Dr Matt’s Newsletter May 21st– "Placebo vaccine" and statistical sleight-of-hand
Supporting healthy social interactions and diversity of health choices
Here are the topics in today’s newsletter:
Inspiration of the week – If you are open to sharing the Near Death Experiences from your family, please contact me.
Many people in my practice have had near death experiences and other similar experiences and I would like to tell some of their stories – anonymously of course – to my readers. You can email or call so we can discuss. I know that many families in my practice have had such experiences because I have heard some of the stories in person! Also, a research study in Europe found about 10% of people have had these experiences.
Research of the week: A new take on the placebo effect – a “Placebo vaccine” would have very similar efficacy to what is claimed for “covid vaccines”, because of statistical sleight of hand.
The illusion of efficacy fades quickly in a few months. Sound familiar? This statistical sleight of hand was described in detail by statistician Norman Fenton, and also discussed in an excellent article by Madhava Setty, M.D.
Politics “Not as Usual” – Joseph Ladapo, the surgeon General of Florida, challenges the FDA and CDC directors to be honest about the “covid vaccines”, including that many research studies have found they increase the chance of testing positive on “covid tests”.
Music of the Week: Tangerine Dream. I first heard them in the 1980’s when electronic synth music was brand new. They are still around, and they are giving concerts again now that people are allowed to join together in groups larger than ten people 😊.
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Yours truly, one moment at a time.
Matt Irwin
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Before starting off with the statistical sleight of hand, here is some music to listen to while you read. Or, if you prefer, it could accompany a 5 minute session of mindful breathing or prayer.
Tangerine Dream: Tangram - Live version
To start us off, below is a graph from Madhava Setty’s article, along with some of his comments. It shows how a placebo vaccine would look effective initially, and fade over the next 6 months until there is a nonsignificant difference.
In other words, the statistical bias described below accounts for the illusion of an strong positive effect, even if you just inject people with plain water.
Another main point is that this bias would not explain the “negative efficacy”, which is much more likely a direct effect of the immune stimulation the vaccine causes, as I described in many newsletters including on May 6th.
Research of the week: A “Placebo vaccine” would appear to have 86% efficacy if the statistics were measured the way the pharmaceutical companies measure them for their “active” drugs and vaccines.
British statistician Norman Fenton has been busy for three years pointing out statistical biases and misinformation from government organizations. Recently he set his sights on a major problem with pharmaceutical company vaccine research: waiting until two weeks after the second dose to count people as “vaccinated”. This delay causes a significant bias, and is something RFK Jr has pointed out repeatedly. I also addressed it in my newsletter on November 9th, as well as reviewing the extremely low mortality from the original “Wuhan strain” of less than 1 in 300,000 in young people. November 9th was my first effort to tackle the “negative efficacy” of covid vaccines, which I most recently covered on May 6th.
If someone has an adverse effect to the vaccine or tests positive on a “covid test” before two weeks after the second dose, they are not counted as “vaccinated”, which creates a very significant statistical bias. Madhava Setty wrote an excellent article summarizing Fenton’s research. Here is his description of the basic problem:
“The problem is that vaccine failures (cases in the vaccinated) were only counted if a person was outside the 14 day window while cases in the unvaccinated population were counted immediately. … The lag in case counts among the vaccinated artificially reduces the risk of infection in that group.”
This issue is even worse in Britain’s National Health Service data. Positive cases in the UK that occurred within 21 days of the second dose of the primary series were, in Setty’s words, “not only excluded from the pool of vaccinated individuals, but were actually attributed to the unvaccinated population!”.
Last week I compared this to starting a basketball game with only one team on the court, and then having the second team come out after five minutes. At the end of the first quarter, you claim victory and stop the game because “it is unethical to continue”. However, if you continued the game long enough, the score difference would appear relatively smaller and smaller (i.e. an initial difference of twenty points to zero is an amazing lead, but a difference of 2020 to 2000 is not statistically or clinically significant, even though the scores are still exactly 20 points apart). In drug trials they quickly say they have “statistical significance”, stop the study, and offer the drug to all participants, stopping the waning efficacy before it takes over.
I have an even better analogy this week. Suppose there was a study of injuries and illnesses in people running 10 miles per day for 100 days, for a total of 1000 miles. The “placebo group” starts walking right away, and the “treatment group” starts walking four weeks later. Obviously, the placebo group will start building up injuries, as well as encountering routine illnesses and other health problems, lets say they have 10 of these in the first four weeks. When the “treatment group” starts walking, it will look like they have been protected somehow, and there will be a score of 10 to 0. After they start running ten miles per day, both groups will get injuries at an equal rate, and after 16 weeks the ten point lead will only be about 50 to 40, which looks a lot smaller. After enough time passes, the score will reach something 210 to 200, which is not a statistically significant difference.
This case counting delay skews the data so much, Fenton shows, that if you vaccinated with absolutely nothing you will still get a false 86% efficacy initially, which wanes quickly over the next few months. One key difference in the “real vaccines” is that the efficacy turns negative a few months later, which does not happen with a placebo vaccine, even with the statistical sleight of hand in place. In a placebo vaccine the efficacy would approximate zero, but would never go negative.
