Okay, ladies and gentlemen, finally we have some data that’s published in the New England Journal of Medicine with regard to the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.
I am gleeful and happy to report the flaws in this study only because the vaccine and the study were developed by people who are affiliated with Harvard University, my favorite university to trash.
I think you should know the bias in my reporting before you accept anything that I say. As you know, I firmly believe that the real virus in the United States of America and the world is Harvard University and its affiliated puppets, institutions, and sycophants.
Hopefully one day someone will invent a vaccine to immunize us from Harvard University, although I would not expect that effort to come from Moderna being that it is run by Harvard people.
Is there a conflict of interest in the New England Journal of Medicine even publishing this article given their close and friendly association with Harvard University? I would think so.
With that stated let me proceed.
The first thing that struck me about this study was the date it was released. It was released the day before the last day of the year when everyone is getting ready to party. Why would Moderna and the NEJM release the study on this day?
What are they hiding?
What are you afraid of Moderna? What are you afraid of New England Journal of Medicine? What are you afraid of Harvard University?
When I first read the report, I was admittedly a little surprised because it appeared on the surface as if the vaccine would be completely effective and safe.
As you may know, I have always felt that this vaccine never should have been released to the public until a) the medical community at large had reviewed the study, and b) all the internal emails and memos that went into the development of this vaccine had been scrutinized. We should also have encouraged any potential whistleblowers to come forward prior to its implementation.
But as I say, on first sight the vaccine appeared to be effective; however, I like to look into the details.
I don’t trust anyone, especially when things look too good.
I’m like Sonny from A Bronx Tale.
Sonny could see through Mickey Mantle, and so can I. So, my friends, throw away your baseball cards.
Here are the main points which bother me about this study.
First, I noted that only one person died of COVID-19 in all the 30,000 people who participated in the study. Only one.
Now, it’s important to review that in this study 15,000 people received the Moderna vaccine while the other 15,000 people received a saline shot. The people who received the vaccine received two doses 28 days apart. All the patients were monitored for signs of COVID-19 and adverse effects.
To recap, only one person died of COVID-19 out of 15,000 presumably susceptible people. This is astounding. Where were these people living? On the moon?
Where I live in Hidalgo County we have already experienced over 2,000 deaths within a total population of 850,000 people. If we prorate the study’s death ratio of 1 death for every 15,000 people per quarter (three months of study time) who did not receive the vaccine, we would only have 14 people dying in Hidalgo county per quarter. That would translate to 42 deaths per nine months which is the time period from April through December of 2020.
If you prorate this ratio of 1 in 15,000 for the population of the United States (325 million), we would only have 21,666 deaths per quarter or 65,000 over the past 9 months. Currently we have over 350,000 deaths in the United States for the nine-month time period from April through December of 2020.
So what’s going on here? The authors meekly point to mask use and social distancing.
That’s a laugher.
This low death count even among the placebo population is certainly not a total indictment of the study, but it is certainly a feature that should make one think that something abnormal is going on.
Who are we kidding here?
This is not the only feature of the study that bothers me.
The total death count in the Moderna study was six people. One died of COVID-19, the other five died of other causes.
Does this bother you? It should.
The normal yearly death count in the United States of America is .0083 multiplied against the total population.
If we multiply 30,000 people by .0083 and then divide by 4 to account for a 3 month interval, we would have expected 62 people to die. To be honest, we would expect more than this number because this study was skewed toward elderly people and those people who have underlying medical conditions.
So it appears that not only did our sample population live on the moon, they evidently came from Krypton before that.
These people defy death rates.
The authors make no notation that any of the 941 people excluded from the original population of 30,000 died.
Let’s move on.
The study claims to be a double blinded study, but it is not a double blinded study at all. We know this because the authors themselves have revealed that there was a higher proportion of adverse effects from the administration of the vaccine. For example, recipients of the vaccine had a higher incidence of local reactions plus systemic symptoms such as fever and chills by almost a 4 to 1 ratio. This is to be expected as we are injecting foreign substances into the human body.
