Covid-19 News

Quote from THHuxleynew

Looking at the case rates in the UK, you can see they are very very low in population cohorts that are 90% vaccinated or more. It seems likely that breakthrough infections of delta would still control infections, without lockdown,

Probably. As I understand the latest reports, and in particular the Provincetown, MA breakthrough cases (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/0…rovincetown-cape-cod.html), the existing vaccines can control Delta. They can even eliminate it, once ~85% of the population is vaccinated. However, this can only be done by continuing to use masks and social distancing for about a month. First, vaccinate ~85%, then wear masks for a month to prevent breakthrough cases. By that time, the number of infected, contagious people will fall to zero, or close to zero. Any remaining cases should be trackable. The patients can be quarantined. If there were a few hundred per day in country such as the UK, Japan or the US, the cost of tracking would be negligible.

A booster shot targeted to Delta would be better, but it is not essential. That's what I think the reports say.

Provincetown came as a shock to the CDC. However, people should keep it in perspective. On July 4, there were 30,000 people in the town, 75% of them fully vaccinated. Mostly young people carousing, jamming bars and house parties, and "making out." There were 965 cases, many of them breakthrough, but only 7 hospitalizations and no deaths. In Provincetown itself they have gone back to using masks and social distancing. That is a very liberal, Democratic part of the country where just about everyone is vaccinated and will do what the doctors recommend. (I know the place. I was there a few years ago when my daughter was working at the National Park nearby, as a naturalist.)

On the internet I have already seen several people claim that 965 breakthrough cases in Provincetown prove that "the vaccines do not work" because more vaccinated people got sick than unvaccinated people. People who say that do not understand statistics. Heck, they do not understand simple arithmetic. There are no unvaccinated people in Provincetown! (Okay, practically none.) If every single unvaccinated person there got sick, they would probably still be outnumbered by the breakthrough cases.

Quote from Wyttenbach

True scientists all do warn the healthy younger age < 65 from taking the RNA gen therapy.

(1) mRNA vaccines are not gene therapy. They are protein therapy where the protein is generated from shortlived and non-reproducing MRNA

(2) You previously said, when challenged, you would not be advising me not to get Pfizer vaccinated (I am 60 years old healthy). That makes you, by your standards, a not true scientist?

Which is it? Are you not a true scientist, or are you an anti-vaxxer asking all healthy 60-65 year-old people to accept a significant chance of death from COVID against the opinion of pretty well every one else who has looked at the data?

Quote from Alan Smith

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplep…ruscovid19/latestinsights

UK Covid cases are starting to rise again...

I would not make that my take home, Alan.

The ONS random household sample infection figures (most reliable) come out on Friday. For the last two weeks there were 1:75 (two weeks ago), 1:65 (one week ago). It is a real question what they will be in two days time. i'm betting no increase on 1:65, possibly a slight decrease (1:70?) - but I'm not confident.

Case figures have quite a lot of contamination. Today, it is true, was a lot higher. But I can't see that as itself indicating a trend, and the trend is still (surprisingly) down a bit.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases

But, what is interesting is the latest ONS survey on seropositivity.

This is from high quality (random sample, good methodology, whole country) data.

Notice that 16-17 year olds are not vaccinated (yet) so that part must come from natural immunity. Note the very high rates (93% in England) for everyone above 25. That is why we do not have a crisis in our hospitals, unlike the US.

The real interesting question, with this level of mostly vaccination immunity in > 16s, and schools on holiday, is are we now reducing infections? We will find out...

Vaccination rates. Note that for > 25 years nearly all of the seropositivity corresponds to vaccination (though some of those vaccinated will also have been previously infected).

