Original article (in Croatian) was published on 07/03/2022
The website Logicno.com “discovered” a pre-publication of the study by a doctoral student of political science Kyle Beattie and a text of entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, according to which “Vaccination increased mortality in Croatia by 43%, Serbia by 32%, BiH by 30%, Slovenia by 27%”.
Counting the victims of the war in Ukraine will systematically “cover up” any news of thousands of vaccine deaths here. No media will share the results of a scientific study based on data from 145 countries…
For Croatia, Covid vaccination is said to have increased mortality by +43%. (p. 37) That means more vaccinations – more mortality. That means – they lied.
Logicno claims that there are differences between vaccine shipments, so some are more deadly than others.
If you think that Croatia (+43%) got a very deadly vaccine series, wait to see which series of vaccines they sent to Orban (mortality +99, i.e., lethality = 0.76 – twice as strong as Plenkovic’s).
In addition to not being published, the study on which Logicno based this sensational “discovery” is population-based (ecological study). Such studies compare pooled data from whole groups or populations and serve to find a correlation between exposure to a potential risk factor and the incidence of the disease. They are relatively fast and inexpensive compared to studies such as randomized controlled trials.
However, they also have significant limitations. For example, they find it difficult to detect variables that affect the outcome of an experiment and are not among the variables studied in the experiment. Therefore, they are used to set future research direction and not draw causal conclusions.
How did Beattie come to these conclusions?
Health Feedback questions how Beattie analyzed the “cause-and-effect” of the Covid-19 vaccine on Covid-19 cases and deaths.
To do so, he used data from Oxford’s Our World in Data page, a public database of Covid-19. He used the total number of cases and deaths in 145 countries in the past 12 to 16 months before the vaccine application started in those countries. From these data, he then created projections, i.e., the hypothetical number of patients and deaths in the following period if there was no vaccine.
He then compared those figures to the actual numbers of cases and deaths in those countries. If it were shown that some countries have a higher number of cases and deaths after the Covid-19 vaccine came into use, compared to its projected pre-vaccination figures, he would conclude that vaccines are the cause of this increase.
Omitted factors
However, this conclusion completely ignores other factors that may have contributed to these figures. One of them is the emergence of new variants. The delta variant did not appear until late 2020 and spread around the world only after the launch of vaccination campaigns, and it spread faster and gave a much more serious clinical picture of Covid than previous strains of the virus.
Furthermore, in order to discuss the impact of vaccines on mortality and the number of infections in general, it is necessary to know the vaccination status of the sick and the dead, and to distinguish outcomes based on vaccination status during the analysis. Beattie did not do that either – it was completely ignored that the analyzed populations have both vaccinated and unvaccinated, only the cumulative number of dead and infected is taken into account.
Beattie also does not take into account epidemiological measures that have been applied with different intensities in different countries. Hospital capacities were not taken into account either.
Examples from the same source
Our World In Data produces analyzes from which it is possible to discern the proportion of cases of infection and death based on vaccination status. It follows that vaccines do not increase the risk of disease and death. Health Feedback singles out examples from Switzerland, Chile, the US and England that show that unvaccinated people are more likely to have more severe outcomes.
On the same website, it is possible to find a link to statistics from Slovenia, which has a higher share of the vaccinated population than Croatia. The text by Logicno explains that Slovenia had better results, i.e., fewer deaths because it had fewer lethal doses of vaccines (!?). The different “lethality of the delivered series of Covid vaccines in a particular country” is nonsense that can be attributed exclusively to the unsigned author from the website. Namely, neither Kirsch nor Beattie mentions any stratification of the “lethality” of individual vaccine shipments.
The effectiveness of the vaccine weakens, but the effect is not the aggravation of the disease
It is undisputed that compared to later variants of the virus, the vaccines were less effective than the original SARS-CoV-2, based on which the vaccines were made. Also, the immunity acquired by the vaccine weakens over time and this has been reported in all countries that have carried out mass vaccination.
This is evidenced by data from the Croatian Institute of Public Health.
But later variants of the virus break through defenses not only acquired by vaccination but also by infection. This is especially true for omicron.