It should also be expected that these patients would report these adverse effects to their physicians who are monitoring their medical condition. These physicians are smart enough to know that if someone is having fever and chills that they were more than likely to have received the vaccine.
Would this taint the study?
If I have a strong feeling that someone has received the COVID-19 vaccine, could I subconsciously skew my evaluation of that individual in terms of excluding that individual if certain symptoms later arose?
Suppose I am giving the vaccine and one of my recipients, who I strongly suspect has received the vaccine, comes down with COVID-19, what am I going to do?
That data doesn’t fit with the narrative. That’s an inconvenient fact.
Not only could the doctors suspect who had received the vaccine, so could the patients. Could the patients have altered their behavior based upon their suspicion?
Many people were excluded from the study on both sides, almost 500 apiece, for any number of reasons, but we are not fully told why they were excluded.
This is one of the problems with statistical studies; everyone gets mixed into the giant Ninja blender of numbers.
We begin to rely on statistics instead of critical thinking. We tend to investigate individual cases with less thoroughness.
This leads me to discuss my fourth problem with this Moderna study, and it is a general criticism of academia.
This study is stat happy.
Let me give you examples of some of the terms that are used in this study.
O’Brien-Fleming boundary.
Lan-DeMets alpha spending function.
Stratified Cox proportional hazards model.
Two-sided 95% exact confidence intervals (Clopper-Pearson method).
It’s good to know that Clopper and Pearson were on the job, eh?
This study is paralysis through analysis. I defy any normal person to understand the gobbledygook mathematics behind the Clopper-Pearson method. Warning: Your brain might be at risk of thermal injury.
Paralysis through analysis was a term that Gene Mauch, the former manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, used. He was using it to describe what happens when you think too much.
Thinking too much is a real problem in sports, and it is a real problem in academia – although they’re too misguided, too stupid and too arrogant to care.
A few years ago the Philadelphia 76ers hired a man named Sam Hinkie (Stanford) who believed in using metrics to run a basketball team.
It didn’t work.
We don’t live in a universe that is precise. We live in a messy universe that defies mathematics.
Indeed, the universe laughs at mathematicians.
The universe chortles at Lan-DeMets and Clopper-Pearson.
Mathematicians are doofuses who keep trying to force an imperfect world into a perfect mold.
It can’t be done successfully, and it won’t be done successfully.
This Moderna study misses the point by clinging to these mathematical tools.
Moreover, the current mathematical tools of statistics take you too far into the forest. You get so close to the trees, you can’t see the bigger picture.
While I do believe in looking at numbers, I also believe that numbers are a guide not the ruling force in evaluating the effectiveness of either a player in the National Basketball Association or a vaccine that is to be administered to the public at large.
The Moderna vaccine and the evaluation of it requires a second look.
This data must be analyzed by humble people in the real world.
This is not to say that the vaccine will not be wildly successful. It very well may be.
I hope it is.
But first, let’s have real people look at it, not psychotic mathematicians.
We may even need a different group, independent of Harvard and its puppets, to do a better study.
In a blatant effort to be diverse, I suppose, the study was spread out over too many providers in too wide a geographic area.
Political correctness abounds in this study.
Spreading the study out makes consistency more difficult. It also opens your study up to corruption.
Furthermore, how were these providers, who administered the vaccine, chosen?
Perhaps they were people predisposed to yielding favorable results for Moderna. Were they given Moderna stock?
Let’s face it, there’s a lot of money and prestige riding on the success of this COVID-19 vaccine.
If you think somebody’s going to get in the way of that success by being a wet blanket on the party, you better think again.
After all we are fundamentally human with all the flaws that humanity has to offer.
Ah, but flaws are not acceptable within the doctrine of our oldest university, Harvard.
Which is why Harvard uses statistics, and awards, and street credibility to sanitize the world, to make it a better place.
After all, they are the master race.
And that my friend is the problem.
Mickey Mantle doesn’t care about you, and neither does Harvard University.
Ha ha, Harvard; you struck out again.
Sincerely,
Archer Crosley, MD
Copyright 2020 Archer Crosley All Rights Reserved
Cowboy Archer 