NB - these graphs are for ENGLAND only

An Irish Doctor Tells His Truth: Repressing Information and Support for the People of Ireland

An Irish Doctor Tells His Truth: Repressing Information and Support for the People of Ireland

Recently, a TrialSite community member in Ireland sent in this letter to the editor of the Irish Medical Times. The individual author is obviously

trialsitenews.com

Recently, a TrialSite community member in Ireland sent in this letter to the editor of the Irish Medical Times. The individual author is obviously concerned that there is some agenda to block people’s access to early-onset COVID-19 care options, such as Ivermectin, which has a safer record than Aspirin yet has been deemed high risk dangerous in the context of COVID-19. Not, of course, when it comes to the hundreds of millions of people in the tropics that use it annually to overcome diseases such as River Blindness.

TrialSite’s been tracking Ivermectin trials since April of 2020 and can attest that there was absolutely no interest among the mainstream media unless there was some negative or at least neutral news. It’s as if the advertisers of those media disapproved. What follows is a letter from Dr. William Ralph, MICGP out of Enniscorthy, Ireland. The good doctor’s got some serious words for the folks at Irish Medical Times about Ivermectin, the Pandemic, and culpability.

Letter: Open letter to the Minister for Health

By Contributor 20th July 2021

Blocking of use of Ivermectin

Dear Mr Donnelly;

It is now quite clear that there is a worrying and somewhat sinister attempt to block the use of Ivermectin in the prevention or treatment of SARS-CoV2 infections. This despite numerous randomised control trials,observational trials and case studies. The arguments against use include lack of evidence, clearly this isn’t the case and the safety profile. This drug is 50 years old and has resulted in approximately 20 deaths in that time. Aspirin has killed multiples of this number.

Given that much of the evidence has been in existence for at least one year, and more has subsequently emerged, I would assert that the writers of the ICGP guidelines (April 2020) and the subsequent HIQA guidelines (January 2021) are guilty of the crime of wilful blindness as defined: “The doctrine of willful blindness imputes knowledge to an accused whose suspicion is aroused to the point where he or she sees the need for further inquiries, but deliberately chooses not to make those inquiries.”

As are those who were party to sanctioning such documents. The instructions in these documents advised GPs to basically do nothing in the initial phases, except perhaps have a PCR test to confirm infection, most were not seen by their family doctors, and if they worsened were sent to hospital.

Sadly, many of those in nursing homes were not offered a hospital admission, instead were given oxygen, morphine and midazolam whilst awaiting death.

In all these cases a window of opportunity in the early stages of this condition was lost.

No doubt some of these people would have worsened and died anyway but we will never know how many could have survived because, in the main, GPs did nothing.

Yours Sincerely,

Dr William Ralph, MICGP,

The Ballagh HC,

Enniscorthy,

Wexford.

God Bless

Quote from Fm1

The doctrine of willful blindness

WHOful .blindness.

"WHO Analysis
WHO updated their treatment recommendations on 3/30/2021 [WHO].

For ivermectin they reported a mortality odds ratio of 0.19 [0.09-0.36] based on 7 studies with 1,419 patients. They do not specify which trials they included.

The report is inconsistent, with a forest plot that only shows 4 studies with mortality results.

WHO's recommendation has not been updated for 128 days.
Despite this extremely positive result, they recommended only using ivermectin in clinical trials.

