How Effective Are the Covid Vaccines? By Eugene Kusmiak

This is a comprehensive deep dive, a Herculean effort, into the statistics and science concerning the efficacy of the Covid vaccines. It’s surprising readable considering the depth of analysis. From Eugene Kusmiak at unz.com:

This is the companion, perhaps less controversial, piece to my article on vaccine safety. It contains research papers and government data published in 2022 on the (in)effectiveness of the Covid vaccines.

First, to clarify what “vaccine effectiveness” means. This term has been used in 4 different ways:

1. Effectiveness in reducing Covid infection. Effectiveness against infection is the primary definition of the term “vaccine effectiveness”. Unfortunately, the data generally shows negative vaccine effectiveness against Covid infection, at least for the Omicron variant, meaning that vaccinated people catch Omicron more than unvaccinated people do, even controlling for age, health, and other confounders. The Covid vaccines are not just ineffective, they are anti-effective. Getting vaccinated makes you more likely to catch the latest variants of Covid, not less.
2. Effectiveness in reducing Covid transmission. This is considered identical to effectiveness against infection because only infected people can be contagious. The main difference between the two is that it’s easy to measure infections – just see if the person is sick – but it’s hard to measure transmissions – you would have to monitor all of the person’s contacts for illness. So, no one actually measures effectiveness against transmission. It’s just assumed to be the same as effectiveness against infection.
3. Effectiveness in reducing serious Covid illness including hospitalization. The evidence is fairly clear that taking the vaccine reduces serious disease and hospitalization, although there are some reports to the contrary.
4. Effectiveness in reducing Covid deaths. The data is also pretty clear that the vaccine reduces deaths from Covid. The original vaccines (which only contained the spike protein of the Wuhan variant) definitely protected people against death from the 2020 Wuhan variant and from the 2021 Delta variant of Covid. With the 2022 Omicron variant, most studies show some protection, although some don’t.

Below, I’m going to write mostly about the vaccine’s ineffectiveness against Omicron infection, hence transmission. I accept the conventional wisdom that it is somewhat effective against Omicron hospitalization and death.

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