Niall Ferguson is a brilliant historian and commentator on current events. The following fragment of a sentence is from a recent article on the election. […the Covid vaccines that saved a significant number of older voters’ lives in 2021.] Ferguson’s topic is not the COVID vaccine, it’s politics. But he obviously thinks the vaccines were safe and effective. He likely hasn’t thought very much about the subject and has accepted the opinions of those around him. His area of expertise is not medicine or public health.
The question here is did the COVID vaccines save the lives of older people during the late epidemic? If one believes they did what is the evidence that supports that conclusion? There are no controlled studies comparing age and sex-matched subjects who did or did not receive the vaccine. Thus, one must reach a conclusion on the effectiveness of these vaccines on less than ideal data.
The epidemic lasted just a few years – roughly from 2020 to 2022. But that’s the same duration as the flu epidemic of 1918 to 1920. It subsided without a vaccine and during a time when its viral etiology was unknown. As I’ve repeatedly remarked, the natural history of an epidemic due to a respiratory virus is for the causal virus to become more contagious and less lethal over time. These conditions will favor the survival of such a virus compared to other strains that kill their host before they can spread. The conclusion that a virus appeared, a vaccine was developed and administered, and the epidemic subsided thus the vaccine was the cause of the epidemic’s disappearance is an example of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.
We know that vaccines against respiratory viruses are weakly effective at best. Dr Fauci himself has recently published a paper demonstrating this property of vaccines designed to guard against these viruses. The most likely explanation for the weak or absent effect of these vaccines is that respiratory viruses mutate so rapidly that by the time a vaccine is available for widespread use, the virus it was intended to prevent may have changed so much that the vaccine is not effective. This property is why the annual flu vaccines seem to do little to prevent the flu. The linked study examines the possible bias of studies that support administration of the flu vaccine. Evidence of bias in estimates of influenza vaccine effectiveness in seniors.
So, is there any solid evidence that the COVID vaccines worked? There isn’t. Everyone is familiar with the famous people who were vaccinated on what seems like a continuous basis and who repeatedly contracted COVID. Dr Fauci and President Biden are likely the most prominent COVID repeaters. The vaccine has side effects. How frequent and serious is still up for debate. The general craziness that spread more rapidly than the virus has inhibited study of these side effects.
Also antithetical to the acquisition of knowledge was the cry of ‘anti-vaxxer’ against anyone who questioned the safety and/or efficacy of the COVID vaccine. These issues should have been settled by dispassionate scientific examination of the relevant data rather than name calling. That a vaccine not subject to a large clinical trial might prove ineffective is not startling. Similarly, a vaccine with not even a short history might have serious side effects is also possible.
Why we quarantined the healthy rather than the sick and demanded that those with little risk from the SARS virus be inoculated will be a source of wonderment in the future. The forfeiture of civil rights and employment against those at minimal risk from the virus who refused vaccination is a marker of disgrace among the so-called democratic countries.
Sir Niall’s offhand remark that the COVID vaccine saved the lives of millions of seniors reminds me of Beethoven’s remark that away from his music he was no different from anyone else. Richard Feynman, the great physicist, made a similar remark about the opinions of scientists on subjects removed from their area of specialization. Ferguson has gone with the flow without examining the source of the current.
Aside from the efficacy of the COVID vaccine, we don’t even know how many people died from the virus. Anyone who died from whatever cause and who had a positive COVID test was counted as a COVID death. Excess mortality did increase during the epidemic, but one can’t be sure if the virus was the cause or if the general decay and delay of medical treatment for other diseases that resulted from the mania caused by the epidemic was responsible.
Thomas Sowell wrote a 422 page book on knowledge and decisions (Knowledge And Decisions) detailing the difficulty of both assessing the state of knowledge and the gap in getting it to both the decision makers and the public. In the more than half a century since he wrote the book the problem seems to have become even more acute. The mishandling of the COVID epidemic appears to have left disfiguring scars.
