In order for there to be a net benefit from taking COVID jabs, they have to prevent more hospitalizations than they cause.
Factors that come into play are the background rate of COVID hospitalization, the variant-specific effectiveness of jabs in averting a COVID hospitalization, and the rate of serious (hospitalization-inducing) adverse events caused by jabs.
Taking the last factor first, a reanalysis in the fall of 2022 of the randomized trials found an excess of 12.5 serious adverse events per 10,000 given the primary series. The central estimate, when put into Number Needed to Harm (NNH) would be 800 jabs (for every 800 fully-dosed, another person is put into the hospital for a serious adverse event).
A review in December of 2022 looked at hospitalization rates by locality and by the predominant COVID variant in circulation. For the September 2021 data presented, it was assumed that Delta variant was dominant. Here is an adaptation of Table 4 of their report:
[click to enlarge]
At top right is the central estimate of the Number Needed to Harm (NNH), along with the lower and upper bound of the 95% confidence interval. That comes from the other study.
While a hospitalization is expected for every 800 people fully jabbed, the range of plausibility includes only getting an extra hospitalization for every 4,762 fully jabbed (blue shaded cell at top right).
Notice how the central estimate of harm in column G always occurs before a COVID hospitalization is prevented below in that column. For instance, in Los Angeles County in September of 2021, it took 5,000 fully jabbed to avert one COVID hospitalization, but only 800 to cause one.
That’s 6 people put into the hospital (with a serious adverse event) for every one who was kept out (by averting a COVID hospitalization).
The orange shaded cells show the worst possible scenario — when the lower bound on the number needed to avert a hospitalization was even higher than the upper bound of the number needed to harm.
If 95% confidence intervals do not overlap — even if the ratio of standard errors is as high as 5:1 — then it’s statistically significant at alpha = .05.
In those four places in September of 2021, it was virtually certain (~99%) that COVID jabs did more harm than good — putting more people into the hospital than they kept out of the hospital.
Even in the other places, the central estimates indicate that net harm was done. Because Omicron leads to even less hospitalization than Delta variant, and because COVID jabs are not as effective against Omicron, the situation is now even worse.
While the two reports cited below were published in 2022, the actual evidence they deal with was available prior to 2022. In other words, it was scientifically “knowable” by the middle of 2021 that the jabs caused net harm to the people that took them.
Reference
[primary series jabs led to excess of 12.5 serious adverse events per 10,000] — Fraiman J, Erviti J, Jones M, Greenland S, Whelan P, Kaplan RM, Doshi P. Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults. Vaccine. 2022 Sep 22;40(40):5798-5805. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.08.036. Epub 2022 Aug 31. PMID: 36055877; PMCID: PMC9428332. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9428332/
[September 2021 data reveal a NNV-Hosp of 2,000-plus, regardless of location] — Larkin A, Waitzkin H, Fassler E, Nayar KR. How missing evidence-based medicine indicators can inform COVID-19 vaccine distribution policies: a scoping review and calculation of indicators from data in randomised controlled trials. BMJ Open. 2022 Dec 12;12(12):e063525. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2022-063525. PMID: 36523237; PMCID: PMC9748517. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9748517/
Thank you!