How to make a placebo look 95% effective and guarantee repeat business
It may be reasonable to allow a certain amount of time for a vaccine to ‘work’. However, classifying a person who becomes infected within 14 or 21 days of vaccination as an ‘unvaccinated case’ in the calculation of vaccine efficacy is nothing short of a scam. It guarantees that any vaccine which is no different (or even worse) than a placebo will be seen to have high initial efficacy.
The ‘cheap trick’ is simple: categorise those who are vaccinated as unvaccinated up until some arbitrarily defined time period after vaccination takes place. The time period might be 7, 14 or 21 days. The supposed justification for this practice being that the benefits of the vaccine do not accrue until it has had time to ‘kick in’. And before it becomes effective on day seven, fourteen, or whatever, the recipient is considered to be unvaccinated.At the time of our original work, we were not at all sure how globally widespread this selection bias was. Recently the Dark Horse podcast covered the issue and shortly after Bret Weinstein asked me if there was a comprehensive list of studies that had deliberately committed this cheap trick.This article is our first attempt to provide such a list. It contains a mix of observational and other studies that have employed the cheap trick when assessing vaccine effectiveness for either infection, hospitalisation or death.
