The swedes just did a large vaccine study using 842,972 pairs of people (1.7 million total). each pair had one vaxxed, one unvaxxed. it’s currently a preprint for “the lancet.” you can grab it HERE.
This was a retrospective study, but one in which the matching of cohorts was pretty good which improves the evidence quality quite a bit. it’s not a full RCT, but it’s a lot better than most of what’s getting published right now.
Age was about the same, comorbidities similar, and gender near exact. the only major variance seems to be that 10% of vaxxed vs 4% of unvaxxed were “homemaker service” which looks to be the high risk “assisted living” group. also, 84% of vaxxed were born in sweden vs 69% of unvaxxed. given the higher covid rates in immigrants, this seems to favor vaccines. so too does the usual definitional game of only counting those who are 14 days or more after a second dose as vaccinated.
Vaccines start off reasonably effective, but they fade very quickly. this has long been a criticism and a complaint about the shortness of the drug trials on which their approval was based and the elimination of their control groups to prevent long term study.
Companies like pfizer are VERY good at clinical trials. They do not make mistakes. They make choices.
Given these longer term results, it seems clear why they chose to run short trials and then eliminate the control groups after about 90 days. because that’s when things start to go off the rails. This becomes obvious in the curves from the study:
The downslope in efficacy against symptomatic infection is just starting right where pfizer and moderna ended their trials and vaccinated the control groups to make future comparison impossible. (red vertical line added by me) out around 240 days (red horiz line added by me) it goes negative.
Note that this is symptomatic only data, not “any found infection.” the fact that the VE is (despite being negative) is still far higher than negative VE’s seen in “all cases” in the UK interests me. this may imply a large group of vaccinated asymptomatic carriers.
It also raises questions about whether the vaccines ever provide ANY sterilizing immunity at all or if they merely prevent symptoms. recall that both the mRNA drug trials only tested those reporting symptoms for covid to assess efficacy. Again, seems like a choice, not an error.
But this is all well known. the evidence that vaccines fail to stop spread has been clear for some time and not even the CDC argues it anymore.
What this study added that was terribly interesting was data on the prevention of severe covid. and this too drops rapidly.