The analysis contains many flaws [Kory (C)]:
•Of the 60 studies (30 RCTs), they only included 16.
•They excluded all 13 prophylaxis studies (3 RCTs).
•There was no protocol for data exclusion.
•Trials included in the original UNITAID search protocol [Hill] were excluded.
•They excluded all epidemiological evidence, although WHO has considered such evidence in the past.
•They combine early treatment and late treatment studies and do not provide heterogeneity information. As above, early treatment is more successful, so pooling late treatment studies will obscure the effectiveness of early treatment. They chose not to do subgroup analysis by disease severity across trials, although treatment delay is clearly a critical factor in COVID-19 treatment, the analysis is easily done (as above), and it is well known that the studies for ivermectin and many other treatments clearly show greater effectiveness for early treatment.
•WHO downgraded the quality of trials compared to the UNITAID systematic review team [Hill] and a separate international expert guideline group that has long worked with the WHO [Bryant].
•They disregarded their own guidelines that stipulate quality assessments should be upgraded when there is evidence of a large magnitude effect (which there is), and when there is evidence of a dose-response relationship (which there is). They claim there is no dose-response relationship, while the UNITAID systematic review team found a clear relationship [Hill].
•Their risk of bias assessments do not match the actual risk of bias in studies. For example they classify [López-Medina] as low risk of bias, however this study has many issues making the results unreliable [Covid Analysis], even prompting an open letter from over 170 physicians concluding that the study is fatally flawed [Open Letter]. [Gonzalez] is also classified as low risk of bias, but is a study with very late stage severe condition high-comorbidity patients. There is a clear treatment delay-response relationship and very late stage treatment is not expected to be as effective as early treatment. Conversely, much higher quality studies were classified as high risk of bias.
•Although WHO's analysis is called a "living guideline", it is rarely updated and very out of date. As of May 14, 2021, four of the missing RCTs are known to WHO and labeled "RCTs pending data extraction" [COVID-NMA]. We added these 4, 4, 2, and one month earlier.
•A single person served as Methods Chair, member of the Guidance Support Collaboraton Committee, and member of the Living Systematic Review/NMA team.
•Public statements from people involved in the analysis suggest substantial bias. For example, a co-chair reportedly said that "the data available was sparse and likely based on chance" [Reuters]. As above, the data is comprehensive, and we estimate the probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive as observed to be 1 in 193 billion (p = 0.0000000000052). The clinical team lead refers to their analysis of ivermectin as "fighting this overuse of unproven therapies ... without evidence of efficacy" [Reuters], despite the extensive evidence of efficacy from the 60 studies by 574 scientists with 21,814 patients. People involved may be more favorable to late stage treatment of COVID-19, for example the co-chair recommended treating severe COVID-19 with remdesivir [Rochwerg].

In summary, although WHO's analysis predicts that over 2 million fewer people would be dead if ivermectin was used from early in the pandemic, they recommend against use outside trials. This appears to be based primarily on excluding the majority of the evidence, and by assigning bias estimates that do not match the actual risk of bias in studies.

Quote from Alan Smith

UK Covid cases are starting to rise again...

Actually, they seem to be falling from the peak of 45,000 per day on July 22, down to 26,000. It looks like a significant change to me.

United Kingdom COVID: 5,952,756 Cases and 130,000 Deaths - Worldometer

www.worldometers.info

I just read somewhere that a quick peak and rapid decline is characteristic of the Delta variation. I do not know why. Among vaccinated people with breakthrough cases, Delta clears very quickly, according to this person, who -- incidentally -- has a low opinion of the CDC:

Opinion | The C.D.C. Needs to Stop Confusing the Public

The C.D.C. isn’t following its own guidance to “be first, be right, be credible.”

www.nytimes.com

Quote from Alan Smith

UK Covid cases are starting to rise again...

Israel rising again..

Fatality is less than in the last wave.

Child vaccination likely to increase

Moderna ...Pfizer.. Hosanna..

"

Moderna said Monday it expects to have enough data to apply for FDA authorization in younger kids by late this year or early 2022.

Pfizer has previously said it expects to apply in September for children ages 5 through 11. Results for two younger age groups that began testing a little later should be available by October or November, according to the company.

Israel is already vaccinating teenagers aged 12-15, as cases of the Delta variant of the virus have been rising quickly despite widespread vaccination among the country’s adults.

Israel to start vaccinating kids aged 5-11 who have severe background illnesses

Health Ministry says it will limit approval only to children with highest risk of serious complications if they catch COVID-19

www.timesofisrael.com

Quote from RobertBryant

Israel rising again..

Fatality is less than in the last wave.

The fatality rate is zero. Okay, 4 or 5 people per day. "Less than in the last wave" is a strange way to describe no fatalities. You should say: "thanks to the vaccines, COVID is no longer fatal, and no more dangerous than seasonal influenza." That puts things in perspective.

Quote from RobertBryant

Child vaccination likely to increase

Moderna ...Pfizer.. Hosanna..

