The ratio of the mortality rate for the vaccinated group to the unvaccinated comparison group is 0.02/0.07. That is 0.285, which the author rounded down to 28 percent.
That ratio, which is the actual finding of the CDC report, means that the rate at which people in the vaccinated group are dying from things other than COVID-19 is only 28% of the rate at which people are dying from things other than COVID-19 in the unvaccinated comparison group. The author notes that the "all-cause mortality drops 72% if you are age 18-44" which is exactly the mathematical drop in mortality since 100 - 28 = 72.
Perhaps you don't look at the numbers in tables in scientific papers, but only read the text. The tables in the CDC paper are just as much a part of the paper as the rest of the text. And the table says exactly what the original article noted. You can check the math yourself with a calculator if you want to.
The reason that the article's comments are interesting is that the entire design of the study would be incorrect if the overall "healthiness" of the vaccinated group was such that their all causes (w/o COVID-19) mortality was 72% less than the comparison group. If that was true it would mean that the groups were not really comparable in the first place.
The expected result for a safety analysis like this would be that the mortality rate for areas other than the disease being vaccinated against would be roughly equivalent between the groups. The goal of this kind of study is to detect vaccine safety issues. Seeing higher mortality in the vaccinated group might indicate that the vaccine caused some problems. Seeing dramatically lower mortality in the vaccinated group is very unexpected, and probably indicates something went wrong in the study.
The expected result for a safety analysis like this would be that the mortality rate for areas other than the disease being vaccinated against would be roughly equivalent between the groups. The goal of this kind of study is to detect vaccine safety issues. Seeing higher mortality in the vaccinated group might indicate that the vaccine caused some problems. Seeing dramatically lower mortality in the vaccinated group is very unexpected, and probably indicates something went wrong in the study.
Thanks for actually digging in on the subject. Most of the other replies I got were ad hominem.
Your comments would be correct (especially this one: "The goal of this kind of study is to detect vaccine safety issues.") if the thing we were talking about were a study, but it's actually just a report. If they set up a study to test the safety of the so-called vaccines, they would need the study and the control group to be comparable. But this is not a study. It's a report on observed data.
The expected result for a safety analysis like this would be that the mortality rate for areas other than the disease being vaccinated against would be roughly equivalent between the groups.
Actually, that's not the expected result. It is often the case that people who choose to be vaccinated are already healthier than people who chose not to. That's called the "healthy vaccinee effect", there's a lot of literature on it (can be easily googled) and the CDC says in their discussion of the data in this report that the healthy vaccinee effect probably explains the disparate mortality data.
Here's a paper which talks about the same effect in the context of an actual vaccine:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)30017-5/fulltext
So to summarize, when you see a report showing that people who are vaccinated against X also have a lower rate of Y, that's likely the result of the healthy vaccinee effect (just like the CDC says) and it definitely does not mean (and the CDC never said it does mean) that your mortality from Y "drops" when you get vaccinated against X, which would be an absurd claim. The author has set up a straw man to make the CDC look foolish and it just makes him look foolish, and it also makes people who have legitimate issues with the so-called vaccines look foolish. There's lots of foolish things the CDC claims. This straw man is not one of them.
An example of what I was referring to in my last two sentences of prior reply:
https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/10/cdc-hiding-the-number-of-naturally-immune-to-covid-19/