A Guide on How NOT to Message the COVID Vaccine's Effects

9 21
Avatar for LateToTheParty
2 years ago

Co-published on Publish0x.

As a disclaimer, this article is not a commentary on the efficacy or safety of the COVID vaccines and only serves to critique the messaging behind the vaccines' risk reduction.

There's an ongoing debate on whether children need to receive the COVID vaccines or not. People on the left side of the political spectrum generally argue for it whereas those on the right argue against it. Earlier today, I stumbled across a 33 second video on YouTube. In it was NBC News contributor Dr. Natalie Azar attempting to explain why children should receive the COVID vaccines. Long story short, she did not do a good job.



Other than the reduction of the number of ICU visits and deaths per million children, Dr. Azar was vague. "Hundreds" of prevented hospital visits can range from 200 to 900 for all we know. "Thousands" of prevented infections has an even larger range. Assuming she's distinguishing between "thousands", "tens of thousands", and "hundreds of thousands", the former can range from 2000 to 9000. Quite simply, it was terrible messaging and here's why.

A Small Epidemiology Lesson

In epidemiology, there are several important variables to consider including risk ratio (RR), relative risk reduction (RRR), absolute risk reduction (ARR), and number needed to treat (NNT). Below is an example of how to calculate for each.


"Event" means having Disease X and "No event" means not having Disease X.

Here's how to interpret the numbers:

  • For the 100 subjects taking Drug B, 3% of them contracted Disease X.

  • 5% of the control group contracted the same illness.

  • A risk ratio of 0.6 means that if you were to take Drug B, you have a 60% chance of catching Disease X compared to not taking the drug.

  • A relative risk reduction of 0.4 means that taking Drug B will lower the chance of contracting the illness by 40%.

  • An absolute risk reduction of 0.02 means taking Drug B will lower the chance of contracting the illness by 2 percentage points.

  • A NNT of 50 means you need 50 people to take Drug B to prevent a single case of Disease X.

What's Wrong with Dr. Azar's Messaging?

Let's say for every 1 million children vaccinated against COVID, 9000 of them are prevented from contracting the virus. Dividing 1 million by 9000, the NNT will be 111.11. That would mean you need to vaccinate 111 children in order to prevent one COVID infection. For reference, a well-matched influenza vaccine has a NNT of 37. A poorly-matched flu vaccine has a NNT of 77. According to Brisson et al. (2007), for 12 year old females receiving the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, the NNT for preventing a single case of genital warts is 8 and the NNT for preventing a single case of cervical cancer is 324.

We can also take the NNT and calculate for the ARR. An NNT of 111.11 would mean the ARR is 0.009. In other words, a child receiving the COVID vaccine will have a lower risk of getting infected by 0.9 percentage points. You may be tempted to conclude that the vaccine is therefore useless because the absolute risk reduction is so minuscule. However, that is actually not the problem.

The problem is that Dr. Azar did not provide the relative risk reduction or any numbers that would help us calculate for it. In order to calculate for the RRR, you need to subtract the incidence of the control group from the incidence of the exposed (i.e. getting the vaccine) group and then, divide that difference by the incidence of the control group. The reason why the ARR hardly tells you the full picture is that it only tells you how many percentage points drop. Did the risk of contracting COVID drop from 10% to 9.1% or 2% to 1.1%?

While the ARR in both scenarios are identical, the RRR are drastically different. In the first scenario, the RRR will be |0.091 - 0.10|/0.10 = 0.09, meaning the vaccine will reduce the risk of contracting COVID by 9%. In contrast, in the second scenario, the RRR will be |0.011 - 0.02|/0.02 = 0.45, meaning the vaccine will reduce the risk of contracting COVID by 45%.

Unfortunately, because Dr. Azar does not provide any incidence numbers, we are left completely in the dark.

Lastly, vaccinating 1 million children to prevent one death is not particularly impressive. Here's an excerpt from Leong et al. (2021) on the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine on Canadian adults:

On the basis of these data, the estimated NNV to prevent 1 COVID-19 death in Canadian adults overall is 33,595 and in men aged 70-80 years is 8722, and in women aged 70-80 years is 9060.

While NNT does not provide the whole story as I established earlier in the section, the NNT for children is several magnitudes greater than the NNT for Canadian adults (29.7 times to be more precise). It is even more so if we are to compare the NNT of children to the elderly 70-80 year old cohorts (over 100 times).

One can conclude from those numbers that the elderly population and adults, in general, are at higher risk of dying from COVID. As a result, it would be more beneficial to focus efforts towards vaccinating the adult population instead of the children population.

4
$ 1.70
$ 1.57 from @TheRandomRewarder
$ 0.10 from @wakeupkitty
$ 0.03 from @Scotty17
Avatar for LateToTheParty
2 years ago

Comments

I have a strong doubt about these doctors and specialists governments use. Fauci is a liar, sociopath, animal molester and serial killer. Doctors, specialists get paid or are threatened or what we call 'media horny'. Our specialist is a vet (no oath of Socrates) the other specialist raised by the WEF and has a history of being wrong, guessing wrong, wrong schedules. The IC doctor who told how worse it was suddenly changed his mind now his end is near (sacked or no longer used but still needs the attention what if people forget his name?).

Those living in fear will not hesitate to kill children, young adults or people. They lost reason, common sense. It's what anxiety does to the brain.

$ 0.05
2 years ago

I've been crying foul about the WuBug since the flatten the curve debacle. With a 99.7% chance of survival, I'll continue to take my risks. Anyone with any semblance of dud diligence and who has been following the leftist narrative, knows by now that it is rife with misinformation.

My child and my family reuse the vax but do not begrudge anyone from taking it. My neighbor contracted pneumonia shortly after taking the Pfizer vax.

Funny how the leftists despised the vax under Trump, eh? Now it is their godsend.

$ 0.00
2 years ago

I remember when Kamala Harris debated Mike Pence, she straight out said that since the vaccines were made under Trump's watch, she would not take the vaccine. It's completely hypocritical.

$ 0.00
2 years ago

Kamala's political record pretty much speaks for itself inasmuch as she will say and do anything that advances her self-enrichment.

$ 0.00
2 years ago

Even CNN of all places has admitted that Kamala's a terrible vice president. When even one of the most sycophantic "news" outlets can't even defend her, you know it's bad.

https://archive.vn/hxH8C

$ 0.01
2 years ago

Yeah, I read about it on the New York Post. Now the admin is running interference. It's all a charade and a veritable clown show.

$ 0.00
2 years ago

Interesting analysis. I'm not aiming at criticising your work, just asking a question "neutrally". Why is the control rate of infection so low? We know that COVID-19 is very contagious and 5% infection rate sounds very low to me. Thanks for writing about the matter.

$ 0.00
2 years ago

Oh, the 5% incidence rate in the control group is just a random example. It has nothing to do with COVID. I was just using it to explain how to calculate for things like risk ratio, relative risk reduction, absolute risk reduction, and number needed to treat.

$ 0.00
2 years ago

Oh, right, I see. Thanks for the clarification.

$ 0.00
2 years ago