The Mirror of Erised: The True Efficacy of Covid Vaccines

The Mirror of Erised: The True Efficacy of Covid Vaccines
by Tomas Fürst at Brownstone Institute

The 21st century is said to be the century of data. So, if Alice claims that Covid vaccines saved millions of lives but Bob says they killed millions, it should be really easy to decide who is right. Just get the data, right?

We obtained the data for the Czech Republic. I still can’t believe we have it, but it is here. It is the official data obtained from a government agency through a FOIA request, and it is available for everyone to download and analyze. The data contains over 11 million rows – a single row for each Czech resident who was alive on January 1, 2020, or was born between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2022.

For each individual, the data row contains the year of birth, sex, exact date of death from any cause (if the individual died within the three studied years) and exact dates, types, and even batch numbers of all Covid vaccines given to that individual. The cause of death is, unfortunately, not provided. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only officially released dataset that links all-cause mortality to Covid vaccination status at the level of individuals on the scale of a whole country. 

Before we return to Alice and Bob, I need to tell you a bit about the Czech Republic. Everything is much more homogeneous here than an American can imagine: There are no significant ethnic minorities here. We have universal, free, and very regulated health care, so pretty much everyone gets the same care (allowing for some corruption here and there). From the communist times, we inherited the system of compulsory “personal citizen numbers” (state-provided IDs), so everyone is very well accounted for: It is impossible to be born, or die, without the state noticing immediately.

Consequently, the Czech official data is almost exactly correct (unlike e.g. the British Office of National Statistics, which somehow manages to lose a couple of million unvaccinated Brits). In other words, this Czech dataset is so precise, clean, homogeneous, and detailed that nothing comparable will ever be available in the US. So, if answers can be found in this type of data, they will be especially apparent and irrefutable in the Czech data.

It is not completely straightforward to compute all-cause mortality (ACM) in a particular age cohort according to vaccination status. One would be tempted to count the number of deaths in that cohort and divide it by the cohort size at a particular time. But this would be incorrect because people keep shifting among the vaccination cohorts, so that their sizes keep changing.

For example, consider Auntie Betty, who entered the study on January 1, 2020, as unvaccinated. She got her first dose on March 13, 2021, went on to get the second dose on April 13, 2021, and died 25 days later. Thus, she contributed 437 person-days to the unvaccinated cohort, 31 person-days to “dose 1 only” cohort, 25 person-days to “dose 1 and 2” cohort, and one death to “dose 1 and 2” cohort. This type of breakdown must be done for every age cohort and every individual. Only then can the number of deaths in each vaccination cohort (further stratified by age) be divided by the number of person-days spent by individuals in that cohort to get the correct value of ACM. 

Further technical details are written in the original paper, but we basically carried out the procedure explained above to compute the monthly ACM rates stratified by vaccination status, sex, and age. The ACM was then compared to the expected mortality based on pre-pandemic data. 

The expected mortality also needs to be computed carefully. One might be tempted to simply compare the computed ACM to pre-pandemic mortality rates (I am afraid that most authors do just this). However, this would be wrong again. Many people died during the pandemic (for various reasons) and since they are not going to die again, mortality must be expected to decrease after the pandemic. Thus, from the pre-pandemic data, we estimated the probability of dying within a year, given age and sex, and then multiplied the current population composition by these estimates. We even evaluated the uncertainty of the estimates by a procedure that is too technical to be described here (please see the original paper).

At this stage, we were holding our breath, eager to see whether the vaccines had been a blessing or a curse. We printed out the charts – and found ourselves looking into the Mirror of Erised. The figures tell many fascinating stories and anyone can pick up the one he/she likes. Let us tell some of the stories for one particular cohort – women born between 1940 and 1949. The remaining figures (together with the ACM values) can be found in the Supplement and we invite readers to examine them carefully. 

Please recall that we are analyzing all-cause mortality, not Covid-related mortality, because the data did not contain the cause of death. This adds another layer of complexity to the interpretation of the results. So, what do we see in the Mirror of Erised?

The “deadly” first dose. Mortality of individuals with a single dose (dark blue bars) was frighteningly higher than that of the unvaccinated population, both before March 2021 and again from summer 2021 onwards. Is this evidence of vaccine-related mortality? Probably not. In early 2021, when vaccines were scarce, the frailest individuals in care homes and ill people were vaccinated preferentially. This “indication bias” probably explains the pattern in early 2021.

Once mass vaccination in that cohort started, the ACM plummeted because the frail were “diluted” by the influx of the healthy. However, over a few months, most people healthy enough went on to receive the second dose. Only a small fraction of the cohort was left behind – probably those too sick to get another dose. Were they sick because of the first dose? Who knows? In any case, the ACM of those who stayed with “dose 1” status again shot up because the ACM of the doubly vaccinated plummeted.

The Sorcerer’s Stone. The Sorcerer’s Stone was said to grant immortality to its owner. The double-vaccinated in summer 2021 (and later triple-vaccinated) certainly seem to have discovered it. Let us recall that summer 2021 was a Covid-free period in the Czech Republic: of approximately 300 daily deaths, no more than 1 was attributed to Covid. Yet, the ACM of the double-vaccinated was 4 to 5 times lower than that of the unvaccinated! In other words, the Covid vaccine effectiveness against non-Covid deaths was close to 80 percent!

This miracle is known to epidemiologists as the Healthy Vaccinee Effect (HVE). Many people of poor health are unable to access the vaccine. People who are dying, too frail, too remote, etc., tend to concentrate in the unvaccinated cohort. No wonder then that the unvaccinated have much higher ACM. The figure above even shows how the HVE repeats with each new vaccine dose.

As soon as dose two becomes available, the vaccinated split into those healthy enough to proceed with dose 2, and those too ill to get dose 2. Accordingly, ACM of newly vaccinated with dose 2 plummets, while ACM of those who stayed with dose 1 skyrockets. The same pattern repeats with dose 3: The newly vaccinated with dose 3 appear “immortal,” while the ACM of those who stayed with dose 2 goes up. This pattern is consistent across both sexes (we still have just two in the Czech Republic) and across all age cohorts, as shown in the Supplement.

There are more reflections in the Mirror of Erised. All are described in the original paper, so there is no need to repeat them here. The important point – which needs to be repeated everywhere – is this:

The true value of the vaccine effectiveness can only be derived from prospective randomized studies. There, HVE is not a concern because people don’t get to choose who receives the vaccine and who receives a placebo. However, the last prospective randomized studies of Covid vaccines ended in early 2021. Moreover, they used a different vaccine (manufactured by process 1) and targeted the original (Wuhan) strain of the virus, which had largely disappeared by the time of the mass vaccine rollout. Since the rollout, all claims about vaccine effectiveness have been based on observational studies.

Yet, in the Mirror of Erised above, you can see that the vaccine may appear to be 80% effective, even against Covid-unrelated deaths! Still, we are not aware of any vaccine effectiveness studies that tried to correct for this huge HVE. This means that all claims of Covid vaccine effectiveness since the beginning of the mass vaccination campaign must be revised. The vaccine’s true efficacy against death from Covid may have been zero, or even negative; we simply don’t know.

In the century of data, after forcing this novel experimental product into the arms of billions, including children and pregnant women, we still face the question Alice and Bob posed at the start: Have the Covid “vaccines” saved millions or killed millions? Will we have to go for the answers – once again – all the way to Nuremberg?

The Mirror of Erised: The True Efficacy of Covid Vaccines
by Tomas Fürst at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society