Child vaccination plus a second booster for older people is likely to bring the total number of cases back down close to zero again. If that does not work, a re-engineered booster to deal with the Delta variant may be needed. Until the booster shots and/or re-engineered vaccine becomes available, a return to some masking will prevent a serious outbreak. This is the same as what they are doing in Provincetown. They are back to requiring masks. The number cases will drop close to zero.

The situation is under control.

In the U.S., in places where people refuse to be vaccinated, the situation is out of control. ~100,000 people are being infected per day. Soon, thousands will die every day. The situation will be same as it was in December, because biology has not changed and without a vaccination you are as vulnerable to sickness and death today as you were then. Probably more vulnerable and more likely to be infected, with the Delta variant. In a state where half the people are vaccinated, an unvaccinated person might think he is safer than he was in December. Half the people around him are immune. That is not the situation, because Delta is so much more contagious. Even with half as many people and a degree of herd immunity, Delta will more likely infect you because it is more contagious. Also, unvaccinated people tend to be in communities where nearly everyone else is unvaccinated. To be specific, they are in GOP districts that voted for Trump. In Georgia in the Democratic district where I live, 60 to 70% or more have been vaccinated. Nearly everyone in the grocery store and hardware store is back to wearing masks. In heavily GOP districts, less than 25% have been vaccinated, and no one wears masks. They are begging to be infected! You can thanks to the Death Cult GOP for that. It is encouraging people to join in a macabre Dance with Death in the service of right-wing ideology and "owning the libs."

Georgia COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker

This is your state and county equivalent level look at how many have gotten a dose or doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. Click on a state to see how many vaccines…

data.democratandchronicle.com

50,000 to 100,000 people will probably die in the next 12 months in the service of this lunatic ideology. Hundreds of thousands more will suffer and have their lives ruined, and their families bankrupted. All because one political party wants to exploit stupid people with fear along with weird appeal to superiority -- telling them they are smarter and know more than Dr. Fauci, exploiting the Dunning Kruger effect. This is the most horrific waste of life and the worst mass murder in the U.S. since the Civil War. And for what? Just to win an election.

Quote from JedRothwell

The fatality rate is zero

10 is not zero..strange math from Georgia

~10/ 3.5k versus ~20/3.5k ..seems less to me..

Graph literacy is not universal it seems..

Quote from THHuxleynew

New vaccines will be needed probably every year.

This will only hold for the fools that got the gen therapy (vaccinated themselves ..). These fear monger people will have to spend their whole fortune for weekly boosters soon... Until they die from a simple cold due to immune deficiency.

This is my last warning. The only people in danger are the ones that got the gen therapy as they do not follow the science. They just believe in their self elected science templates like Fauci, that never have studied any science.

Quote from THHuxleynew

New news - long COVID for 5 - 16 year olds is reassuringly low. 1.8% symptoms persist after 8 weeks.

Here a study has been made among young with long Covid and normal young with no covid. Result: Both groups did report the same symptoms over the duration of the study...I do not say that there is no long Covid as I know some very rare cases. But as said very rare cases!

Quote from THHuxleynew

The current vaccines (against delta) provide something like a reduction of mortality and hospitalisation to 10% or better of what it would be without them.

Greeting from Israel 4000 infection after vaccination....

Quote from THHuxleynew

The comparison of T cell response after infection or vaccination revealed no significant difference in magnitudes of response, memory phenotypes,

I hope you know the difference between magnitude and quality. The most recent papers all show the gent therapy generated antibodies are of poor quality and also the T-cell memory.

Quote from THHuxleynew

So the strategy deliberately infecting people (mildly) to obtain strong "natural immunity" is to make sure people have a fairly severe case of COVID - enough fully to push up immunity,

May be once you should fully read the paper linked above I commented too.

Even a faint infection is enough. But with your room cleaning woman knowledge you cant even guess what the papers says.

Quote from Alan Smith

UK Covid cases are starting to rise again...

>90% of all UK people have antibodies. But less that 90% are vaccinated...

Coronavirus (COVID-19) latest insights - Office for National Statistics

This implies that also 90% of the un-vaccinated have antibodies...

