Great to see you're in Sydney Brendan, and let the haters hate.
You have done a brilliant job elevating your chosen specialty to the world, and encouraging and inspiring others in the industry for a long time - so you should be fairly compensated for that lofty position. I don't envy the late nights or very early mornings you have ahead of you on conference calls with SF, but good luck at OpenAI mate !
Dr Jeyanthi Kunadhasan is an Australian Anaesthetist that has been on this COVID mRNA vaccine is bad rant for a long time, and has been widely discredited in Australia. She is misinterpreting the deaths data in the trial, which unfortunately is a widespread naive error.
1. In the part of the trial in which you can actually compare raw death counts because of the randomization, the deaths were 15-14, with confidence intervals nearly completely overlapping, and so there was no evidence vaccine arm death rates were significantly higher than placebo arm.
2. After the subjects were unblinded, the placebo subjects were allowed to crossover to the vaccine arm, and the vast majority did, with >>90% of the subjects vaccinated in the end and <<10% remaining vaccinated. After crossover, there were 9 additional deaths, 6 of who had been vaccinated and 3 of which had not yet been vaccinated.
3. But one cannot simply add the 6 to the 15 and 3 to the 14 and compare 21 vs. 17 to compare death rate of vaccinated to unvaccinated, since after the crossover, the vast majority were vaccinated and very few remained unvaccinated.
4. If one wants to assess the death rate after vaccination during the post-crossover period, they must treat it as an observational cohort study with time-varying vaccination status, adjusting for the wildly different group sizes and the fact that there were far more person-years of potential risk of death (i.e. denomiantors for death rates) after vaccination than in the pre-vaccination group. If such an analysis is done, there is also no evidence that death rate after vaccination is greater than before vaccination.
So, in the end, there is no evidence that the death rate in the vaccinated group is greater than the placebo/unvaccinated group.
Then her second big error is presuming, without any evidence whatsoever, that the excess deaths in Australia are predominately caused by the vaccine.
reply