The goalposts keep moving. The latest we are being told is that the COVID vaccine keeps the illness from being as severe. We are told that we should trust the science, and I am a facts and figures kind of guy, so let’s do just that.
So we will do what is called a retrospective analysis of COVID data to see if the presence of the vaccine changed the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of COVID. All figures for this analysis were obtained from this website.
By December 15, 2020, exactly zero percent of the US population had received a COVID vaccine. Also on that date, 17,299,965 Americans had been determined by various tests to have COVID. Of them, 320,309 had died. That means that 1.85 percent CFR.
In the ensuing months, 70 percent of the public received a COVID vaccine between December and September. So how did it do?
As of September 11, 2021, a total of 41,905,818 had tested positive for COVID. As of that same day, 678,866 of them had died. That means that 24,605,853 people tested positive for COVID and of those, 358,557 died from December 16, 2020 to September 11, 2021. That means a 1.46 percent CFR .
Reducing the CFR from 1.85 to 1.46 represents a 31 percent reduction in the CFR. So what caused this reduction in the fatality rate? There are a couple of things that this could point to:
- The vaccine does in fact reduce the severity of COVID.
- During the first few months of the pandemic, tests were in short supply. For this reason, the only people being tested were those who were the sickest with apparent COVID symptoms. Those who had only mild symptoms, or no symptoms, simply weren’t tested, and this skews the CFR higher.
- The medical profession has simply gotten better at treating the illness.
- The new strains of COVID are less virulent
In science, you want to eliminate all of the variables except for the variable you want to test (called the independent variable) and the result (called the dependent variable). So how do we do that?
The independent variable is the vaccine. We will isolate that by looking at the 90 day period from June 15 to September 15. During that period, an average of 60 percent of Americans was vaccinated.
To isolate the dependent variable, we will look at a 90 day period immediately prior to the vaccine becoming available. That will eliminate factors 2 and most of 3, which will allow us to examine as pure a set of variables as possible with the dataset we have.
So- let’s do some math. From September 15 to December 15, 2020, a total of 10,343,397 Americans tested positive for COVID. During that same time period, 115,703 died. The CFR for the 90 day period immediately preceding vaccine distribution was 1.12 percent. Now from June 11 to September 11, 2021, a total of 7,697,685 people tested positive, and 63,589 died, for a CFR of 0.83 percent. So there was a 25.9 percent reduction in the CFR between the two time periods.
The conclusion here is that vaccinating approximately 60 percent of the public corelated with an approximate 26 percent decline in the CFR. Note that this does not mean that the vaccine was the cause of this decline. In fact, it implies the opposite. If the vaccine were the cause of this decline, the decline in the CFR should have been larger.
Real scientists would be looking into other reasons for the decline. I am betting that they aren’t.