Back in mid-2021, after the mRNA vaccines had been approved for emergency use, the authorities (including the pharma companies), presented a number of arguments to boost acceptance of these products. One was the claim that unvaccinated people in hospitals were more likely to die of COVID than vaccinated patients. A friend recently asked me about this argument, and this was my response.
The claim that COVID deaths in hospitals were more likely to be unvaccinated people than vaccinated ones is no longer being made by anybody who has looked at what happened. Even the pharma companies that are still pushing RNA vaccines seem to have abandoned this bogus claim.
I remember the vaxxed death rate versus the unvaxxed death rate as part of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” scare campaign. This was when Biden and Walensky and Jimmy Kimmel and Rachel Maddow and all the news anchors were telling people that once you got the shot you would never get COVID, and that people like me should be fired from jobs and denied medical care and barred from restaurants and public transit.
I don’t think there was ever a serious study on the death rate issue, and there was certainly nothing that was peer-reviewed. The claims were mostly official-looking press releases from a hospital or a few hospitals, and they never withstood much scrutiny. For one thing, the definition of “vaccinated” tended to differ among these varying reports. Some of the “unvaccinated” COVID victims had actually been vaccinated but were not counted as vaccinated for a number of reasons (too recent, wrong vaccine, etc.). It seemed clear early on that the death-rate argument was not based in any kind of science since the data supporting the various elements of it was so questionable.
First, the largest number of COVID deaths occurred in 2020 when the virus was most lethal since it had not yet started to mutate. Because there was not yet a vaccine, all those early deaths were among the unvaccinated. Were all those people included in the so-called studies? And if so, doesn’t that skew the results toward the unvaxxed-death side of the equation?
But that’s a minor issue. The real problem is that we have no idea how many people died of COVID from 2020 to 2023. We are just now finding that out from studies of the official death data and studies of the autopsies done at the time and filed away without analysis.
As you will recall, the practice was to declare that any death of a person with a “confirmed case” of COVID was a COVID death (in other words, caused by the virus), even if the person displayed no COVID symptoms, was 96 years old, and had congestive heart failure. This was entirely driven by financial incentives from Medicare and the pharma companies. Any death that could conceivably be called a COVID death was called a COVID death.
There was almost nothing the public health authorities would not do to inflate the number of COVID deaths so pretty much everyone who died “with COVID” died “of COVID.” One of the more famous instances occurred when a man who died in a motorcycle crash in Orlando Florida was listed as a COVID death. A public health officer in Orange County, Dr. Raul Pino, justified the result, stating that one “could actually argue that it could have been the COVID-19 that caused him to crash.”
Then there were the flu deaths, which are counted and reported every year by the CDC. Here are the official flu death totals from 2018 to 2023:
2018-19 27,000
2019-20 25,000
2020-21 700
2021-22 4,900
2022-23 21,000
Are we really supposed to think old people stopped dying from the flu in the two flu seasons from 2020 to 2022? Or could it be there were just as many flu deaths, but they were called COVID deaths instead because of the extra money attached?
Now, years later, it will be impossible to unravel all the poor science and outright fraud that went into the designation of COVID deaths. The only thing we really know is that there were not nearly as many COVID deaths as we were told there were.
The problem of determining how many COVID deaths occurred in hospitals brings with it an additional set of difficulties. This is because, during the pandemic, anyone admitted to a hospital was required to take a PCR test for COVID whether they showed any symptoms or not. The hospitals then, following CDC and WHO guidelines, defined a “confirmed case” as a person with a positive test result. No symptoms were ever required. Once you were a “confirmed case,” you were a COVID case, and if you died, you were a COVID death.
This was a fundamental error.
The basic mathematical principle, which has been understood for decades, is that a diagnostic test like the PCR should never be used on a population where only a very small percentage of the test subjects have the disease. In 2021, a letter from the FDA to healthcare providers explained the problem: “As disease prevalence decreases, the percent of test results that are false positives increase.” But though warned not to test for a disease in a low-prevalence population, the CDC decided to do it anyway.
Here’s the problem. If 1% of the population tested has the disease, there will be one true positive in every 100 subjects. So even if your test is 99% COVID-specific (i.e., accurate), it will judge 99 of your 100 subjects correctly and there will be one false positive. This means that among your 100 people, the test will give you one true positive and one false positive. Thus, if you test positive for COVID, there is only a 50-50 chance you actually have it. It’s a coin flip, and the test is worthless, even though it is 99% accurate.
But in fact, PCR tests were quite a bit less reliable than that. First, the rate of active COVID infection at any one time among the general population was always less than 1% (it was actually about 0.5%). This could mean there would be fewer than 1 true positive in every 100 hospital admissions. But even if people entering the hospital were ten times as likely to have COVID as the general population, that would still mean only 5 out of 100 would be true COVID cases.
The real problem is that PCR tests were never close to being as accurate as in the example above. Instead of being 99% COVID-specific, the CDC found they were only about 70% COVID-specific, meaning they would produce 30% false positives. If there were 5 true positives and 30 false positives in every 100 hospital admissions, the false positives would be 85% of the total. Whatever the actual numbers were, a large majority of the positive PCR results were false positives and most of the “confirmed cases” in hospitals did NOT have COVID.
The stated justification for this universal testing protocol in hospital admissions was that it would reduce widespread outbreaks in hospitals, though it is hard to see how falsely identifying large numbers of patients as having COVID would have that effect. But the clear result was there were an enormous number of patients who had no COVID symptoms and did not have COVID, but were deemed to be COVID cases. And when they died, they became hospital COVID deaths. Some of them were vaccinated and some of them were not, but none of them died of COVID.
The sum total of all this bad science piled on top of itself is that nobody now has any realistic measure of how many COVID deaths there were in hospitals or anywhere else, or whether most of the people who died of COVID were vaccinated or not.
Copyright2024MichaelKubacki
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