Lastly, the Commonwealth Fund released a paper purporting to prove Covid jabs had saved almost 3.3 million lives and prevented 18.6 million hospitalizations in the US.
I didn’t plan to mail about this; the figures are absurd on their face.
The hospitalization number is particularly stupid, implying that 6 percent of Americans would have been hospitalized for Covid without the vaccines. What?
But now the media is writing about this study as if it is something other than a joke. They’re using it to prop up the faltering campaigns for Covid boosters and shots for kids.
CNN: Covid-19 vaccines have saved more than 3 million lives in US, study says, but the fight isn’t over
The Hill: Covid vaccines saved 3.2 million U.S. lives, researchers say
Et cetera.
Let’s pretend for argument’s sake that the paper’s claim that the vaccines stopped 54 million Covid infections between April and November 2022 is correct, rather than absurd. Fine. The paper then claims that avoiding those 54 million infections prevented 1 million deaths.
In other words, Commonwealth is estimating an infection fatality rate from Omicron almost 2 percent (1 million deaths out of 54 million infections). That estimate is at least 20 times the actual infection fatality rate for the Omicron variant - and not because of vaccines. In 2020, before vaccines existed, the original Sars-Cov-2 had an infection fatality rate in the range of 0.3 percent - and Omicron is significantly less lethal than the original.
Claiming Omicron has a death rate of 2 percent is worse than a joke.
It’s dishonest, and the only reason to do it is to produce numbers that friendly reporters can paste into headlines and post on Twitter. One last point: Omicron has killed fewer than 500,000 people WORLDWIDE since April, even though most of the world does not use the mRNA jabs. How could it have killed 1 million Americans in the last eight months under any circumstances?
This paper is an embarrassment, and so is anyone who repeats what it says without checking it. Which won’t stop CNN. |