Key facts about COVID-19 vaccines that may save your life... and which Bobby Kennedy says Tony Fauci wants to hide.

Key concept

Risk to unvaccinated people in a COVID-19 epidemic is a combination of risk of infection and risk of disease progression to severe health damage. Pre-existing immunity from vaccines measurably decreased both of these risks in the 2021 NSW COVID-19 outbreak yielding 10 to 40-fold relative risk reduction. 

In recent posts, the Pundit has been trying to shine a light on COVID-19 pandemic solutions advocated by US celebrity lawyer Bobby Kennedy junior (see post label RFKjr)

Lawyer Bobby makes a prominent statement in his recent book that caught the Pundit's attention:

In RFKjr's view, Dr Tony Fauci, a prominent American infectious disease specialist, wants to hide the comparison of health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

Unfortunately, even though the Kennedy book has lots of interesting advocacy (it's written by a lawyer), it contains very little or no direct evidence-based comparisons of health outcomes of unvaccinated people and COVID-19 vaccinated people.

Vaccinated and unvaccinated health outcomes in an epidemic.

Bobby Kennedy largely talks about vaccine outcomes without carefully evaluating their consequences during an epidemic. Such crucial science informed discussions are largely, if not totally absent from his book. An epidemic radically changes the risk context for vaccination risk evaluation, and epidemic evidence in the book is sparse and carelessly presented (e.g. see earlier post). 

Here is more of that missing evidence, from Australian state government health agency in New South Wales during the 2021 Delta variant coronavirus outbreak in New South Wales. 

NSW health have done very careful comparisons of health outcomes from the epidemic that really illuminate what risk COVID-19 vaccines may pose-- under real-life epidemic conditions.

First a graph of the two groups -- vaccinated people and unvaccinated people side by side.

This graph shows daily numbers of diagnosed cases, and daily numbers of events leading to severe outcomes during the course of the epidemic from July to November 2021.

Overall it is an epidemic of the unvaccinated, even though most people were vaccinated. Serous outcomes were largely confined to unvaccinated people.

These facts totally refute the main arguments Bobby Kennedy makes in his book about vaccines.

There's more to see if you like details.

Here is a table showing hard numbers on the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated people. (obtained from the same NSW government health agency.)

Note how far more people who took no effective dose of vaccine got infected with coronavirus (even though they were in a minority in the NSW community). Not also how serious health outcomes for the unvaccinated vastly outnumber those occurring in vaccinated people.

Vaccination doesn't increase harm from disease, as Bobby Kennedy repeatedly claims -- it reduces harm from the COVID epidemic.

In the hospital intensive care unit (ICU), unvaccinated COVID-19 patients outnumber fully vaccinated patient admissions 16:1. 

Deaths in unvaccinated COVID suffering people outnumber deaths in fully vaccinated COVID people 5:1.

Please tell anyone who believes  Bobby Kennedys take on COVID-19 vaccines about these numbers. It may change their minds. It also still has a chance of saving their life.

Some people may still find difficulty in getting their minds round these medicals stats.

Perhaps it will help to convert them to relative risks of unvaccinated compared to vaccinated people. This is a combination (C=AxB in table below) of increased risk of infection ( A in the table) and increased risk of infection transitioning to severe disease from not having immune protection (B in table).

This is how the Pundit made sense of the details:

In this Delta variant COVID-19 epidemic, unvaccinated people were 11-fold more likely to get infected. If infected, they were more likely to go to hospital and to the intensive care unit. Overall, at the peak of the epidemic, they were 20-fold more likely to go to hospital, 38-fold more likely to enter the ICU, and 11-fold more likely to die.

In Bobby Kennedy's book, these risks and all this line of evidence are ignored.