by Tom Evslin
….Because that’ll mean that 100% of people are vaccinated.
The numbers we hear in the nightly news consistently undermine the importance of vaccination even though the intent is to do the exact opposite. Problem is that neither political leaders nor most reporters know much about statistics. There’s enough misinformation current so you certainly should ask why you should believe my applied statistics 101 in this post. I’m not an epidemiologist or even a medical professional; I didn’t sleep in a Holiday Inn Express last night. I have made my living with statistics-based software which controls things in real time based on statistical information and I have some related patents. Still, you should be skeptical and judge whether what I’m saying makes sense.
What does 95% effective mean?
Developing vaccines which were initially “95% effective” at warp speed was an enormous achievement even though the efficacy wanes with time and is reduced by mutations. But what does 95% effective mean? Does it mean that you have only a 5% chance of getting Covid if you’re vaccinated? NO. Definitely not! It means that people who were vaccinated in the study groups were only 5% as likely to get symptomatic Covid as those who were given a placebo. If 500 out of 10,000 unvaccinated people got Covid, the studies are saying that only 25 similarly situated vaccinated people had symptoms. That’s huge and that’s the reason the vaccines were quite properly authorized for emergency use almost as soon as these results were available.
What if everyone were vaccinated?
Then all cases would be breakthrough cases but there’d still be cases. If the chance of an unvaccinated person contracting symptomatic Covid at a particular time and place during any given month is 2% and vaccinated people statistically have 95% protection (5% breakthrough rate), then the chance of a vaccinated person getting infected is 0.1%, a small number but not nothing. If 300,000,000 of us are vaccinated and the breakthrough rate is 0.1% (numbers for illustration only), then we’d still expect 300,000 cases per month. 100% of these would be breakthrough cases. Would that mean the vaccines aren’t working? Of course not. Without them there would’ve been 6 million cases, 20 times more.
Moreover vaccinated people are saving the lives of the unvaccinated by reducing the overall spread rate. If everyone were vaccinated, cases would quickly become rare and far between and then almost non-existent in the vaccinated population – fingers crossed on mutations and booster shots.
What to watch for
As more people are vaccinated, the number of symptomatic Covid cases among vaccinated people will go up. As we have less unvaccinated people the number of cases among the unvaxxed will go down. The numbers that are important are the rate among the vaccinated and the rate among the unvaccinated. These rates are confirming the efficacy of the vaccines although both the Delta variant and the apparent waning of effectiveness are muddying the waters. Both rates will go down as the unvaxxed get a free ride from the vaxxed – fingers still crossed on mutations and booster shots.
But immunity doesn’t mean you can’t get Covid
Even if a vaccine is 100% effective (none are), they don’t stop you from getting infected. Your immune system has no way to destroy pathogens before they enter the body. It can only fight them on home territory. Even if we are “immune” because of either prior infection or vaccination, pathogens we come in contact with do establish small beachheads on our bodies before being repelled by the prepared immune system. Unfortunately in the case of Covid even those beachheads – often too small to be noticed – can be the staging ground for infecting someone else. We vaccinated people are much less a breeding ground for virus than the unvaxxed; but we can still spread the disease.
95% effective doesn’t mean 95% improved protection at the individual level
Vaccines work by preparing your immune system to fight a particular pathogen. If you have a strong immune system, that preparation may well be enough to assure that it will always defeat the pathogen before it is a serious threat to you. On the other hand, if you have a weak immune system because of disease or treatment for disease, you will have a much smaller chance of beating back the disease. Your immune system will be forewarned but outgunned. The 95% statistic is a group statistic and useful for populations but not individuals. It is a blend of those for whom the vaccine is close to 100% effective and those for whom it is not very effective at all. That’s why the immunocompromised need – and are going to get – boosters ASAP.
And in conclusion…
Get the shot if you haven’t. Get your booster as soon as it is available. And, even if vaxxed, wear your mask where there is high likelihood of getting or transmitting disease.
See also:
Most Workers Should be Required to Get Vaccinations
The author is an inventor, entrepreneur, former Cabinet-level state official, and publisher of the blog Fractals of Change. He lives in Stowe.
Categories: Commentary
An astonishing display of official-narrative thinking, utterly beyond help. Statistical Jedi mind tricks don’t budge some inconvenient facts:
Evslin clearly doesn’t understand how the trials were rigged to prove efficacy. The “95%” figure referred to relative efficacy, not absolute efficacy, as Peter Doshi correctly pointed out in the BMJ. The absolute risk reduction is barely more than 1% when those trials are scrutinized.
“We vaccinated people are much less a breeding ground for virus than the unvaxxed.” Perhaps Evslin is unaware of the recent study on breakthrough cases from Vietnam that found “Viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with old strains.” (In other words: vaccinated people in that study were asymptomatic super-spreaders.)
Evslin has seemingly no understanding of the important role of natural immunity. Natural immunity — with a more diverse array of antibodies and T-cell receptors — will provide better protection overall as it has more targets in which to attack the virus, whereas vaccine-derived immunity only focuses on one portion of the virus, in this case, the spike protein. Once that portion of the virus has mutated sufficiently, the vaccine no longer is effective. Hence the breakthroughs, which are going to explode come fall.
And, of course, the usual blindness to the skyrocketing VAERS reports of injuries and deaths, which have already made this vaccine–if you can actually call gene therapy a vaccine– statistically the most dangerous in history.
But all of that is just needless detail. Go get your shot.
