The Wealth Theory of Vaccine Efficacy Confounding Gets a Boost

The Vaccine Wars Part XLVIII

Aug 5

Pun intended, of course.

A couple of months ago, I ran some analyses on U.S. countywide data carefully put together from several sources. What I found was that

There were small and inconsistent correlations that pointed to Vaccine Efficacy (VE).
These correlations matched perfectly with county wealth differentials.
The county-level mortality data from 2019 was highly predictive of the same data from 2021, just slightly scaled.

In other words, the mild VE noted in U.S. statistics, that does not seem to match results from elsewhere in the world, much less global summaries, seems to be entirely explained by wealth effects that do not otherwise fall into variable categories we usually examine for confounding effects. And that makes sense when you think about the way Mendellian genetics studies rarely find substantial effects without aggregating hundreds or thousands of genes. Wealth improves lives in innumerable ways.

Rounding the Earth Newsletter

A Mechanistic Explanation of the Vaccine Efficacy Illusion

About a week ago I published a first "Who Died During the Plandemonium?" Article. I plan a sequel, but the first one spurred a ton of good discussion. Some of that took place at the first RTE Clubhouse Chat (again at 8:30 PM Eastern each Monday). I thought that first conversation was great. Not long after that conversation, I saw Ethical Skeptical on Tw…

4 months ago · 146 likes · 72 comments · Mathew Crawford

I was recently made aware of this study (Rancourt et al, 2022) recently posted to preprint with the following meandering title:

I was planning to discuss the data, but instead I will simply point out that it falls in line with the "VE as wealth effects" hypothesis, and point readers to my friend Joel's discussion:

Dead Man Talking

COVID-Period Mass Vaccination Campaign and Public Health Disaster in the USA From age/state-resolved all-cause mortality by time, age-resolved vaccine delivery by time, and socio-geo-economic data.

The COVID-19 vaccination campaign did not reduce all-cause mortality during the covid period. No deaths, within the resolution of all-cause mortality, can be said to have been averted due to vaccination in the USA. The mass vaccination campaign was not justified in terms of reducing excess all-cause mortality. The large excess mortality of the covid period, far above the historic trend, was maintained throughout the entire covid period irrespective of the unprecedented vaccination campaign, and is very strongly correlated (r = +0.86) to poverty, by state; in fact, proportional to poverty. It is also correlated to several other socio-economic and health factors, by state, but not correlated to population fractions (65+, 75+, 85+ years) of elderly state residents…

2 months ago · 116 likes · 50 comments · Joel Smalley

This spurred in me the idea of reworking the U.S. county data along economic strata. That's generally the way we tease out Simpson's paradoxes. While I suspect that I already largely know what the results will look like, it's important to do the work to see.