Et tu, John?

Before MSM runs off with it, you should know that Norman Fenton and Martin Neil reviewed an article (just say quietly: debunked) which states that the vaccines would have saved 14.8 million years of life. You can download the pre-print of that paper Download here as a PDF. It will irrevocably lead to jubilant stories in NRC and Volkskrant, because their primary task is simply to calm the people in periods of great fear. Critical journalism simply does not fit very well with managing the masses, they will think for themselves and of course we should not have that according to the Klok doctrine.

The paper calculates with VE, IFR and infection rates as if it were nothing, but we now know how difficult the VE is to measure, that it is quite uncertain how many people have actually come into contact with the virus and that you need to know how many registered Covid deaths there would not have been without Covid. The VE they want to quantify is already an assumption in the formula they use to calculate!
The infection forecasts with and without vaccination are estimates anyway.

It is also notable that the vaccination mortality is set to zero. It doesn't participate for a while, for convenience. This also applies to vaccination damage, while both could still have an effect on the 14.8 million life years saved (or with vaccination damage converted into QALYs.)

A curious sentence was also: "Het aantal levens dat tijdens de Omicron-periode werd gered, bleek iets hoger te liggen dan het aantal levens dat vóór de Omicron-periode werd gered." (So when almost no one died of Covid thanks to Omicron, not even in barely vaccinated areas, the vaccine saved more lives. yes right.)
The subsequent explanation is not convincing either. But read for yourself.

Below is the complete translation of the English article of Fenton and Neil.

John Ioannidis uses circular assumptions about 'safe and effective' vaccination in a model to show that vaccine has saved millions of lives.

Imagine that we want to test the claim that a special diet - let's call it D - consisting of consuming 10,000 calories per day without any exercise will lead to a weight loss of 25 kilos in 5 weeks. To make such a bold claim you would expect us to examine the evidence by comparing people's recorded weight before and after following the diet.

But suppose our 'proof' is nothing other than the following mathematical model:

• Weight loss after n weeks in kilos = n x efficiency_D
  where efficiëntie_D is the average weekly weight loss of diet D.
• Suppose we assume
  efficiëntie_D = 5
• With these assumptions, we then calculate
  Weight loss after 5 weeks in kilos = 5 x 5 = 25

QED! We can now rely on the claim that the special diet D does indeed lead to weight loss of 25 kilos in 5 weeks. There is no arguing with that (hand on heart).

Would you be convinced by this argument? Or would you feel very uncomfortable and strongly suspect that this is magic? Considering that the purpose of the study is to test the claim, don't you find it strange that the main assumption in the model (i.e. efficiëntie_D = 5) is essentially exactly the claim we are trying to test?!

Isn't it all a bit circular and goal-oriented?

Well, it turns out that a study claiming to test the claim that the Covid vaccine saved millions of lives (just like a Previous research of Imperial College) is not based on a comparison of empirical mortality rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, but rather on the above-mentioned 'scientific' methodology.

This scientific study applied the same highly sophisticated logic and similar circular assumptions used to test the claims about the special diet, D, namely that:

• Without vaccination, Covid infects and kills many people.
• The vaccine is effective; People who don't get the vaccine are four times more likely to get Covid than people who do.
• The vaccine is completely safe, i.e. no one dies as a side effect of the vaccine.

Below is the headline of the article. Pay special attention to the identity of the first author:

The first author of this article is none other than one of the most respected scientists in the world, John Ioannidis of Stanford University, who in 2020 real world data to show that Covid was not at all as deadly as claimed.

And here, in its entirety, is the mathematical model in the paper that was used to claim that 14.8 million years of life were saved by the vaccine:

For each age group of the population, the number of lives saved in that age group is L:

L = N x PI x IFR x VE

Whereby:

• N: number of people in that age group
• PI: number of people in that age group who would be infected with covid (without a vaccine)
• IFR: fatality rate of infection in that age group (i.e. the percentage of infected who die)
• VE: the efficacy of the vaccine in that age group (that is one minus the ratio between the percentage of vaccinated people who get covid and the percentage of unvaccinated people who get covid).

With the exception of N, all the true values assumed in the equation are fanciful, based on a host of unproven assumptions, such as that the numbers of Covid cases were accurate. Specific:

• PI is assumed to be 20% (i.e. in the absence of the vaccine, 20% of the population is assumed to have contracted Covid).
• IFR in each age group is based on Ioannidis' work that showed that older people were at much higher risk; but the values are still based on the (incorrect) assumptions that those classified as Covid cases actually had the disease and that those who died did indeed die from Covid disease.
• The VE is based on the assumption that those classified as Covid cases did indeed have the disease. More importantly, the data used is based on studies that we have shown to be systematic shortcomings show. The article also assumes (pre-Omicron) that VE = 75%, d.w.z. dat an unvaccinated person is four times more likely to get covid than an unvaccinated person. This is nonsense.

Although a number of people have publicly criticized the article, there is one point that no one seems to have raised and that is that it demonstrates, unwittingly, an extremely important point, namely:

Since there is no real-world data showing that the vaccines saved lives, we know that the estimates of the vaccines' effectiveness - such as the 75% assumed in the study - are empirically incorrect.

Perhaps this was actually the covert conclusion Ioannidis hoped to derive from the article? If not, why would he want to be associated with junk work masquerading as real 'research'? That's inexplicable, or at least mysterious.

Op de voorkant van het artikel staat dat er geen financiering of belangenverstrengeling was verbonden aan het artikel, hoewel er staat: "Het werk van John Ioannidis wordt ondersteund door een onbeperkte gift van Sue en Bob O'Donnell aan de Stanford Universiteit".

Although this paper by Ioannidis has not yet been peer-reviewed, it is already being used as "overwhelming evidence" of how great the vaccines were. The 2022 Imperial article claiming 20 million lives had been saved by the vaccine was published in no less than the Lancet, despite being based on similarly circular ridiculous assumptions. It has since been used in multiple high-level reports and forums as justification for the motivation to continue with the vaccine rollout.

As explained in this short video, we can't just ignore or laugh at such nonsense: