Note: Public figure, Sam Harris, reinstigated the conversation on the efficacy of COVID shots by stating that it is probable that they saved 3 million lives. But as is shown below, “you can’t get there from here”
In this prior installment, results of a 150 million-round computer simulation reveal COVID infection fatality rates (IFRs) consistent with known UK COVID death data by 19 Jan 2021 (as reported in UK Tech Briefing No. 5).
But a COVID model attempting to estimate the COVID deaths averted by COVID shots required an IFR not compatible with the UK death data. They ran it from 12 Dec 2020 up to 30 Nov 2022 and proclaimed that COVID shots averted 3.2 million deaths. On 12 Dec 2020, the tally of confirmed COVID deaths had reached 288,000:
And by 30 Nov 2022, it had risen to 1,070,000 confirmed COVID deaths:
The difference between these two death counts is 782,000, over the span of 1.97 years. The rate of accumulation of COVID death, once annualized, was 398,000 per year — a rate that is 31% higher than it was before the COVID shots:
[click to enlarge]
The running tally of COVID deaths are at top-left just next to the green (begin) and red (end) cells. Cell F8 shows that the annualized COVID death rate after shots was 31% higher than before them. In order for the “averted deaths” analysis to hold true, you need a counterfactual with 4 million COVID deaths.
To obtain 4 million COVID deaths requires the joint occurrence found in the yellow cells at bottom right (at least 130% spread of COVID and at least 0.7% IFR).
While it is materially possible that the average incidence of COVID was 1.3 infections per person or higher, it’s not materially possible for an IFR of 0.7% or higher —as the 150-million-round computer simulation showed (with a 99.99% upper bound IFR of 0.196%).
In other words, it is a materially impossibility that COVID shots saved 3.2 million lives, because it requires an IFR so high that it contradicts known death data.
Reference
[recent COVID model, likely alluded to by Sam Harris, which requires an IFR near 0.9%, just like the Imperial College London one did] — Two Years of U.S. COVID-19 Vaccines Have Prevented Millions of Hospitalizations and Deaths. https://doi.org/10.26099/whsf-fp90
Thanks for this great summary. Sam Harris is not the man he was pre-Covid. I am not at all surprised to hear proven wrong again and again, but I must admit that this article of yours is one if the most simple and convincing proofs I have seen of him being wrong.