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.
Nice try, but your cited "paper" is actually just correspondence to the journal, and doesn't give an example of a healthy vaccinee group with anywhere near the effect supposedly shown the data in the CDC report.
And your argument that the CDC publication is a report and statement that "But this is not a study" is simply inconsistent with what the CDC publication says:
"In this cohort study of VSD members aged ≥12 years, vaccination status through May 31, 2021 was determined."The CDC calls it a "cohort study" but somehow you think it isn't a study. I'm starting to understand why you get a lot of what you characterize as "ad hominem" replies.
The data published by the CDC speaks for itself. Either the study planning or the data analysis has some flaws in it, or we have discovered a miracle drug which can dramatically reduce mortality from all causes.
Your statement that the result the data shows can't possibly be related to the effect of the vaccine because that is "absurd" is exactly the point the critics are making. If you run a study and the data resulting from the study shows an impossible or "absurd" result you probably made an error somewhere in the study design or the data analysis.
If your theory of a healthy vaccinee selection effect was true, and the people in the vaccinated groups were so different from the unvaccinated population that their mortality rate was more than 3 times lower than the comparison group independent of vaccination, then the study does nothing to show that the vaccines are safe.
Your theory also implies that the entire premise of such a study is pointless. You say that "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."
But wouldn't you agree that the only way you know if a vaccine or other treatment works at all is to do the same kind of study? In your own sentence just replace Y and X with "COVID-19". You agree that a study which cuts the mortality rate after vaccination is how you prove a vaccine works, right?
You are now arguing that the very principle used to establish that a drug or vaccine works "definitely does not mean" what it has to mean if the study is worth running. If the relative mortality rates didn't mean something why run the study at all? If the vaccinated mortality rate from non-covid causes was twice the rate for the unvaccinated comparison group would that also "not mean" anything? How would you ever know when the ratio between the mortality rates meant something?
I hope you can think more about how this type of research is conducted, and not just have blind faith in the people listed at the top of the CDC publication.