Need Debunking: "Experimental Vaccine Death Rate for Israel's Elderly 40 Times Higher Than COVID-19 Deaths"

[pizzadelivery]

(The Sources)
I came across this article being circulated on social media by multiple conspiracy-minded individuals today. While most stories I've come across about the Israeli vaccine program, not regarding the lack of immunization of those in the West Bank and Gaza, have reported widely positive results (for example: "Vaccine prevents 98.9% of COVID-19 deaths — Israel"). This claim caught my eye because of the wild assertion not that the vaccine is ineffective, but that its side effects are deadlier than the virus itself. While the article itself is posted on lewrockwell.com, a site prone to conspiratorial claims and pseudoscience, it links to an alleged study on an Israeli website called Nakim.org and another article on Arutz Sheva (English: Israel National News), which itself references another article in FranceSoir about the supposed study. MediaBias/FactCheck, the fact-checking site that dubs lewrockwell.com untrustworthy, notes that while Arutz Sheva is associated with fringe religious Zionist elements in Israel, it claims the site demonstrates highly factual reporting standards.

(The Claims)
The articles claim Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccination has resulted in high mortality rates among those who have received it - a detail they claim is being overlooked in mainstream reporting about Israel's vaccine success.

The articles all reference a Dr. Hervé Seligmann, who is allegedly a faculty member at Aix-Marseille University in France, and an "engineer" named Haim Yativ who they claim offer an analysis of official vaccine data that highlights a morbid reality.

From Arutz Sheva:

A front-page article appeared in the FranceSoir newspaper about findings on the Nakim website regarding what some experts are calling "the high mortality caused by the vaccine."
The paper interviews Aix-Marseille University Faculty of Medicine Emerging Infectious and Tropical Diseases Unit's Dr. Hervé Seligmann and engineer Haim Yativ about their research and data analysis. They claim that Pfizer's shot causes "mortality hundreds of times greater in young people compared to mortality from coronavirus without the vaccine, and dozens of times more in the elderly, when the documented mortality from coronavirus is in the vicinity of the vaccine dose, thus adding greater mortality from heart attack, stroke, etc

About Seligmann:

Dr Hervé Seligmann works at the Emerging Infectious and Tropical Diseases Research Unit, Faculty of Medicine, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France. He is of Israeli-Luxembourg nationality. He has a B. Sc. In Biology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has written over 100 scientific publications.

The writing is somewhat chaotic and hard to follow. Here is the meat of their claims:

After a presentation, the authors discussed their data analysis, the validations carried out, limitations, and above all, their conclusions that they compare with data received via a Health Ministry Freedom of Information Act request.

Their findings are:

• There is a mismatch between the data published by the authorities and the reality on the ground.
• They have three sources of information, besides the emails and adverse event reports they receive through the Internet. These three sources are Israeli news site Ynet, the Israeli Health Ministry database, and the U.S. federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database.
• In January 2021, there were 3,000 records of vaccine adverse events, including 2,900 for mRNA vaccines.
• Compared to other years, mortality is 40 times higher.
• On February 11, a Ynet article presented data related to vaccination. The authors of the Nakim article claim to have debunked this analysis based on data published by Ynet itself: "We took the data by looking at mortality during the vaccination period, which spans 5 weeks. By analyzing these data, we arrived at startling figures that attribute significant mortality to the vaccine."
• The authors say "vaccinations have caused more deaths than the coronavirus would have caused during the same period."
• Haim Yativ and Dr. Seligmann declare that for them, "this is a new Holocaust," in face of Israeli authority pressure to vaccinate citizens.

Note the wild accusation that the vaccine program is akin to "a new holocaust".
The Arutz Sheva article concludes:

They also invite specialists to complete their analyses, and intend to pursue legal follow-up to their discovery. The Health Ministry was not available for comment on a FranceSoir query regarding the findings.

The authors also deplored "the fact of not being able to communicate on this vital information" to their fellow citizens.

On their site, Nakim writes: "On February 11, 2021, Ynet (the most known Israeli News website) published a confused and confusing article entitled 'Vaccination efficiency data in Israel, and its rapid effects on the young'.

"Our reanalyses of these data explain why during the massive vaccination project initiated mid-December 2020 during a confinement, daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases failed to decrease as they do during confinements, and, more importantly, why numbers of serious, critical, and death cases increased during that period that covered at least one month. From mid-December to mid-February (two months), 2,337 among all Israeli 5,351 official COVID-deaths occurred. Our analyses indicate orders of magnitude increases in deaths rates during the 5-week long vaccination process, as compared to the unvaccinated and those after completing the vaccination process. Presumably, asymptomatic cases before vaccination, and those infected shortly after the 1st dose, tend to develop graver symptoms than those unvaccinated.

"The Ynet article is organized in an exciting way and uses data provided in an erroneous way by the Ministry of Health. It is unclear whether this was intentional to prove the vaccine's efficiency or if this was done erroneously because the provided data were misunderstood. Note that in Israel, all vaccines are from Pfizer.

