Listen in Bobby Kennedy. What effect does COVID-19 vaccination have on mortality risk? It pushes it down, down, down.

A  blinkered anti-technology mindset misses out on seeing how lives can be saved.

 A recent post discusses a book by Bobby Kennedy (RFKjr) outlining his opinions about Dr Tony Fauci, a widely admired medical scientist in the USA. 

In the book, while castigating Dr Fauci for promoting COVID-19 vaccines, Kennedy explicitly claims that vaccination increases fatal outcomes from COVID.

The word "lies" comes up repeatedly in the book.

With all the Kennedy emphasis on ethical behaviour, you'd expect to see his careful presentation of evidence to support the claim that COVID-19 vaccines enhances death from infection with the coronavirus in a book where this claim is a key theme.

But no, there is none of that in this latest book.

Infections cause deaths.

Spread of infection is the primary factor influencing the rate of death from COVID-19.

Strangely, there is zero discussion in the Kennedy book about coronavirus infection and its link to fatalities. In Kennedy's blinkered mindset, mortality is seemingly only ever connected with vaccination.

We supply here is the discussion that missing from the book  using Australian statistics for mortality rates from SARS-CoV2 infections.

The simplest way to evaluate the influence of vaccination on mortality rates is to look how it changes when vaccines are introduced during an epidemic.

Look at the following graph for Australian COVID-19 infections and deaths to see how this can be done:

The cumulative number of detected COVID-19 infections during 2020-21 in Australia is plotted on the horizontal axis of this graph, and the cumulative number of deaths from those infections is plotted on the vertical axis.

In such a plot, the slope of the graph is a measure of the COVID-19 infection fatality rate (IFR).

(In Australia, COVID-19 diagnosis has been very efficient, as we have kept infections low a lot of the time in most of the country, meaning the slopes of the plot are the true IFR).

In the early stages of the outbreaks in Australia the slope reached as high as 2.9 percent

The arrows on the graph show where vaccination ramped up.

The red arrow indicates the timing of the start of vaccination. After this event, there is a dramatic and permanent decrease in the slope of the curve. 

The slope from 1000 deaths onward is 0.63 deaths per 100 cases. The infection fatality rate falls below 0.60 deaths per 100 cases as vaccination rolls out more fully. 

These changes demonstrate that vaccination has saved at least 12,000 lives in Australia so far

It also shows that the Bobby Kennedy notion that vaccination makes death rates worse in coronavirus infections is totally false.

Why would Kennedy avoid looking at such evidence?

It's part of a systematic bias in his book against looking carefully at countries that have managed the pandemic well, and learning from them.

Sadly it is not the only tragic bias in his book, but that's the subject of another post.