Quote from THHuxleynew

(1) mRNA vaccines are not gene therapy.

Dear undergrad: This term has originallybeen given by big pharma. You can complain by Roche OR Pfizer.

Vaccine is marketing only! For dummies like you.

Quote from zorud

Is there any evidence that early IVM treatment after an intentional infection will end up with the wanted full (?) naturally developed immunity for those folks?

Normally you do this with a crippled virus and then it's called a vaccine. With Delta it is enough to go to some crowed places - with not mask of course - to catch it the soft way.

As linked above: A soft infection is enough for good immunity: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24377-1

Statement 1)

Collectively, these results indicate that SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses are long-lasting over 10 months in COVID-19 convalescent patients although SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody response may decrease.

2)

Considering preserved polyfunctionality and proliferation

capacity of SARS-CoV-2-specific memory T cells, the current

data indicate that memory T cells contribute to protective

immunity against re-infection even 10 months after the primary

infection.

Key statement:

3) Therefore, we compared long-term (≥200 DPSO) T cell memory between the

asymptomatic and symptomatic groups. We could not find a

significant difference in the number of IFN-γ spots between the

two groups (Supplementary Fig. 8). In addition, when we

performed subgroup analyses of the asymptomatic/mild group

and moderate/severe/critical group, we found no significant

differences in the number of IFN-γ spots or the frequencies of

AIM+ cells among T1 (31–99 DPSO), T2 (100–199 DPSO), and

T3 (≥200 DPSO) in either group (Supplementary Fig. 9). From

these results, we conclude that SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell

memory is successfully maintained regardless of the severity of

COVID-19.

For the cure::

You can be 10000% sure that Ivermectin works best as never in the live time of modern medicine more money has been spent to hide a drug from the public...

These cricket brains are not aware that the 100% negative logic is 100% confirming too!

RB and W - please pay attention.

You cannot seriously maintain that a high vaccination rate for adults does not reduce deaths/infection by a factor of 10 or more?

Using data from the UK (where the the data is higher quality, and includes random sample infection surveys all with same methodology that remove any artifacts due to testing):

The official data estimates incidence (number of new infections /week/100,000). We can then compare that with deaths.

Aligning deaths and infections is not precise, but by looking longitudinally we can check the ratio at peaks corresponding to waves.

The most recent peak has high vaccination - the problem is that the infection incidence lags the infection positivity data, so currently we have data from about 2 weeks ago, and although now we seem to have an infection peak, we were before it then. Nevertheless we can use (say) a 14 day lag from infection to death to get some sort of rough estimate - it will not be so wrong because deaths have been pretty stable over recent weeks. We will gte a better estimate in 2 weeks time.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey: England - Office for National Statistics

Weekly Infections (England) number / 10,000 people / day

9.5 (20 October peak - no vaccination - original variant)

19.6 (23 December peak - just before start of vaccination - alpha variant)

11.6 (7 July - high vaccination - delta variant - no peak yet but quite flat)

Deaths (England) / day (7 day average - at peak)

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=nation&areaName=England

21 Nov --- 402 deaths / infections = 402/9.5 ~ 42

19 Jan --- 1168 deaths / infections = 1168/19.6 ~ 60

26 July --- 61 deaths / infections = 61 / 11.6 ~ 5

Thus we see roughly 10X reduction in IFR from these figures.

there are a number of caveats when making this comparison.