"The data in the table, rather than indicating the vaccine efficacy, indicate the vaccine's adverse effects," the authors conclude.

Referenced links:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/03...imes-higher-than-covid-19-deaths-researchers/
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/297051
http://www.nakim.org/israel-forums/...data_in_Israel__reveals_a_frightening_picture

Before scolding me, please understand that I am not a skilled debunker and do not possess the same savvy in researching info online that I'm sure many on this board do. I am also still becoming accustomed to Metabunk's posting guidelines, but I am doing my best to comply. I tried look into the two supposed sources for the claims, Dr. Hervé Seligmann and engineer Haim Yativ, by searching their names online. All that came up was duplicates of the above claims on various obscure websites. I would appreciate the incites of more skilled debunkers on the above claims.

Thanks.

 

[Mendel]

The hardest part about this is digging up the data they're using. Do they attribute their sources properly? If not, it's likely there's some misrepresentation of the numbers involved.

• In January 2021, there were 3,000 records of vaccine adverse events, including 2,900 for mRNA vaccines.

VAERS reports all sorts of adverse reactions. From a presentation held January 7th, which won't have complete data for January:

Article:

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html

As you can see, there are far fewer deaths than even serious adverse events! So that "2900 records" number is misleading.

And these deaths are the "unexamined" number, the link is just temporal. It's like saying "20 people died in car crashes after receiving the vaccine", the car crashes are unrelated, they just happened after the vaccination, and you have to look if there's actually a connection or if it's a coincidence.

If the vaccinations are more deadly than Covid-19, that's going to show up in the overall mortality data, just like Covid itself does. Here's data from the Euromomo project, which tracks mortality in a number of European countries:

Article:

Source: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

You can see the first Covid wave of spring 2020 and then the second wave of fall/winter 2020, well before the vaccination programs began. The data for the most recent weeks is still incomplete, but if vaccinations were 5 times more deadly than Covid, these deaths should show up, but they don't.
It'd be useful to find this data for Israel.

Note that Israel also had a pronounced second wave of Covid deaths:

Article:

Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/

Spoiler: Thumbnail, needed below

 

[Mendel]

http://www.nakim.org/israel-forums/...data_in_Israel__reveals_a_frightening_picture

I looked at this, and also at nakim.org/israel-forums/viewtopic.php?t=270873 . This guy is juggling numbers on tables ripped out of context that I can't make heads or tails of.
My guess is that if there was something there, he could explain it in a way that made sense, and that didn't present numbers out of context.

Here's another example of misdirection:

Article:

Now we analyse the data. In fact, from this long article the most important information is from page 45-54 in the tables from the Supplementary appendix.

Dr Hervé Seligmann commented on the basis of these tables: The initial situation for the vaccine-treated vs the unvaccinated control groups differs, meaning that these groups were not randomly chosen from a pool of individuals. Indeed, there are on the first day of vaccination 172 positive COVID-19 cases among the 596618 vaccinated, vs 359 cases, more than twice, among the controls that same day. The probability that this would occur by chance is 1 in 5.813.953.488.372.093, meaning P =1.72x10-16.
This means that there is a greater chance to win two consecutive times jackpot at the lottery than to get randomly such a difference between the two groups.

Source: http://www.nakim.org/israel-forums/viewtopic.php?t=270873

What this tells us is that people with Covid-19 symptoms are less likely to go to a vaccination. That's why on the day after the vaccination, fewer people have documented cases of Covid than if you just set a random starting date (as happened for the controls).
But if you look at days 7-9, the vaccinated group has more cases than the control group. It's clear that the people getting vaccinated are not somehow at a lower risk of contracting Covid. It's just the first day that's off, and that doesn't affect what happens afterwards. If there really was a problem with how the subjects were chosen, we'd see this disproportion continue, but it doesn't.
It's only once the vaccine takes hold that the numbers in the vaccinated group slowly go down compared to the other group.

The comment continues:

Article:

What does that mean? This means that the treated group, those vaccinated, were apparently carefully chosen to have half the morbidity than in the unvaccinated group. Or, deciding the results before starting the experiment.

Source: http://www.nakim.org/israel-forums/viewtopic.php?t=270873

You can't decide in advance who'l have Covid 7 days later; and in fact, as this table shows, this was not done (and the table isn't about morbidity anyway).

Article:

Surprisingly, in the data from the research by Dagan et al 2021, this sudden increase in COVID-19 cases is not reflected by an increase in COVID-19 deaths, of which there are none until day 11 post first vaccine dose.

Source: http://www.nakim.org/israel-forums/viewtopic.php?t=270873

That's quite unsurprising. People do take some time to die after contracting Covid, and they exact length is variable.

 

[Mendel]

One more misleading claim from nakim:

Article:

Today a professor in epidemiology from an US university contacted me in relation to a previous article with interesting comments. He added a table that shows well mortality after the mRNA vaccines according to time, from reports to VAERS, see table below.

