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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Since COVID-19 vaccinations have become available in December 2020, an estimated 182 million people in the United States were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by September 21, 2021. However, since April 2021, the number of people starting to get COVID-19 vaccines has decreased. People have cited vaccine safety concerns as deterrents to getting a COVID-19 vaccine, concerns that include deaths following COVID-19 vaccination. Although deaths after COVID-19 vaccination have been reported to VAERS, there have been few studies done to evaluate the mortality not associated with COVID-19 among vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. To analyze this, researchers conducted a study using the Vaccine Safety Datalink, comparing those who received COVID-19 vaccines and those who did not between December 2020 through July 2021. This study included data from 11 million people; 6.4 million received either Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna or Janssen COVID-19 vaccine and 4.6 were unvaccinated. The analysis showed that those who received COVID-19 vaccinations had lower rates of mortality for non-COVID-19 causes than those unvaccinated. These findings provide evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and support current vaccination recommendations.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/research/publications/index.html

There is another study in there as well with the same conclusion. This is just non-covid mortality risk, obviously the risk for COVID itself is much lower for people who took the vaccine, and that data is in there as well IIRC.

Thank you for the response, but it doesn't really address what I was saying. You claimed that "if the vaccines caused noticeable health risks it would be absurdly easy to see a correlation. Vaccination=higher mortality. That correlation isn't there." and that "This is one of those conspiracies that's really hard not to be condescending about because it's just so thinly supported."

I showed you that clinical trials (the best kind of data!) found a significant increase in serious adverse events after vaccination (health risk!) and increased deaths in the vaccinated group compared with controls (vaccination=higher mortality).

Your response that cites a study with different results may indicate that the situation is complex, with contradictory studies supporting different positions, but it does not show that the "correlation isn't there" - it's there in the randomized clinical trials (RCTs), which represent the best type of evidence. Your initial claim was very very strong, and it is what I'm contesting. You did not just say that there are contradictory studies on COVID vaccine health risk, you said that the claim of health risk is so thinly supported it's hard not to be condescending about that claim, when in fact the clinical trials that were used to approve the vaccines show both a serious health risk and that vaccination=higher mortality.

The study you quoted here (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm) is not a RCT and thus immediately weaker evidence than the clinical trials, but let's look at it more closely. The study has a very surprising result, namely that vaccine recipients had lower non-COVID mortality than the unvaccinated. Unless you want to claim that the COVID vaccine magically protects against all forms of death, the study has missed something or introduced some kind of bias in their study design that skewed the results.

One explanation that immediately springs to mind when reading the study stems from this decision in the study design:

"To ensure comparable health care–seeking behavior among persons who received a COVID-19 vaccine and those who did not (unvaccinated persons), eligible unvaccinated persons were selected from among those who received ≥1 dose of influenza vaccine in the last 2 years."

So they only included unvaccinated persons who were vaccinated against the flu but were not vaccinated against COVID. The majority of the healthy population does not vaccinate against the flu - some healthy people do, of course, but it's primarily given to older or sick and thus vulnerable people. Among the people who were vaccinated against the flu due to being sick, but did not vaccinate against COVID, some proportion did not receive COVID vaccination because they had gotten sicker in the meantime, and thus COVID vaccination was deemed too risky. It is possible that this group was large enough (you don't need that many such people to skew the results) to lead to the result that unvaccinated people died from non-COVID causes more often more than the vaccinated - because a proportion of the sample was unvaccinated due to being too sick to receive the vaccine, thus resulting in more deaths among the unvaccinated group.

Of course, this explanation is not a certainty, but the decision to only include flu vaccine recipients in the unvaccinated group, without controlling for initial health status and with no mention of ensuring that the vaccinated were also flu vaccine recipients, was very questionable. It may have skewed the results of this study, leading to the result that COVID vaccines seem to magically protect from non-COVID death. Even if this is not the explanation of this weird result, the results of this study just make no sense - something is happening that the study doesn't account for, even if the result were to be correct. I therefore rate the reliability of this study a fairly low - definitely lower than the reliability of RCTs that show vaccination=higher mortality.

To summarize, the study you quoted here has a weird result that indicates some unknown factor at play that is skewing the results, and they made a questionable decision in study design that they did not match in both samples.

In any case, randomized controlled trials are stronger evidence, and they do indeed show vaccination=higher mortality and that there's a health risk from vaccination (16% increase in serious adverse events).

This contradicts your original very strong claim that there is no correlation indicating a health risk from COVID vaccines and that believing that is something it's hard not to be condescending about because it's so thinly supported. That claim is what I'd be interested in hearing you defend.

Don't the vaccines have quickly waning immunity/resistance, wasn't natural immunity/resistance shown to be superior, and aren't we at the point where everyone probably everyone has had COVID?