• The death peak occurs roughly 4 weeks after the infection peak based on these figures - so we need death figures from 4 August - which we do not yet have. However the deaths are only going up v slowly, I'm betting these will be not very different. Still they are likely to be about 10% higher
• The 23 Dec infection peak was alpha the 7 July infections are delta. That means without vaccination we expect the deaths to be worse (by how much we don't know)
• On 7 July the UK vaccinations were not as complete as they are now. these figures include some small percentage of the at risk population invaccinated, that makes them quite a large underestimate of the real vaccine effectiveness in reducing death
• Comparing peak infection with peak death may not be exact if the peaks have different widths - deaths may change slower than infections because varying time from infection to death will average out the infection curve. Eyeballing the infection curve I expect the error here to be fairly small - but it will tend to underestimate the deaths for 19 Jan - where the infection peak was sharper.
• differences between who is getting infected may change outcomes here. It would require much more sophisticated modelling to incorporate that. It can be done from the whole dataset but I can't do it myself quickly. So this is a real caveat.
• The recent figures include the unvaccinated fraction of the population dying as well - although recently that is small more of them die so deaths will be higher than expected if everyone was vaccinated. if you knew ration of vaccinate/unvaccinated deaths we could adjust. The figures here are assuming 100% of deaths (and infections) are vaccinated. That is obviously not true, but means the real efficacy of the vaccine will be higher than this estimate.

You can do the same comparison with cases but that really is less reliable - even though case data is more precise the correspondence between infecations and cases is distored by test availability, is their surge or school testing. how do people feel about getting tested, etc. That is why this UK data with stable longitudinal infection survey figures is very reliable.

So - to conclude:

• England shows roughly 10X reduction in deaths, based on overall infection and death numbers, between when the population was unvaccinated (alpha variant) and when the at risk population was 90% vaccinated (delta variant)
• These figures are based on random sample positivity testing throughout the period so do not depend on testing. However they cannot take into account differences in demographics of who gets infected.
• We know from hospital data that quite a lot of the deaths are unvaccinated. I'd need to extract exact data to incorporate this but it would make the effectiveness of the vaccine against death go up, obviously, if i did.
• The difference between 20 Oct and 23 Dec peak IFR via this method (+50%) is I think explained by going from original variant to alpha variant
• I have not calculated IFRs from this - you could do this given that England population is 56 million, so you multiply infection figures by 5600 to make them comparable with death figures. That gives: 0.75%, 1.1%, 0.089%

You have got all the links from which I took the data - it is all reasonably clean. Check for yourselves. More importantly - check back in maybe 1 month when we should have another infection peak tracked through to a death peak and can do this more accurately.

Other people can do this - I'm sure you will find these estimates (done more properly) in one of the ONS reports eventually.

Quote from THHuxleynew

You cannot seriously maintain that a high vaccination rate for adults does not reduce deaths/infection by a factor of 10 or more?

You mix carrots and apples. We did vaccinate all older >65. These are responsible for 97% of all deaths.

So what is your argument?? This gives a reduction of 33x at least!

The healthy people younger than 65 contribute more or less nothing! No gen therapy needed!

Only fools cripple/kill themselves...

Quote from Wyttenbach

You can be 10000% sure that Ivermectin works best as never in the live time of modern medicine more money has been spent to hide a drug from the public...

Just pointing out: this is pretty fair. Those thinking ivermectin has very strong evidence all believe this conspiracy theory, and it is really necessary to believe it to maintain ivermectin is very effective. Since at least two expensive big good quality RCTs are still in progress for IVM we will get more data, it will be interesting to see. Obviously the money was not sufficient to prevent these gold-plated RCTs from happening.

Quote from Wyttenbach

You mix carrots and apples. We did vaccinate all older >65. These are responsible for 97% of all deaths.

So what is your argument?? This gives a reduction of 33x at least!

The healthy people younger than 65 contribute more or less nothing! No gen therapy needed!

Only fools cripple/kill themselves...

OK - glad you admit that vaccination reduces COVID death rates by at least a factor of 10. Now look at the UK IFR calculations above please. Those are whole-population, but I doubt you are going to question the exponential dependence on age that allows us to work out from population demographics and IFR the age-specific IFR?

I know this is boring but "true scientists" know the difference between protein therapy and gene therapy...

The other thing needed is to calculate vaccine death rates. I doubt we will ever agree that because you include all background VAERS etc deaths in your vaccine risk calculations. Background deaths are typically a very high proportion. Actually I'd like to see your calculations written out rigorously - then I could correct them and see whether they then were the same as everyone elses.

