainable green economy, although costly, would provide so many benefits in terms of human health and well-being, the environment, and the economy that it's not just necessary and urgent, but basically a no-brainer.

Solar Panel Installer//Credit: Maxpixel

I'll be writing about other aspects of this later, but today I'm just going to report on three job-related findings:

First, as of the end of 2019, the US Green Economy employed ten times more people than the entire fossil fuel industry. As reported in New Scientist on October 15 of that year, the entire fossil fuel sector of the US economy employed around 900,000 people. In contrast, the Green Economy, broadly defined, employed at least 9.5 million Americans--more than ten times those fossil fuel jobs.

Those jobs comprised about 4 percent of all US employment and the green sector now accounts for 7 percent of the GDP, about $1.3 trillion per year. 

Marc Maslin, a geoscientist at University College London, and co-author of the underlying study, pulls no punches. "The Trump administration with the 'America first' approach of 'fossil fuels are good', is stupid when it comes to economics," he says. "If you want to be a hard-nosed neoliberal economist you would say, 'Let's support the green economy as much as possible.'"

Looking globally, research published in the July 23 edition of the journal One Earth shows that if nations took the necessary steps to transition to a green economy and by doing so meet the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global heating below 2 degrees C, that would create far more new jobs than would be lost in the declining fossil-fuel sector, a net gain of at least 8 million jobs.

Many of those jobs would be in the U.S.  A separate study reported in Renewable Energy World estimates that adding enough rooftop or community solar panels to power 30 million American homes would add 1.77 million jobs. In addition, in just five years this would save $69 billion in energy bills and keep the same amount of carbon out of the atmosphere as taking 42 million cars off the road or closing 48 coal-burning power plants.

Talk about a win-win solution--and one we need to push forward on urgently.

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REA 8/8/2021

THE DELTA VARIANT AND BEYOND--EXPERT COVID-19 UPDATE

I just sat in on a Covid-19 update presented by the Newswise science news service featuring three experts:

Perry Halkitis, a public health psychologist and applied statistician at New Jersey's Rutgers University,

Eleanor Wilson, a medical doctor and infections disease specialist at the University of Maryland, and

David Souleles, Director of UC Irvine's Covid-19 response team, recently retired .Orange County Public Health Director

Delta is for Dangerous . . .

Credit: The Spinoff/ISO FORM LLC

The focus of the update was the emergence and trajectory of the delta variant and what that implies for the US.

Here are some of the key points the three experts made:

--The delta variant is a serious threat in the US and worldwide.

--As recently reported, the level of viremia--the viral load in the bloodstream--from a delta-covid infection is 1,000 times higher than from previous versions of the virus. That's probably what is making it so infectious.

--According to Dr. Wilson, the infectiousness, or "R-nought" value, of the original version of Covid-19 was estimated to be between 1 and 3. Statistically that means that one infected person would pass the virus to one to three others. The beta version's R value was between 4 and 6. The delta variant is 8 or 9. The only virus known to be more easily transmitted is measles, with an R value of 13.

--Unfortunately, the current vaccines appear to offer less protection against delta than against earlier versions of the virus. However, even though they may not completely protect against catching the virus, they are still highly effective at preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death. As such, vaccines remain our most important and urgent line of defense. "If we want to get back to normal life, we need our vaccination rates to be much higher," Souleles says. "That's priority number one to get our lives closer to what they were in January of 2020."

--That doesn't just include the US. The billions of people worldwide who are still not vaccinated are not just at risk personally, but represent a huge reservoir of current and future Covid-19 cases and so a huge opportunity for the virus to continue to mutate and spin off even more dangerous variants. "It's a global problem," says Wilson. "We have to vaccinate everyone. If we give the virus fewer opportunities to replicate, we win."

--All three of the experts were very concerned about the portion of the US population that are not yet vaccinated. They emphasize the importance of recognizing that this is not a monolithic group of dedicated vaccine refusers. Instead, these are individuals with many different issues, including very real medical, scheduling or other practical issues, normal anxieties and fears, such as a fear of needles, along with exposure to partial or incorrect information, and, unfortunately, a substantial number of people with politicized resistance to the vaccine and other protective measures. 

--They advocate both continued public education and persistent one-on-one outreach, aimed at recognizing and addressing each person's specific issues. "The media need to help people figure out what's real and what's not real, people who are being bombarded by misinformation," says Halkitis.  

"It takes a lot of conversation, but you have to keep doing it," says Wilson. To which Souleles adds, "Not just one conversation, maybe three, four or five."

--However, when education and patient one-to-one persuasion don't work, stronger steps may need to be taken. "I'd take a "tough-guy-from-New-York" approach," says Halkitis. "If you live in a civil society and you want to navigate spaces like concerts, restaurants, jobs and schools, you need to be vaccinated. Macron did it in France. If you want your children to go to school, they have to be vaccinated."

--All three agree that we need to track the course of the delta variant and any new variants that emerge with great attention, and that they could easily force a re-instatement of controls that have only recently been lifted. "Where we were six weeks ago is not where we are today," says Halkitis. "The next week will be very significant."

To summarize, the delta variant is highly contagious, surging rapidly, and is a potential game-changer. Everyone is eager to get back to something like the old normal, or on to a less restrictive new normal, but ultimately, it's the trajectory of the virus that will determine that. That trajectory is at least partly under our control through vaccination and other public health measures that we're all too familiar with. 

"We've got the tools," Souleles says. "We've just got to apply them on a broad scale."

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REA 7/23/21

NOW WE KNOW WHY DELTA IS SO DEVASTATING

The delta variant of the covid-19 virus is now the dominant strain in the U.S. and worldwide, accounting for more than half of new infections and driving up hospitalization rates and deaths in many U.S. states and multiple countries. 

We now have the first clues as to why the delta variant spreads so easily--at least twice as fast as the original virus. Just-released research from China reveals that the variant was detected in infected people two days earlier than was typical of the original virus--in 4 vs. 6 days--and, strikingly, the number of virus particles produced and potentially spread by sufferers was up to 1260 times higher.

Credit: Fortune.com

"This virus has surprised us," says  Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, after reviewing the new study. 

The one-two punch of faster development after infection and vastly higher viral load combine to make the virus more quickly and easily transmitted, and make testing-contact tracing and quarantine-one of the main weapons in the battle against the pandemic--less effective.

"Putting it all together, Delta's really difficult to stop," says Benjamin Cowling, an epidemiologist at the the University of Hong Kong.

Unfortunately, with low vaccination rates in many states, along with the relaxation of most covid-related restrictions, we're going to hear a lot more about this virulent covid variant.

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REA 7/22/21