I haven’t seen a review of this particular study, just published, based on data from Hong Kong, on Substack yet, so maybe this time I have got in first? Or maybe writers have given up reporting on dodgy studies. I saw it on our legacy news media here this week.
Maybe it was a slow news week in Australia? Novak Djokovic just won the Australian Open on Sunday after being locked up and then deported this time last year. Not much to report.
The study considers itself important because it covers the whole of Hong Kong (7.5M people) and they apparently had access to all the data through a common hospital system. In particular, this study looked at people who had more than one comorbidity. So this is the population who are at high risk from COVID. The news article provided no actual reference to the paper but I found it here by searching. The supplement with tables and graphs is here.
The Nine news reports: “The robust results will contribute to the evidence base that getting boosted provides strong protection against death from COVID-19.”
"As the data on SARS-CoV-2 vaccination records used for this study was provided by the sole operator of vaccine roll-out in Hong Kong, with a unified recording system, and with linked clinical records provided by a territory-wide public health care provider, our data should be highly reliable and representative"
The study covered Pfizer and also the Chinese Sinovac injections in separate analyses. The report was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on 30 Jan 2023 so the reporter was quick off the mark, copy pasting the press release.
First, who funds the authors? Looking at the Competing Interests section I count Pfizer 5 times amongst the authors including the senior author. But this study itself was funded by a government grant.
The authors postulate why they achieved a 95% reduced risk of death, for those with the booster (for Pfizer), as that is higher than any other studies. Somehow it is perhaps due to the rapid waning of 2 doses in that cohort.
In the limitations section they admit that confounding was possible as randomisation was not possible. They postulate that those people with comorbidities who get the booster early may be better educated, more health aware and more proactive in health seeking behaviours.
This is the usual nonsense that is written in these studies. However, I note that in the data they include people who transition from 2 dose to 3 dose during the study. So apparently people become better educated as they take the extra shot?
They admit that people who get more shots may take more precautions to avoid COVID.
Here’s the important graph from the paper. It is of the Cumulative Incidence. This is basically adding up over time how many people die in each group. The group that is higher at the end of the timescale loses. That’s the 2 dose group, green lines, in graphs below.
What can we tell from these graphs?
More 2 dose people (the green lines) die over time, compared to those boosting. But wait, look at time zero on the graphs. There is a difference right from day one!
The boosters are magic. On the day you get the booster you are less likely to die.
I checked the paper and the index date for the 3 dose is the date of injection, ie no 14 day lag or anything. For the 2 dose group the start date is some arbitrary time after their 2nd shot such that it is thought the effectiveness of the second dose has waned. For those interested there is a section about a “pseudo-index” for them.
This splitting of the incidence lines for the two groups, from time zero, is a typical indication of confounding. The two groups they are comparing clearly have different health backgrounds. We know it is nonsense that the booster protects from death immediately.
I recalled that a while back I saw a Substack from Vinay Prasad, when he was being critical of that fact that there was no valid justification of 4th doses.
For those interested the link in his post to the paper he is referencing is incorrect. This is the correct reference. It is an Israeli study. A similar graph shows how a second booster is better than first:
Vinay Prasad zooms in to show the splitting of the lines:
And of course, it is impossible that the 2nd booster is having an effect on mortality within this time period. He also points out in that study that those who got the 4th dose were more likely to be Jewish than Arab, with potential difference in health outcomes.
All these studies show is that they are comparing death rates in two fundamentally different groups. This is the thing that Randomised Control Trials (RCT’s) are meant to take care of. But RCT’s are no longer performed. We only need 8 mice (in the case of new bivalent boosters) .
In the case of the Hong Kong study I looked at the actual number of people who died. For the Pfizer it was 34 in the 2 dose group and 5 in the booster group out of approximately 120,000 people.
This seems a small number of total deaths to make grand claims. As an aside, I recently became aware of the work being done looking into the original Pfizer trials via Naomi Wolf’s organisation. An Australian doctor, Jeyanthi Kunadhasan, who I met recently, is involved in the detailed analysis. See the interesting article in the Spectator she has written here. The 95% effectiveness (protection from infection) figure from the original Pfizer trials was based on a total of 170 people who supposedly caught COVID. From what I have seen there was so much manipulation done to get these people. It also included a large proportion from the dodgy site 1231 in Argentina. It’s a write up for another day.
Back to Hong Kong…
In this total Pfizer group there were 455 with dementia and 1700 with metastatic cancer. One can imagine that a booster dose may not be given to certain of these vulnerable people and they may be more at risk of death from COVID. We have no idea of the range of conditions of people within these groups, or their ages.
The outcome for a total of 39 people is justifying their result.
These studies are nonsense and provide little useful information. If they were serious, they would look at all-cause mortality over the same period. How many people total die in each group? Then there is no argument about whether they really had COVID. We are never given that data.
In fact, we are more likely to learn from what they don’t show.
As a final note this is a recommendation for something to watch. Vera Sharav is a Holocaust survivor and human rights activist. An amazing lady in her 80’s. She was interviewed on the Highwire last week.
She has just produced a 5-part series called “Never Again”. It relates times past to the events of the last few years. It has just been released on chd.tv
Watching is an emotional experience. It is food for thought in this time of political correctness, where referencing the Holocaust causes outrage. Her point is warning of the environment that allowed the Holocaust to happen in the first place.
My own father was Polish and suffered in the forced labour/concentration camps during WWII so it has special meaning to me. We watched the first episode last night. It is heavy going but worth it.
Also isn't there a confounder that those who got boosted had to run the gauntlet of the 2nd jab too... i.e. at some point they a;; were in the other group. Those who were already vulnerable would have got picked off at this stage - i.e. a survivor bias effect.