Youtube bans discussion of ivermectin..sporadically..

protests.. succeed

VAERS analysis.

I guess my wife got off lucky with two months of mild neutropenia

and a day off from work,,

6500 deaths by the end of 2021? ..x 2 for under reporting= 13000

I guess that's acceptable

as long as it is someone else..

in NSW my state ...10 million doses... maybe 40-80 deaths..due to Vax

of course the ivermectin option is unspoken..

Quote from RobertBryant

VAERS analysis.

I guess my wife got off lucky with two months of mild neutropenia

and a day off from work,,

6500 deaths by the end of 2021? ..x 2 for under reporting= 13000

I guess that's acceptable

as long as it is someone else..

in NSW my state ...10 million doses... maybe 40-80 deaths..due to Vax

of course the ivermectin option is unspoken..

Display More

This argument has been around quite a while and contain two logical errors which together make it impossible to draw any conclusions in this way:

(1) it assumes that VAERS deaths are vaccine deaths, they are not, see CDC statement of VAERS strengths and weaknesses

(2) it assumes comparisons can be made between number of VAERS deaths for COVID, and for other vaccines. They can't.

Thus the VAERS death rate will be conflated by:

1. How many background deaths are there - which varies greatly with the age of the person vaccinated?
2. How likely is a background death to be reported?

Thus, for example:

• A standard Flu vaccine, administered to the whole population, will have whole population frequency of background events. COVID vaccines in the US are allowed for the whole population but taken up predominately by older people. Therefore they have a higher background rate
• A standard Flu vaccine is well understood by everyone. Unrelated deaths that are easily explained in some other way are not likely to be reported as possible side effects: for a new vaccine anything that could possibly be a side effect will be reported.
• The fact that COVID is killing people as well during the COVID vaccine administration time ups the reporting rate - since it will not be clear whether a death shortly after a vaccine is COVID or vaccine side effect
• Interestingly, looking in detail at data on known COVID deaths after vaccines shots, they are actually a bit higher than normal for the first week after the first dose.Obviously no protection is expected at that time. Possible reasons are: (a) when COVID rates in the population are very high there can be infection at the COVID vaccination centers (I can speak for them not all being well ventilated). (b) people may be going for vaccination because somone they know has been diagnosed with COVID. That, directly or indirectly, may have exposed them.

VAERS Information

VAERS reports cannot be used to determine quantitatively the number of deaths a vaccine causes (that is the warning on top of the can)

From: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesaf…html#anchor_1616772265496

Strengths and Limitations of VAERS Data

When evaluating VAERS data, it is important to understand the strengths and limitations.

Strengths

• VAERS accepts reports from anyone. This also allows VAERS to act as an early warning system to detect rare adverse events.
• VAERS collects information about the vaccine, the person vaccinated, and the adverse event. Scientist obtain follow-up information on serious reports.
• All data (without identifying patient information) are publicly available.

Limitations

• VAERS is a passive reporting system, meaning that reports about adverse events are not automatically collected. Instead someone who had or is aware of an adverse event following vaccination must file a report.
• VAERS reports are submitted by anyone and sometimes lack details or contain errors.
• VAERS data alone cannot determine if the vaccine caused the reported adverse event.

  This specific limitation has caused confusion about the publicly available data, specifically regarding the number of reported deaths. In the past there have been instances where people misinterpreted reports of death following vaccination as death caused by the vaccines; that is a mistake.

  VAERS accepts all reports of adverse events following vaccination without judging whether the vaccine caused the adverse health event. Some reports to VAERS might represent true vaccine reactions, and others might be coincidental adverse health events not related to vaccination at all.

  Generally, a causal relationship cannot be established using information from VAERS reports alone.

• The number of reports submitted to VAERS may increase in response to media attention and increased public awareness.
• It is not possible to use VAERS data to calculate how often an adverse event occurs in a population.

Comments

From the above: COVID vaccines are higher visibility (because new, and talked about all the time) => more reports

From the above: VAERS death => may be non-causal

Deaths by chance (background) amongst vaccinated group are higher than by chance amongst population