SummerSimo Travel Troubles Notes and The Purring Page

Science is not a series of Ipse Dixit, of wrong or right, of absolute belief versus heresy, but is, or should be, a continuous discussion and verification.

Unfortunately, this is happening less and less, and academia, and research, is suffering, as recent scandals also show. For example, there has always been talk about the exceptional efficacy of vaccines in reducing mortality, with even 90% peaks in preventing deaths. Yet some doctors have a doubt, and they express it through the normal academic avenues, that is, with a letter to a scientific journal, in this case the New England Journal of Medicine.

Drs. Hoeg, Duriseti and Prasag write, referring to Arbel’s December 2021 research that showed vaccine efficacy of 90 percent in preventing deaths

The 90% lower adjusted mortality due to Covid-19 reported among participants who received a booster cannot, with certainty, be attributed to the booster. The “healthy vaccinee bias” in this population may also have led to overestimation of vaccine efficacy in similar Clalit Health Services studies. The inclusion of Covid-19 unrelated mortality in all observational studies of the Covid-19 vaccine would provide important context.

What does it mean ? That while mortality was calculated on the entire population of unvaccinated, pure extremely sick people who would have died anyway, the vaccine booster was instead given to relatively healthy people, excluding those who had fatal conditions. This means that if we considered 100 people in the unvaccinated group and 100 in the vaccinated group, in the former group there were also seriously ill people, in the latter these were excluded. So it is obvious that there was a bias in mortality between the two groups, with the former group showing more decedents anyway, because it included extremely sick people. The exact equality between the treated group and the control group would have been violated. This is a problem that often occurs in vaccine-related research, and it is due to the fact that people who are severely

The challenge is part of the normal scientific process and is, in fact, answered: the authors of the original study admit that severe hospitalized people with other diseases were not inoculated. So the 90% effectiveness in preventing mortality with boosters would be inflated and would need corrections, as the study authors themselves note.

I point out that the same journal published original research, scientific rebuttal and researchers’ response. Because that’s how science, real science, should work, not with bans and jail time for objectors. Contestations are answered if one has something to say.