Peter McCullough on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1747

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

The primary VA-based COVID-19 vaccine data from this period is a CDC-authored study of five Veterans Affairs Medical Centers (Bajema et al., MMWR, September 17, 2021), which used a test-negative case-control design, not a raw cohort non-infection rate. It found vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19-associated hospitalization of 86.8% overall (95% CI 80.4-91.1%) during February-August 2021, including during Delta variant predominance, with effectiveness of 95.1% among adults 18-64 and 79.8% among those 65 and older. No CDC or VA dataset from that period reports a headline figure of vaccinated people who "never get COVID" framed as evidence vaccines are unneeded; a high proportion of any vaccinated cohort testing negative for COVID-19 in a given window reflects general community infection incidence rather than vaccine failure or superfluity, and does not account for the appropriate comparison, which is the relative reduction in infection, hospitalization, and death versus unvaccinated peers. CDC's COVID Data Tracker vaccine effectiveness monitoring, along with the VAMC study, consistently frames vaccine benefit in terms of relative risk reduction for infection, hospitalization, and death, not absolute non-infection prevalence. The claim's underlying statistic could not be traced to a specific published VA dataset, and the interpretive framing built on the 96% figure misapplies non-infection base rates to argue against the value of vaccination.