I am confident that the “negative efficacy” is because of the non-specificity of the so-called “covid tests”. People’s inflammatory systems are stimulated by the vaccine, and sometimes hyper-stimulated. This can cause mild issues like short lived flu-like symptoms, or severe health problems such as overwhelming autoimmune syndromes. When a person’s system is in an inflammatory state it is more likely to test positive on the “covid tests”, regardless if there is any virus present, even if the inflammation is caused by allergic or autoimmune responses. I covered the problems with PCR false positives 23 years ago in a literature review as a research project in medical school.
In my newsletters I have reviewed the studies showing “negative efficacy” of covid vaccines several times, including some that found tripling and even quadrupling of the risk. The most recent review was in my newsletter on May 6th.
Madhava Setty’s article in on his Substack explains Fenton’s statistical work in great detail. Setty is an anesthesiologist who has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. He worked as an engineer for six years before attending medical school, and this experience helps him see through statistical issues more easily than most, as well as being used to doing “harm vs benefit” analyses. For the past three years he has focused on the various contradictions to the covid narrative, but he also has a strong emphasis on emotional and spiritual health, and would likely know a lot about the actual “placebo effect” which I covered on September 28th . I focused on the remarkable efficacy of placebo surgery and the placebo effect in antidepressants, where it accounts for approximately 100% of the improvements in pharmaceutical drug trials.
Here is a link to the presentation by Irving Kirsch telling the story of how he became famous – or infamous- for his meta-analysis on antidepressants . In antidepressant research a similar statistical manipulation is used to the 14-day-after-2nd-dose issue, called a “placebo washout period”. This technique hides adverse effects, including the very worst ones such as suicides and suicide attempts, both of which are consistently and significantly increased by antidepressants in randomized trials.
Tangerine Dream: Horizon - A Journey
Just as with the covid vaccine, the placebo group starts accruing adverse effects during the “placebo washout” phase, before the drug trial actually starts. Even with this bias, it was found repeatedly that the drug group had increased risk of suicide attempts and completed suicides, and there is a Black Box warning for antidepressants due to this risk. However, the warning underestimates the risk significantly. When researchers obtained unpublished trials using a Freedom of Information requests, there was a doubling of the suicide risk. This was raised several fold higher when the “placebo washout period” was removed from the analysis, with a risk of completed suicides nearly 7 times as high in the group on “antidepressants”!
A book on antidepressant research, “Prescription for Sorrow” by Patrick D. Hahn, described these issues including the seven-fold increase in suicides. His book is sad and at times painful to read, but something everyone who takes antidespressants shuld read so they have fully “informed consent”. On page 61 he covers the work of David Healy, a British psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist who has published multiple studies and who has spent thousands of hours researching problems with antidepressants including the risk of homicide and suicide. (https://davidhealy.org/bio/)
The more positive side of the equation for the placebo effect is the power of positive belief, something Irving Kirsch focuses on in great detail in his book, “The Emperor’s New Drugs”. However, people often hold onto their belief in antidepressants very tightly. There seems to be a strong preference for a biological explanation for the painful negative experiences and suffering they face, and the placebo response threatens this belief. It is as if the power of their own belief to heal them is an extremely dangerous possibility.
Personally, I try to generate the power of belief as much as I can, in the healthiest way possible, including “present moment running”, which I believe is healthy, although I run so slowly some might say it is really a fast walk 😊.
Politics Not as Usual - Surgeon General of Florida, one of my favorite people, has written a strongly worded letter to the head of the FDA and CDC asking them pointed questions about covid policies.
His new letter, dated May 10, 2023, focuses on vaccine risks primarily, and asks them to simply be honest about the many problems. He states: “Your efforts to manipulate the public into thinking they are harmless have resulted in deep distrust in the American health care system.” He also points out that their dis-honesty is a “startling exercise in disinformation”.
Ladapo is being accused in the media of all kinds of things, just like RFK Jr.. In his case he is accused of being “far right”, while RFK Jr is called an “unstable conspiracy theorist antivaxxer”. To me both of them hold to true liberalism which supports freedom of expression and free exchange of ideas. In these Orwellian times, if you promote honesty, freedom of expression, and common sense too strongly, you are labeled a “Crazy antivaxxer” :-). Here is a nice interview with RFK Jr, from the conservative-leaning Megyn Kelly.
My favorite part of Joseph Ladapo’s Letter is when he addresses the “negative efficacy” of “covid vaccines” in point number 10:
“10.Explain why you have not publicly reported on the studies indicating a likely increased risk of COVID-19 infection after four to six months from receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. (Chemaitelly H, Lancet Infectious Disease. 2023; Altarawneh HN, New England Journal of Medicine. 2022; Lin DY, New England Journal of Medicine. 2022).”
Note that he actually cites research, very similar to RFK Jr.
Here is the link to the pdf of the letter.
And here is another link to the article by Madhava Setty.
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