Negative Vaccine Effectiveness Isn’t a New Phenomenon – It Turned Up in the Swine Flu Vaccine
This is a guest post by Mike Hearn, a software engineer who between 2006-2014 worked at Google in roles involving data analysis.Conclusions
Negative effectiveness is important because if a vaccine halves your risk of getting one virus but doubles your risk of getting a closely related virus, you can end up back at square one. In fact, you’d end up in a worse position than when you started because vaccination programmes aren’t free: they consume enormous resources, both financially and in terms of public health staffing, and cause collateral damage via vaccine injuries (hence why vaccine manufacturers refuse to accept liability for harm caused by their products). It’s therefore of critical importance to understand the gestalt effect of vaccination on the immune system, and not merely on the specific variant of a virus that was originally targeted.The fact that papers published as recently as 2018 are talking about negative vaccine effectiveness as a new, not really understood effect should give governments serious pause for thought. Most people in public health are clearly unfamiliar with this phenomenon – as indeed we all are – and are thus tempted to either ignore it, delete it from their data, or try to convince the public that it must be a statistical artefact and anyone talking about it is guilty of spreading “misinformation”. The reports in these papers provide recent evidence that vaccines making epidemics worse is in fact a real phenomenon and that it has been previously detected by serious researchers who took every effort to avoid that conclusion.
Nonetheless, despite my harsh words about IFR education above, we must acknowledge that the UKHSA is so far standing by the basic moral and foundational principles of public statistics. Their answer to the confounders and denominators debate is clearly written, straightforward, reasonable and ends by saying:
That’s absolutely true. The deep exploration of obscure but important topics by independent parties is possible in the U.K. largely because the HSA is not only publishing statistics in both raw and processed forms, but has continued to do so even in the face of pressure tactics from organisations like Full Fact and the so-called Office for Statistical Regulation (whose contribution to these matters has so far been quite worthless). England is one of the very few countries in the world in which this level of conversation is possible, as most public health agencies have long ago decided not to trust the population with raw data in useful form. While the outcomes may or may not be “increasing vaccine confidence in this country and worldwide”, as the HSA goes on to say, there are actually things more important than vaccines that people need confidence in – like government and society itself. Trustworthy and rigorously debated government statistics are a fundamental pillar on which democratic legitimacy and thus social stability rests. Other parts of the world should learn from the British government’s example.
Many questions now lie open:
- To what extent does negative effectiveness require viruses to be different? For example, is the difference between H1N1 and the flu strains targeted by the Canadian TIV bigger, smaller or the same as the gap between COVID Alpha and COVID Delta, as perceived by the immune system?
- Although highly suggestive, is this genuinely happening with COVID vaccines, or is raw negative effectiveness due to something else, e.g. a temporal artefact caused by splitting waves into two overlapping waves as effectiveness wears off, or indeed, due to lack of adjustments for factors that TNCC fixes even though it may introduce other problems?
- Should this cause health authorities to abandon TNCC as a methodology, despite its speed and cost advantages?