Why people who got vaccinated are catching covid and dieting, you president let illegals in dropped all over the U.S. in vaccinated ,caring covid , you can’t even make a cure for the common cold virus , but under a yr you had a vaccination for the covid virus
Well…Looks like the 95% efficacy is down to about 60% now requiring “boosters”? And WHY did Pfizer ditch the Placebo Group in their “studies”? Want a real laugh? Just Google “Pfizers Criminal History” and see/read what comes up! Trust US! Would WE lie to you?
The Mayo Clinic has stated adverse events/breakthrough cases as it relates to the ‘jab’ include but are not limited to: acute kidney injury, anemia/low platelet count, cardiac arrest, chronic fatigue syndrome (inflammation of the central nervous system), encephalopathy delirium/caused by toxins in the blood/damages the brain, hyper-tension, plural infusion: fluid between the lungs and chest, sepsis/chemicals throughout the body causing massive inflammation, acute respiratory distress/failure and disseminated vascular coagulation/THROMBOSIS.
The medical community is NOT encouraged to report these as their jobs/reputations may be threatened/eliminated.
Or maybe we’re already here? “Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on Tuesday that, at some point in the future, a strain of COVID-19 that is resistant to vaccines is likely to emerge” Interesting that there are 9 new billionaires in the pharmaceutical industry, when this, IF its as bad as they want us to believe, should be a humanitarian effort, shouldn’t it?? Paid for by the US taxpayers, shouldn’t make people billionaires…….Wonder if they’ll keep it all or kick 10% back to the “Big Guy”.
Mr Evslin spouts fancy numbers and statistics once again to try to convince someone to listen. Unfortunately, Mr Evslin’s arguments are but a fraction of the whole picture. Immunization is a risk, and requires an informed decision. The proven risk of Covid illness and mortality is not what’s being questioned. The risk that any vaccine has, based on the benefit of that vaccine is what is being debated. Clearly we know Covid risk factors- age, co-morbidities, obesity, are not disputed. We have quickly learned how to protect those at risk, and we do- to the best of our current knowledge.
Great thinkers such as Mr. Evslin have not included natural immunity and treatment in there dire warnings and murderous accusations. What, Mr Evslin is the risk to a Covid recovered 12 year old of receiving a vaccination? How about a 20 or 30 year old? Do the risks of the vaccine outweigh the disease itself, considering these people have had it and recovered? Could it be that the vaccine causes harm to them- and the virus is able to mutate around both the vaccine and natural immunity? Your blanket”get the shot” is nothing more than an platitude without some better answers. Until our Federal alphabet agencies stop playing politics and start looking at natural immunity and treatment anything you seers of knowledge have to say is pure conjecture.
By following your “statistics 101” we’d all end up locked in our houses, masked and waiting for the next booster shot.
This Fool has been drinking the Blue Koolaid . Big words do not Counteract the facts , More People have Died from The Jabs than from Covid
‘This Ends The Debate’ – Israeli Study Shows Natural Immunity 13x More Effective Than Vaccines At Stopping Delta
Alex Berenson, a science journalist who has repeatedly questioned the efficacy of vaccines and masks at preventing COVID, touted the study as enough to “end any…
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/ends-debate-israeli-study-shows-natural-immunity-13x-more-effective-vaccines-stopping
And one more thing to add to the comments shared above that really covered it perfectly, despite your analysis of the data which according to the “narrative” would be spot-on, all the data has been collected using the RT-PCR test, which is not a gold standard Covid specific test, despite what has been said about it. It could never be, it is always a surrogate test which must be calibrated FROM a gold standard test or marker, which it never was. It is why it will soon no longer be used. AIDS researchers used to joke about the fact they they could hop continents and either have HIV or not based on countries using differing cycle thresholds. The PCR test cannot test for infection, it is not a binary test and the state of VT has been using a cycle threshold of 40 which has been shown to result in 80-90% false positives. This really gets to the heart of the matter with the data and so unfortunately all of your hard work with the data analysis and explanation is unfortunately meaningless and has no ground to stand on because the tool used to gather the data was never intended for this use and is a gross misuse of the tool. I am sorry about this, I wish it were more common knowledge, it is quite unfortunate in more ways than one. If you are interested, it is really worth looking into Kary Mullis the Nobel Laureate inventor of the PCR test. Unfortunately he has passed away but He has done some great interviews about the misuse of his tool and has some very strong opinions on Fauci and AIDS, really worth listening to, wish he was alive now to shed more light. Thank you for your efforts but until people can realize the PCR issue, there will continue to be confusion and misunderstanding.
Wonderful kitchen table talk with Kary Mullis on the F word.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/OOpWClE6s9A9/
Relevant.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/gVc1zKFPZqH8/
Dr. Lee Merrit, tenured Navy doctor, on the mass vax of the military, they are dying, getting tumors, myocarditis with a 66% 5 year mortality rate on the heart damage, when there is virtually no “covid” mortality in the military. There will be after the jabs.
She states “Why are we not stopping this?” … “If you think we are fighting a virus you are going to act like a victim. If you think we’re fighting a war you are going to act like a warrior. My argument is we are in a war. It’s a fifth generation, uncharacteristic, unrestricted war, now we have to determine who the enemy is.”
Evslin obviously LOVES to see his name plastered everywhere; talking nonsense. For starters, I’d like to see him defend his position as to what constitutes a vaccine and the efficacy of masks and the PCR test.