With the release of Pfizer documents and a renewed focus on vaccine safety, there is special interest now in weighing up the balance between lives saved by the vaccine as compared to lives lost.
One way of measuring this is through collecting all-cause mortality figures.
The Ministry of Health posts annual statistical information on the underlying causes of all deaths registered in New Zealand.
The leading causes of death in 2019 were cancer, ischaemic heart diseases and cerebrovascular diseases.
The Ministry has not yet posted data for 2020 or 2021, after the vaccine was rolled out in New Zealand but looking at global data, a Waikato University economics Professor John Gibson concludes that the worldwide mass Covid-19 vaccination campaign has not provided the aggregate health benefits that might have been expected.
In a paper published in November 2021, he says mortality estimates are available for 32 developed and highly vaccinated OECD countries.
“For these countries there is no overall correlation between the incidence of Covid-19 vaccination and excess mortality, repeating a non-effect found when studying changes from 2020 to 2021 for the same month of the year. If mass vaccination truly is cutting the Covid-19 death toll, as is frequently claimed, it presumably is increasing deaths elsewhere to yield this aggregate non-effect.”
The study of 32 countries compared changes from 2020 to 2021, for each month through to September 2021, and found that vaccine rollout is unrelated to changes in Covid-19 cases, in Covid-19 deaths or in all-cause mortality.
“If mass vaccination reduces Covid-19 deaths but increases other deaths, leaving excess
mortality largely unchanged, the rationale for vaccine mandates is undermined, and suggests just targeting groups, like the elderly, for whom vaccination gives highest net benefit”, Gibson says.
The rapidly waning protection against infection provided by these vaccines also undermines the case for vaccine mandates, he adds.
“The findings reported here may be confronting to some readers, as widespread public
relations campaigns mounted by pharmaceutical companies and governments, and sometimes co-opting seemingly independent commentators such as academics, have hammered home the message ‘Covid-19 vaccines save lives’.”
In a separate peer reviewed paper, Gibson says the economic costs of collateral damage has been surprisingly absent from public discussions during the pandemic.
“After 1.3 billion doses for these countries and seven billion doses worldwide, one would expect to see some reduction in deaths. Yet such an effect does not show up in these data… As lockdowns failed to control the virus, and did not reduce excess mortality, politicians could have undone these costly and ineffective interventions without needing to rely on mass vaccination.”
At the University of Waikato New Zealand Economics Forum, held last year, Gibson said,.
“It is difficult to imagine anyone in New Zealand who is not aware of these key Covid-19 messages: Covid kills. Stay home. Save lives. And Covid does indeed kill - plenty of international evidence, and Covid deaths on our own home turf, leaves no doubt of that fact.
“But Government responses to a health risk must always weigh competing threats to health and wellbeing. And so the question lingers: to what extent has our national Covid response been in proportion to the actual threat? And what are the less publicised - but no less significant - other consequences of our ‘safety at all costs’ approach.”
He predicted a future historian describing New Zealand in 2020 and 2021 would report that daily life was dominated by Covid, both in the media and at a personal level.
“The impacts, they will note, ranged from disruptive recurrent lockdowns to smaller behavioural changes such as wearing masks and scanning into different locations. Economic effects will be easily detectable, with GDP now about five percent below where it was forecasted to be, pre-Covid.”
Early in the pandemic, a widely reported model predicted that Covid could kill 80,000 New Zealanders, he noted.
“That claim was never retracted or corrected, yet it is entirely implausible. With a death per infection rate of 1-in-1100 from the WHO, the New Zealand population would have to be almost 90 million—all infected—for so many deaths to occur. This is almost 20-times higher than our actual population. A fully rational Covid response would reflect updated information, and overly-fearful early predictions would be corrected.”
A ‘safety-at-all-costs’ approach to Covid ignores benchmarks for evaluating health and mortality risks, Gibson said.
“In some cases, resources used to cut the risk of losing one life per year due to Covid could be about one hundred times more effective if used for other health risks. Moreover, lower future incomes—from lost earnings in lockdowns, and from New Zealand’s rising debt as a consequence of our response to Covid — will decrease future life expectancy by far more than any more modest loss of life we would see from a more proportional response to Covid.”
Professor John Gibson is an Economist at the University of Waikato Management School. His paper is entitled Mass Covid-19 Vaccination and Excess Mortality: Direct and Indirect Pathways John Gibson
https://repec.its.waikato.ac.nz/wai/econwp/2113.pdf
https://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/handle/10289/14388
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-economic-and-health-effects-of-mass-covid-19-vaccination/
https://www.health.govt.nz/nz-health-statistics/health-statistics-and-data-sets/mortality-and-demographic-data-series
Another economist who examines trade-offs and cost-benefit analysis for New Zealand’s COVID policies, is Dr Martin Lally.
Dr Lally is a director of Capital Financial Consultants, which provides financial economics advice to clients in the public and private sectors in New Zealand and Australia.
He takes issue with Medsafe’s assertion that the protective benefits of vaccination against COVID-19 far outweigh the potential risks of vaccination.
“Medsafe’s assertion then looks like cheerleading rather than impartial reporting of adverse events. A related problem occurred with the elimination strategy pursued by the government, in that its external advisers continued to publicly support this strategy even after the only cost-benefit analysis carried out by any of them on elimination versus mitigation revealed that mitigation was preferable. All of this could reasonable lead some people to doubt official sources of information.”
Lally says the risks of death from covid-19 if infected are so low for healthy adults under the age of 50 (less than 1/30,000) that such people could rationally prefer not to be vaccinated purely on the basis of the number of serious (but non-fatal) side-effects from the vaccine that have been reported to date by Medsafe.
Lally concludes: “Opposition to covid-19 vaccines is rational for many people. In particular, the risks of death from covid-19 if infected are so low for healthy adults under the age of 50 (less than 1/50,000) that such people could rationally prefer not to be vaccinated purely on the basis of the number of serious side-effects from the vaccine that have been reported to date by Medsafe.
Go to:
https://www.covidplanb.co.nz/data-science/a-cost-benefit-analysis-of-covid-19-vaccine-mandates/