The incredible success of vaccination...according to WHO

Comment by Thomas Verduyn

In a recent Lancet article, the authors make a claim that "vaccination has averted 154 million deaths" and go on to write about impact of vaccination on public health over the past 50 years.

It begins with "In this modelling study, we used a suite of mathematical and statistical models to estimate the global and regional public health impact of 50 years of vaccination..."
"Models" tell you all you need to know - over the past 4 years alone they have shown themselves to be unbelievable.

The article continues: "We then used these modelled outcomes to estimate the contribution of vaccination to globally declining infant and child mortality rates over this period."
In other words, the authors have assumed that vaccines have a certain share in the declining mortality rates. What if the vaccines increased the mortality rates, but this was masked by improved sanitation and food?

They go on to say: "We estimate that vaccination has accounted for 40% of the observed decline in global infant mortality, 52% in the African region."
Note the word "estimate."

If their models and estimates are correct, the Covid debacle will have killed millions of children on account of the fact that childhood immunization programmes were canceled during the "pandemic".

As expected, the authors' calculations of lives saved by vaccination did not take into account any lives lost by adverse events.

Their models included:
• published transmission models
• vaccine efficacy profiles
So we can rest assured that their findings are unreliable, since we know from experience how inaccurate these two are.

"All forms of modelling allowed us to capture both individual effects of vaccines (ie, protecting the vaccinated) and population-level effects (ie, reducing transmission and incidence, and indirectly protecting the unvaccinated."

What is not clear is where they accounted for vaccines with a negative efficiency, like Gates' polio shots which are now causing more polio than before.

"...selecting the parsimonious model with best performance"?
Does it mean they had several models in use, but chose the one that made vaccines look the best? Using that best performance model, "we used the selected model to impute the impact in countries with missing data."

The phenomenal scale of their bias, and their uncompromising faith in vaccines is demonstrated in this quote:
"To estimate vaccine impact in time periods not directly modelled, we fitted a functional relationship between model-estimated cumulative impact—in terms of either deaths averted or years of full health gained—and the cumulative number of fully vaccinated people. Four functional forms were fitted for each vaccine in each country: linear (presumes each dose has equal effect, no community herd effect), logarithmic, exponential (each additional dose has a respectively lesser or greater effect), and sigmoidal (programme takes time to establish and achieve community effects, then each subsequent dose has less individual effect). Therefore we selected functions that best fit locally specific data, thereby capturing locally relevant interactions between the individual and population effects of specific vaccines at specific places and times."

They do have the courtesy to explain why confidence intervals are not provided: "Propagation of uncertainty at all levels of estimation was also not possible for all the hierarchical underlying models or for the values input into those models."
Not possible? That is correct. This is possibly the most correct thing in the whole article.

How can one possibly calculate uncertainty for a process that involved one estimate after the other, on top of multiple models, on top of missing data, extrapolations, and so forth?

In other words, since 1974, vaccines have averted 154 million deaths plus or minus 300 million.

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