Peter McCullough on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1747
SUBJECT: HEALTH
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
Now, 1040 came in in JAMA, and this was published in the fall of this year, and they had an 85% protection overall against hospitalization.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
A JAMA study (Tenforde et al., published November 2021) analyzed 4,513 adults across 21 US hospitals and found vaccination was associated with substantially reduced odds of COVID-19 hospitalization, with an adjusted odds ratio of 0.15 (95% CI, 0.13-0.18), corresponding to roughly 85% lower odds of hospitalization among vaccinated versus unvaccinated patients. The 85% figure and the JAMA/fall-2021 publication details McCullough cites are consistent with this study, though the patient count he states (1,040) does not match the paper's reported cohort size of 4,513 (1,983 case patients with COVID-19, 2,530 controls). The study's authors acknowledged possible differences in admission or testing thresholds between vaccinated and unvaccinated patients, but reported that the protective association held up in a sensitivity analysis restricted to patients admitted with hypoxemia, indicating the effect was not merely an artifact of differential testing. This single case-control study's findings were also consistent with numerous other US and international studies using varied designs that converged on substantial (roughly 70-95%) vaccine protection against COVID-19 hospitalization during 2021, indicating the overall body of evidence, not just this one paper, supports strong hospitalization protection. The claim is best characterized as citing a roughly accurate figure from a real, non-retracted study while overstating the role of testing bias in explaining that finding.