But a peer-reviewed British study covering 9.1 million people and almost 600,000 Covid infections in 2021 shows vaccine advocates badly overstated the effectiveness of the shots even last year, at the peak of their effectiveness.
By mid-2021, fully vaccinated people had a higher risk of being infected with Covid, the study shows. They had only about 65 percent protection against hospitalization and death – after accounting for age, sex, and other risk factors.
Sixty-five percent protection is still better than nothing, of course. But it is far below the claims Murthy and others made – and continue to make.
Further, the period the researchers examined represented the peak of vaccine protection, which declined over time and declined further with the Omicron variant, which evades vaccine-generated antibodies within months.
And the sixty-five percent figure likely substantially overstates the actual protection from the shots, because of an epidemiological phenomenon called “healthy vaccine user bias.”
Put simply, physicians often withhold shots from people who are extremely frail or near death. They fear that vaccine side effects might kill those patients and that the vaccines will be pointless in any case.
