Critique of Lin et al.'s claims that COVID unvaccinated have been dropping like flies

As long-time OTN readers will know I am fighting against the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, and this necessitates doing a bit of research on the jabs. Some of this ends up getting published in proper medical journals. Some of this takes the form of critiques, against articles/studies purporting to show the great benefit of the jabs. My critique of Kitano et al. was published, and a few more are in consideration. It is very challenging to get my contrarian thoughts published in the medical journals, even more so given my current battles, so when another study recently came out making such grand claims, a very flawed one, I didn’t even bother trying to publish a proper critique of it - especially as this particular journal doesn’t publish response pieces. But for those keen to know my thoughts on Lin et al. (source), which has been featured in the mainstream news (source), and which claims that “Unvaccinated individuals had a 7.7-fold greater mortality rate than those who were fully vaccinated among people aged 50+, which rose to 11.2-fold in those who had received a booster dose.”, and that “mortality would have been far higher if not for vigorous efforts to rapidly vaccinate the entire population”, check out my unorganised ramblings below:

• Once again, it’s centred on a model. The map is not the territory, people! Garbage in, garbage out. Their estimates of vaccine effectiveness better be accurate… And we would hope that they provide accurate estimates of vaccine safety and IFRs as well…

• Their Figure 1 shows COVID-19 cases really taking off once almost all of Australia was vaccinated. I wonder if the jab might be causing some of that.

• Their “primary focus was on individuals aged 50 and above”, so for a lot of us that’s the end of the line. We want to know if the jabs are suitable for all, if the jabs might be doing more harm than good in people that don’t have much to worry about when it comes to COVID, if the mandates were rational, etc.

• Interestingly, confirmed COVID-19 deaths (insofar as we can trust these confirmations) were “classified by vaccination history as either having received no doses, one dose, two doses (fully vaccinated), or three or more doses”. So maybe they won’t be doing the dodge, playing around with the meanings of ‘fully vaccinated’ and unvaccinated. Haha, almost had you: “we assumed that any vaccine dose required 2 weeks to provide protective immunity, which we implement by shifting vaccination coverage (1st dose, 2nd and 3rd dose) two weeks later”. Looks even worse in the supplementary material: “Cases reported as no effective dose received their first dose of a vaccination course less than 21 days prior to known exposure to COVID-19 or have not received any vaccine dose.” So if you take the jab, get infected 18 days later, go to hospital after 19 days, and die on day 20, congratulations, you padded the unvaccinated COVID-19 infections/hospitalisations/deaths stats! Look how dangerous it is to be unjabbed… Is it so hard for them to count from the very first jab? Are they trying to hide something? Enter Fung, Jones, Doshi, and myself. If doing it right wouldn’t make much difference to the results, as some critics of my work might claim, then why not just do it right? Why leave the door ajar for ‘conspiracy theories’ to flourish? Anyway, this is already it for me, without the right data and methods, their results are invalid.

• As seems to be the norm for these sorts of papers, “rates of mortality of 50+ individuals were first estimated”. Why do they always have to estimate? Don’t they know?

• Is effectiveness waning factored into their model? Buried in the supplementary data we find this juicy nugget: “the effectiveness of two doses of the vaccine in reducing death rate is assumed to decline by 0.5% per week”. Makes me want to puke. We’ve seen data suggesting any effectiveness of the jabs is gone within weeks, for infections, and within 12 months, for deaths, even turning negative (for all) within the year.

• Surely they mention the healthy vaccinee effect, right? Especially since we’re talking about a study dealing with older people, so if this bias is happening it can be having an even bigger impact here, right? Nope, not even a mention. They came close, noting “a higher proportion of unvaccinated people… about 7% and 9% of aged care residents in NSW and VIC, respectively, had not received any vaccine, compared with only 1.4% of people aged 70+ in NSW”, but still couldn’t bring themselves to say the magic words. And what about other confounding variables? They don’t seem to care. The results are bogus. That’s what you get for running a crappy model, with garbage assumptions, instead of a proper RCT. Remind me again, how many lives were saved in the mRNA vaccine clinical trials? Oh that’s right, it was 0 (possibly/arguably even negative).

• They do show a scary graph showing how poorly the ‘unjabbed’ have been doing. Didn’t see here the reports from NSW Health, which consistently showed the unvaccinated outperforming the vaccinated with regards to COVID-19 hospitalisations and ICU admissions, and sometimes on COVID-19 deaths, through to December 2022, with NSW Health for some reason abruptly deciding to stop reporting serious COVID-19 stratified by vaccination status. Oh, that’s right, Lin et al. are only looking at the 50+ crowd. Nothing to see here then.

• They do acknowledge that “the great majority of Australia’s COVID-19 deaths were fully vaccinated individuals”. Don’t get too excited, they also state that the death rates are much more important, and I of course agree. The problem is, the data and methods here are dodgy af.

• IFRs employed seem too high, and it’s not enough to just cite someone who thinks that’s right. There is a great diversity of opinions on what the IFRs and CFRs actually are, so this needs proper justification.

• No mentions of injuries and deaths caused by the COVID jabs. Because of course. It’s hard to do a proper risk-benefit analysis without looking at such highly relevant data, don’t you think? We know the jabs cause death, for a fact, but it’s hard to know how many. Partly because of the obvious underreporting, and partly because we still cannot know, by definition, the long-term impact. Maybe further research on excess mortality will help enlighten us, as long as we sidestep their efforts to hide it.

Okay then.