Negative Benefit
Post #1075
Dr. Aseem Malhotra put out an open letter to the General Medical Council pleading with them to remove the recommendation for COVID shots, citing how they had been putting around 8 people into the hospital with a serious adverse event of special interest (serious AESI) for each person kept out of the hospital.
I went to primary data sources and verified that such a bold claim does check out. The first real-world trial evidence of exposure to COVID shots came out in February 2021 (Dagan et. al.). Possible benefits to compare to harms would either be reduced hospitalizations or severe COVID. But look at how hospitalizations got defined:
In other words, if you were admitted to the hospital, and if you had had a positive PCR test during or before being admitted, then you were a “COVID-19 related hospitalization.” But over one-third of PCR positive cases do not have symptoms of COVID, so this classification is clinically meaningless.
Because too large of a fraction of all PCR-positive hospital patients will not be sick with COVID (and they should not be counted), the better measure for comparison purposes is “severe COVID.” Here is how severe COVID got defined:
There were 4 criteria, and meeting even just one of them is enough. The first one deals with pulse oximetry readings of less than 94% oxygen saturation (O2 sat). Let’s ignore how you can artificially create that O2 sat level merely by over-consumption of nitrates, such as by drinking beetroot juice (up to 11,400 mg nitrate/L).
When the more potent nitrogen source, sodium nitrite, was given to rats at just a dose of 30 mg/kg, it caused methemoglobinemia, a condition which depresses O2 sat readings from pulse oximeters. That is equal to a 65-kg (142-lb) person getting 1,950 mg of sodium nitrite. A liter of beetroot juice would convert to that much nitrite.
The observation period was for 44 days and the jabbed and unjabbed groups were of the same size, and the cumulative number of cases of severe COVID shows up in the image below in the top-right panel:
Because the number jabbed was 596,618, and the number of severe COVID cases averted was (174 - 55 = ) 119 averted cases, then that means that the number-needed-to-treat (NNT) in order to prevent one severe case is 5,014. But Fraiman et al. found out that there is an excess of serious AESI which is near 1 excess case per 800 dosed persons.
That rate of excess cases becomes a number-needed-to-harm (NNH). When you consider a million dosed persons, here are the results:
By the time that one case of severe COVID is averted, the mRNA shots will have caused 6.2 hospitalizations due to serious AESI. But Dagan et al. had a high number of originally-placebo persons who ended up getting the COVID shots inside the time window. They checked out what happens as they get removed at different times.
In a sensitivity analysis with a different time-point for pulling these originally-placebo persons out of the unjabbed group, they found even less effectiveness against severe COVID (NNT = 5987):
Note how the group sizes have reduced somewhat to 526,877 but also note how, at bottom right, the averted severe cases have gone all of the way down to (178 - 90 = ) 88 averted severe cases. This now leads to the regretful situation where 7.4 persons are put into the hospital for every person kept out, due to avoiding severe COVID:
So, when Dr. Aseem Malhotra cautions that we are making ~8 persons seriously ill for every averted serious illness due to COVID, the primary research backs him up. The primary research points to up to 7.4 serious illnesses caused for each one averted — a tragedy of epic proportions, if there ever was one.
Reference
[up to 6,000 persons, on average, may have to take mRNA shots, before even a single person benefits from it] — Dagan N, Barda N, Kepten E, Miron O, Perchik S, Katz MA, Hernán MA, Lipsitch M, Reis B, Balicer RD. BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Mass Vaccination Setting. N Engl J Med. 2021 Apr 15;384(15):1412-1423. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2101765. Epub 2021 Feb 24. PMID: 33626250; PMCID: PMC7944975. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7944975/
[by the time that just an average of 811 people have taken mRNA shots, someone will have been put into the hospital with a serious AESI] — 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://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9428332/
[Of 28,426 positive tests published in peer-reviewed literature by 6 Jul 2021, there were 11,923 (42% of them) which were defined as having asymptomatic infection at the time] — Buitrago-Garcia D, Ipekci AM, Heron L, Imeri H, Araujo-Chaveron L, Arevalo-Rodriguez I, Ciapponi A, Cevik M, Hauser A, Alam MI, Meili K, Meyerowitz EA, Prajapati N, Qiu X, Richterman A, Robles-Rodriguez WG, Thapa S, Zhelyazkov I, Salanti G, Low N. Occurrence and transmission potential of asymptomatic and presymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections: Update of a living systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS Med. 2022 May 26;19(5):e1003987. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1003987. PMID: 35617363; PMCID: PMC9135333. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9135333/
[Beetroot juice is loaded with nitrate, some of which converts to nitrite in the body] — https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2020.1746629#abstract
[giving rats relatively small doses of sodium nitrite causes methemoglobinemia, something which drives down O2 sat readings] — National Toxicology Program. Toxicology and carcinogenesis studies of sodium nitrite (CAS NO. 7632-00-0) in F344/N rats and B6C3F1 mice (drinking water studies). Natl Toxicol Program Tech Rep Ser. 2001 May;495:7-273. PMID: 12563346. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12563346/