COVID Vaccine May Lower your Risk by Only 1%

Let me start by saying I'm generally in favor of vaccines: I got a tetanus shot when I fell off my bike onto the pavement; I got a flu shot last year because I didn't think I could fight off both the flu and COVID if I was unlucky enough to get both. But one reason I haven't gotten a COVID shot is because there's no way of knowing the long-term effects, if any, of the new technology it uses.

Now I have another reason. For people like me (not old, diabetic, overweight or suffering from heart disease), the clinical trials of the vaccines showed a reduced absolute risk of getting COVID of...wait for it...around 1%.

Regular readers probably know about absolute risk vs. relative risk. Reducing your relative risk of something by 70% or 95%, as the vaccines do for symptomatic COVID infections, sounds like they are extremely effective. But when your risk of something is low enough to start with, reducing it further may not mean much. This graphic of a hypothetical vaccine trial illustrates relative vs. absolute risk. Absolute risk reduction (ARR) is 1%, while relative risk reduction (RRR) is 50%. One less person out of a hundred got sick with the vaccine--but that's half as many as got sick with the placebo. That's how you can say "50% risk reduction!" with a straight face.

Hypotethical example of a vaccine clinical trial (1)

The author of the article where this graphic appears notes that vaccine trials are supposed to report absolute risk, since reporting only relative risk can lead people to make suboptimal decisions. But "the manufacturers [Moderna and Pfizer] did not report a corresponding absolute risk reduction..."

If relative vs. absolute risk is still confusing, the article helpfully states the number needed to vaccinate to avoid a symptomatic case of COVID: 142 people for the Pfizer vaccine; 88 for the Moderna vaccine.

Sebastian Rushworth likewise reports the Astra Zenica vaccine offers an absolute risk reduction of 1.2% and notes their trial had some problems: two arms of the trial didn't use a real placebo but meningococcal vaccine instead; there were relatively few elderly people in the trial (the people most at risk from COVID); and people with a variety of health conditions were also excluded. So between that, the short length of the trial, and the size of the trial, there's a good deal of uncertainty around the safety of the vaccine. He says he would not take the vaccine (even though he's a junior doctor who presumably sees patients) because he's young and healthy and has a low risk of getting COVID. (2)

Sources:

"Outcome Reporting Bias in COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Clinical Trials" by Ronald B. Brown. Europe PMC, February 26, 2021.

COVID: Why Most of What you Know is Wrong by Sebastian Rushworth. Karneval Publishing, Stockholm. 2021, pp. 112-131.

Comments

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here . * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...

Fasting blood sugar & insulin have crept up!

It's pretty bad when even conventional medicine thinks your blood sugar is high. I had lab tests done last week, as I do every year, and saw things were going in the wrong direction. Photo from Pixabay . Uh-oh. Ideal blood sugar is about 70-90. Your blood sugar can be high because you're stressed or ill, but I felt OK. I can't blame it on cortisol, which was smack in the middle of the normal range. And my A1c, which reflects blood sugar over the past few months, shows that whatever is going on has been happening for a while. My insulin is more than double what it should be. Oddly, my triglycerides, which typically indicate carb consumption, were good. I don't have an explanation for the triglycerides. I should have suspected something was wrong, though. I've felt very tired and a little sad for the past few months. Unlike many people with higher than ideal blood sugar and insulin, I had only gained about three pounds. Regardless of my good weight and triglyceride...

Interview: The Microbiome's Effect on Almost Everything

Mark L. Cannon, DDS, MS joins Bret Weinstein of the Darkhorse Podcast for a discussion about the oral microbiome and its downstream effects on everything from acne to Alzheimer’s. Dr. Cannon is a pediatric dentist and professor of otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat medicine). It's an hour and 44 minutes, but well worth your time. Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjkOgCXiMeE

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog