Even more negative vaccine efficiency

Summary: Yet another study shows that two doses of vaccine have negative efficiency against Omicron variant — ie, they’ve resulted in far higher case numbers than if we’d never vaccinated at all. I also note new data that shows that two doses of vaccine had -146% efficiency against Delta variant. It is very likely that the vaccines are responsible for the very high case numbers we’re seeing around the world (even before Omicron).

Earlier in the month I noted that the UK Health Security Agency had identified that the Astra Zeneca covid vaccine appeared to have negative efficiency in protecting against symptomatic covid.

Now a team at Imperial College has replicated this finding using a proper cohort based study. This is currently in preparation, but they’ve released some of their analysis in their latest Imperial College covid review; in table 2 they report the relevant data from their cohort study:

The important data points are highlighted in yellow — the vaccine efficiency with two doses of vaccine against Omicron variant.

• The upper data point is for the Astra Zeneca vaccine; this appears to have -39% efficiency against Omicron after two doses

• The lower data point is for the Pfizer vaccine; this appears to have -18% efficiency against Omicron after two doses.

Sure, the other data in the table are about the impact of the booster doses — these do appear to return some positive effect of the vaccine… but at what cost and for how long?

It should be noted that the negative efficiencies of vaccine efficiency against the Omicron variant estimated in the new Imperial College data base this on earlier estimates of vaccine efficiency against the Delta variant. But is the data for Delta reliable? I have already discussed how multiple studies show that the vaccines have far worse performance than officially recognised, partly due to the use of the Test-Negative Case-Control methodology; recently more data appeared on real-world vaccine effectiveness in a study on travellers in Israel. The important data are given in table 2 of that report:

Highlighted in yellow is the vaccine (mainly Pfizer) efficiency against Delta variant identified in August before the start of the booster campaign, ie, when the population only had two doses of vaccine — -146%. So, this is yet another study identifying that the vaccines appear to significantly increase the risk of infection with covid. The imperial College analysis assumes that two doses of vaccine were fairly effective against the Delta variant and have only started to make the situation worse since the arrival of Omicron variant. However, time and again real-world studies keep on showing that the vaccines had deeply negative efficiencies against Delta variant — I suspect that while the booster doses are providing an increase in vaccine efficiency, it is from a much lower level than has been assumed in publicised data, and that the benefits of three doses of vaccine compared being unvaccinated are very low indeed, and could well still be negative.

Yesterday the UK had 93,000 new cases of covid, a new record, and it appears to be heading even higher. Given that most of the population still has two doses of vaccine these very high case numbers shouldn’t be surprising — we have appeared to have fed the covid pandemic with our mass vaccination campaign of non-vulnerable groups, not suppressed it.

In recent months governments around the world have been aggressively promoting the boosters as the solution to the covid pandemic — Do they know the vaccine efficiency has become deeply negative and are desperately trying to stop an already disastrous situation of their own making becoming far far worse?