Crude Risk:Benefit Analysis from Number-Needed-to-Vaccinate (NNV)
Single harm analysis already negative
When COVID is raging at a 40% annual attack rate, kids still only have a 6-month risk of death that is about 0.6 per million (less than 1-in-a-million) — as I show in a previous Substack.
CDC data shows that COVID injections have a 6-month average vaccine effectiveness against severe outcomes (hospitalization/death) of 40% for adults, and presumably somewhat less than that for kids.
Taken together, this means that the absolute COVID risk reduction, or ARR, for injected kids is 0.24 per million. It also means that, to prevent one single COVID death, you have to vaccinate more than 4 million children.
But by the time that you do that, you’ve inadvertently caused somewhere between 400 and 800 excess cases of myocarditis in kids, almost 1% of which is fatal. Here is how it’d look if fully 1% of all child myocarditis cases died:
Lane et al. reported that you get 10-20 excess myocarditis cases per 100,000 injected, which is the same as 100-200 excess myocarditis cases per million. They also show that, in the 5 studies reporting deaths due to myocarditis, 30 out of a total of 2859 cases died.
That’s 1% of myocarditis cases in those 5 studies, though it must be admitted that the risk of death for adults was higher than 1% of myocarditis cases, while the risk of death for children was below 1% of cases.
Even if 1.1% to 1.3% of adult myocarditis cases die, and only 0.5% to 0.7% of child myocarditis cases do, COVID injections will still kill twice as many kids as they save — even when COVID is raging rampant at a 40% annual attack rate.
Notes:
Reference
[study reporting excess myocarditis at a rate of 10-20 per 100,000 vaccinated; and an aggregate 1% myocarditis death rate for 5 studies reporting deaths] — Lane S, Yeomans A, Shakir S. Reports of myocarditis and pericarditis following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination: a systematic review of spontaneously reported data from the UK, Europe and the USA and of the scientific literature. BMJ Open 2022;12:e059223. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2021-059223. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/5/e059223
[CDC presentation showing how, when averaged over 6 months, vaccine effectiveness against serious outcomes like hospitalization is only 40%] — https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2022-09-01/04-covid-link-gelles-508.pdf