To Be or Not To Be VAXXed (Part 1)

16 June 2021

Many people can't make up their mind.   There are too many horror stories told about the Covid vaccines. Stories about how people died after getting vaccinated. Stories about long term effects. There are just no good answers. Many choose to wait at the side line.  This article will try to help. It will analyse and compare the odds of getting vaccinated and not vaccinated. Hopefully,  it will help someone.

Vaccine is Safe and Effective

This slogan has been used all the time. It really makes no difference.  No one can be 100% sure there is no long term ill effect.  There are also the serious adverse effects requiring hospitalization & even death. But if one knows one might have 20 times higher chance of getting infected, what would one think?   

20 Times Higher Chance?

To work this out,  one must refer to this formula often used to work out the vaccine efficacy

Using the above formula,  one could easily work backward to find out the relationship between ARU & ARV, the attack rates of unvaccinated and vaccinated respectively  Assuming  the vaccine efficacy or VE is 95%,  the ARU will be "1/(1-VE)"  times of ARV or simple "1/0.05" of ARV or  20 times of  ARV.  In simple words,  the attack rate of those unvaccinated will be 20 times higher than the attack rate of those vaccinated.  Even if we were to assume the efficacy is 50%,  the unvaccinated would still have 2 times the chance of getting infected.

What about the Serious Adverse Effects & Death?

It is true that there are people having serious adverse effect such as swelling,  high fever.  Some have to stay in ICU after taking the vaccines.   Some died.   The Authorities and manufacturers will never admit the deaths has anything to do with the vaccine.  

Let's not talk about whether the claims are true.  Let talk what if one gets infected.  What are the chance of one would get hospitalized or one would end up death?

What are the odds of Hospitalization and Death?

The medics are telling us that once we have been infected,   a person of age around 20 will have about 1% chance of ending up in a hospital with a severe sickness. This risk is higher for older people.  For example,  there is 8% chance for people in their 50s and nearly 19% chance for those over 80. (https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-03-odds-hospitalization-death-covid-steadily.html)

As for the death,  the medics said young people has an odd of about 0.031% and  more than 7.8% for people over 80.

They also said,  people in their 50s made up the biggest age demographic among hospitalized patients, with 222 out of 790 hospitalized cases being aged 50 to 59.

The Economist has this interesting interactive chart showing the risk % of male and female for various age group (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mortality-risk-estimator)

 

The Economist has a model about estimating the odds of hospitalisation and death (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/13/our-covid-19-model-estimates-odds-of-hospitalisation-and-death)

How the Odds Compared?

Every COVID-19 vaccine must undergo 3 stages of  clinical trials under controlled  condition to ensure accurate measurement.   The trials are required by World Health Organization (WHO) and/or any country before they approve the vaccine for emergency use.   The sample size must be more than 30,000 in the Phase 3 trial.   

In these trial reports,   the various safety and vaccine performance are recorded,  determined & evaluated.    The vital information about some vaccine brands are tabulated as shown

	Pfizer (Double Dose)	Moderna (Double Dose)	Johnson (Single Dose)	Averages		Attack Rates Include(J&J)
	BNT162b2	mRNA-1273	Ad26.COV2.S			%		X
Sample size	43,000	30,420	44,325
Vaccinated	21,720	15,210	19,630	III	18,853
Placebo	21,280	15,210	19,691	IV	18,727
Efficacy	95%	94.10%	66.9%
Serious adverse after vaccination	4	91	83
Vaccinated Group
Infected	9	11	116	V	45	V/III	0.24%
Serious Adverse Events	130	91	83
	Estimated from (I)	Estimated from (I)
Death	2	2	3	VI	2	VII/III	0.012%
Serious Adverse Events (I)	0.60%	0.60%	0.40%		0.53%
Death Rate	0.009%	0.01%	0.02%		0.013%
Platebo Group
Infected	169	185	348	VII	234	VII/IV	1.250%	5.20
Serious Adverse Events	106	91	96
	Estimated from (II)	Estimated from (II)
Death	4	3	16	VIII	7.67	VIII/IV	0.04%	3.31
Serious Adverse Events (II)	0.50%	0.60%	0.40%		0.50%
Death Rate	0.019%	0.02%	0.08%		0.040%
	LINK	LINK	LINK

Links for Pfizer Trial Report:  https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

Links for Moderna Trial Report:  https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2035389

Links for J&J Trial Report:  https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa2101544?listPDF=true

One can see that in the vaccinated cases,  Those having Serious Adverse Events requiring hospitalization is only 0.53% in average among the 3 vaccines and those deaths accounted for only about 0.013% average. Those for Platebo cases where saline water was used instead  of vaccines,  the infection & death cases are slightly higher.  Of course,  the vaccine manufacturers claimed those deaths got nothing to do with the vaccines.

Now if we were to consider that the unvaccinated have higher chance of catching Covid and assumed that the Vaccine efficacy is only 53% (or 2.1 times ARV),  we could see that the odds of unvaccinated has increased by nearly 30% straightaway.  The males with age 80 and over will have over 60% chance of landing in a hospital bed and 25% chance of meeting a death.  The female will have 44% & 15% respectively. 

What will happen after the Covid Recovery

One in 10 recovered Covid-19 patients had persistent symptoms six months after their initial infection, a study led by the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) has found.

1 in 10 recovered Covid-19 patients in S'pore suffers persistent symptoms sixmonths after infection: Study

Part 2 is an update that talk about the new variant,  Delta,  affecting the odds of getting the Covid infection.

   

The Scary Number of UK Covid-19 Death Figure Cause by Delta Variant

The UK DailyMail has this news report which is self explanatory.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9681613/Study-shows-29-people-died-catching-new-strain-vaccinations.html

Daily Mail claimed that 1/3 or 29% of those death caused by Delta have been fully vaccinated. This news had caused a big stir among the Netizens. Many used the word "Shock" to express their feelings.

The UK Publish Health (PHE)'s Report

PHE made regular Technical Reports about Covid-19 works in UK.  In its 15th Technical Report,  it has this table 6. It shows the UK infection and death figures caused by Delta.  This table was arranged according to the vaccination status.

Among the various information,  the report said there were 42 death and 12 of them were fully vaccinated.

What Does this Death Figures Means?

It simple means what it means.  It doesn't tell whether these people died because the vaccine was not effective.  It also does not tell if the vaccine was the cause of death.  Do these people have pre-existing medical conditions that often cause death? Technically,  it is just another table with numbers if the numbers have not been analysed.

Does it not mean the Vaccine is not effective?

To understand better,  lets examine the other table,  table 4 as shown here.

This table 4 shows the infection number,  the death figure and the fatality of various virus variants since 1 October 2020.  Then we have  only Alpha. This Alpha caused over 4,000 deaths.  Delta came in after UK has the vaccine.  This Delta caused 42 deaths so far 

What the Tables Mean Exactly ?

Lets analyse the tables and put them into another table as shown below

This  table compares the "performance" of Alpha and Delta so far.  One can readily see that the performance of Delta has reduced drastically ranging from 70%  to 99%.    The rate of infection cases per day went  down by 70% per day and the rate of death  per day down by 98%.

Take Away

Most critics concentrated in comparing the raw death numbers.  This is not reflecting the real effectiveness of the vaccines.  One should always compare the numbers in terms of rates. For example,  US might have 20,000 deaths and Uruguay might have only 2,000.   When comparing in rates, Uruguay have 10 time more infections than the US.