Were fewer than 0.1% of v-safe registrants hospitalized?

CDC's highly cited v-safe Lancet paper makes misleading claims

Summary:

• The CDC published a paper in The Lancet (June 2022) claiming less than 0.1% of v-safe registrants were hospitalized after COVID-19 vaccination

• Analysis of 1.3 million "vaccine enthusiast" Pfizer recipients (those who reported no initial problems) shows 8,751 people (0.67%) reported hospitalization in their v-safe check-ins - nearly 7 times higher than CDC's reported rate

• The CDC's lower figure resulted from:

  • Splitting the data into separate dose blocks rather than showing cumulative risk

  • Only counting hospitalizations within 7 days of vaccination instead of the usual monitoring period of 42 days

• The CDC's v-safe system was actually designed to monitor patients for 365 days after their final dose, but the published analysis only used 7-day windows

A few weeks back I wrote that Debunk the Funk Dan Wilson had mentioned the following in his video about the ICAN lawsuit:

“But the numbers who said they actually reported seeking medical care are much smaller. That was around 0.8% after the first dose and around 0.9% after the second dose. And medical care might just mean taking Tylenol or going to the pharmacy to pick up something to deal with your symptoms. Even smaller numbers reported seeking a telehealth consultation. Even smaller numbers reported visiting the clinic for their symptoms. And even smaller numbers than that reported going to the emergency room or actually being hospitalized because of whatever symptoms they were feeling. So when the research is done properly using this data and statistics are applied, let's see what the authors of this paper actually say about it. “

Link

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To support his point, Dan Wilson cites this June 2022 CDC paper published in the Lancet.

Notice what the paper says in Table 5:

This is what Dan Wilson cites in his video when he says “And even smaller numbers than that reported going to the emergency room or actually being hospitalized because of whatever symptoms they were feeling.“

Looking at the chart, you might think that less than 0.1% of people required hospitalization.

I ran a quick query over one of the cohorts I constructed for a previous article.

I called it the vaccine enthusiast cohort - these are people whose initial v-safe checkin indicated no problems at all, which meant they did not sign up only because they had some symptom.

Link to tweet

There are about 1.3 million registrants in the vaccine enthusiast Pfizer cohort.

These are people who are in the vaccine enthusiast cohort who took only the Pfizer vaccine¹.

Let us call this VEPC for short.

In the table (CSV file) called consolidated health checkins, there is a field called Healthcare_visits, which contains the word “Hospitalization” if the registrant checked the appropriate box.

I built a tool to visualize the v-safe timeline and this is what the form would look like when the user selects this checkbox².

And this is what the entry looks like in the Healthcare_visits field:

Telehealth, virtual health, or email health consultation:Outpatient clinic or urgent care clinic visit:Emergency room or emergency department visit:Hospitalization

Notice that all the checkbox values selected by the user are concatenated to generate the field value³.

The question “What type of healthcare visit did you have?” question is presented to the user only if they checked “Get care from a doctor or other healthcare professional” in the previous step.

v-safe Protocol v6

Out of the 1.3 million VEPC registrants, I checked to see how many of them had mentioned “Hospitalization” in the Healthcare_visits field.

What the query tells us is that there were over 8700 registrants out of that 1.3 million who were fine on the day of vaccination, who mentioned “Hospitalization” in one of their v-safe checkins on a future date.

This comes to 8751/1300000 = 0.67%

But this is nearly 7 times higher than the <0.1% number that the CDC mentions in the paper.

How did the CDC get less than 0.1% across the board?

Was the CDC lying about the data?

Third rate vaccine safety standards

No, the CDC was not lying about the data.

They just divided the data into blocks which make people think that they are referring to unique registrants. In reality, the n=3455778 and n=2920526 under BNT162B2 are not disjoint sets. In other words, given that the same registrant could be hospitalized after Dose 1 or Dose 2, the risk is additive.

Either the CDC should have stated this in their article, or the Lancet reviewers should have caught this and asked for a revision to point out that the risk could be additive.

The CDC also limited the time window to only 7 days after vaccination.

But most vaccine safety analysis extends to at least 30 days, and sometimes up to 42 days⁴. In fact, v-safe itself was designed to monitor the patient’s health for 365 days after the final dose.

And there are also a few people who were only hospitalized after the 3rd dose.

So you can see a problem here - if people like “Debunk the Funk” Dan Wilson take the CDC’s paper and use it as a way to rebut the claim made by the ICAN folks without doing any kind of independent verification, then they have not really “debunked” anything. At best, they are blindly parroting what they have been told by the CDC.

Of course, some people could say that .67% is still not a very big number. If 250+ million people were vaccinated (this is the number of Americans who were vaccinated, according to CDC), this would send nearly 1.7 million people to the hospital!

I also mentioned in my previous article that I don’t think what Aaron Siri and Del Bigtree are claiming (that over 7% had to go see a Doctor for something presumably serious) is correct either.

In fact this seemingly simple question - how many v-safe registrants had a serious adverse event for which they needed to see a Doctor? - actually needs a lot more analysis. It is not as high as 7% as folks at ICAN imply, nor is it as low as less than 0.1% as Dan Wilson suggests.

I will use the Vaccine Enthusiast Pfizer cohort (VEPC) to do this analysis and present my findings in the next article.

For now, the takeaway message is that the “< 0.1% hospitalized” number mentioned in the CDC’s Lancet paper is very misleading and under-reports the vaccine’s danger.

1. This prevents confounding due to multiple vaccine brands being administered

2. I mimicked the UI from this document on Aaron Siri’s Substack to make it easy to visualize and explain these concepts.

3. To be very precise, I reverse engineered this UI from the value in the field. But this is how the UI is supposed to work according to the CDC’s v-safe protocol document. Cached copy here.

4. And there are some people who say even that isn’t sufficient and want safety monitoring over a much longer time period.