Illusions in Vaccine Effectiveness
The pseudo-effectiveness of Covid vaccines against death from unrelated causes is not a new observation. The same kind of pseudo-effectiveness was discovered long ago for the flu vaccines. It is called the “healthy vaccinee effect.” For various reasons, unrelated to the vaccines, people who are vaccinated have better background health (on average) than people who are not, and therefore, they are less likely to die from “anything,” including flu and Covid. Vaccinated or not, they would have had lower Covid mortality than their unvaccinated counterparts.