The table shows that postvaccine deaths happen mainly within the 4 first days after vaccination.

Source: http://www.nakim.org/israel-forums/viewtopic.php?t=270873

As I mentioned in post #2, VAERS contains reports of deaths that occur after a vaccination that may or may not be caused by that vaccination. What this table tells us is that a death is more likely to be reported in VAERS if it occurs close after a vaccination. It tells us nothing about whether these deaths are actually caused by the vaccination. It just tells us that shortly after a vaccination, more people think "maybe the vaccination contributed to this death". The less time between the vaccination and the death, the more people will see a connection; but that does not mean that there were actually more deaths caused, because VAERS does not contain facts about causes.

I don't understand what the "community / low / mean / serious /..." table means, or where it comes from.

 

[Mendel]

I may have some idea of what is going on with the last part.

Article:

More analyses by Dr Hervé Seligmann and myself of the data from Dagan et al 2021 we found an additional phenomenon challenging the reliability of Dagan et al 2021. Among the 596618 unvaccinated, there are 32 deaths within the 44 days of the vaccination data gathering, 5.3/100000. This matches the Ynet table shown below that, as we suggested spans for a period of 18 days.in the updated article in Hebrew,

Among the vaccinated, there are only 9 deaths among 596618 and within 44 days, hence 1.5/100000. This does not match at all the Ynet table that shows 50 deaths among 100000 for a similar period, see here.

We can vet this by examining death data for that period from data from the Israel Ministry of Health. From December 19 2020 until February 1 2021, 1742 Israelis died from COVID-19, meaning 40 per day for an adult population of 6.5 millions. Hence, during that period, 0.61/100000 died per day, hence, 27/100000 cumulated over 44 days.

Considering that the unvaccinated in Dagan et al 2021 had only 5/100000 for that period and considering that this death rate corresponds to the death rate observed before the vaccination started on December 19 2020, we conclude that the 27-5 =22/100000 deaths from the vaccination period should be from the vaccinated subpopulation, as we observed in the Ynet table and as indicated by the reports from VAERS.

The conclusion from all the above is that the research by Dagan et al 2021 may be the greatest fraud ever in science since the hydroxychloroquine scandal in the Lancet.

Source: http://www.nakim.org/israel-forums/viewtopic.php?t=270873

First, I don't understand the claim that the "5.3" matches.

Second, they are comparing the death rate for people enrolled in a study with the death rate in the general population, assuming these must be the same. But that's probably false. Death rates are highly age-dependent. If the study did not enroll very old people, its death rate would be lower than that of the general population. That alone would explain why the study registered fewer deaths than the commenter expects. The idea that this deficit must be caused by fraud is resorting to a conspiracy theory to make up for a bad assumption.

Third, "the death rate observed before the vaccination started" is highly variable, so much so that the 5/100000 value seems arbitrarily chosen. The graph I posted in my first comment above shows this clearly:


Fourth, for "greatest fraud ever in science", it's hard to top Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children" that fraudulently linked vaccines and autism. The resulting anti-vaxx movement has facilitated much death and disease that could have been prevented.

If you have any questions, please don't hestitate to ask. This is a difficult (and sometimes confusing) subject.

 

[DanTheOracle]

from my understanding of the vaccine it dosnt even stop you dying from the coof. it just makes you less likely to die. i saw this coming out of israel who has one of the best vaccine programs on the planet yet still 16% of the people who have died have had either one shot or both shots of the vaccination.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news...p-majority-of-israel-s-covid-deaths-1.9586396

you have to understand how statistics work to understand how conspiracy theorists work. there was a news article i read about american suicides last year that the news article going around claimed that there was 100% increase in suicides over the last year in 2020, the source article claimed that there was also a huge new change in suicides in this one american county but when you go to the actual data the statistics were literally that the year before there were some 50 suicides in that country and in 2020 there were literally 3 more suicides than the year before but because those 3 happened in the one month they reported on [i think it was october and the year before october had far less suicides] that somehow there was a massive over representation of suicides.

loads of truthers till only focus in on the thing that proves their point, if you zoom out the map most things are put back in perspective

 

[FatPhil]

you have to understand how statistics work to understand how conspiracy theorists work. there was a news article i read about american suicides last year that the news article going around claimed that there was 100% increase in suicides over the last year in 2020, the source article claimed that there was also a huge new change in suicides in this one american county but when you go to the actual data the statistics were literally that the year before there were some 50 suicides in that country and in 2020 there were literally 3 more suicides than the year before but because those 3 happened in the one month they reported on [i think it was october and the year before october had far less suicides] that somehow there was a massive over representation of suicides.

I remember that specific example, I think it made the BBC news a couple of months back. They had 12 months to chose from and selected the ratio of the one that had the greatest change year-on-year. I ranted to whatever audience was available when I read that, it did the pot-plants well, I'm sure. At least they didn't stick a p number to it, as that would be classic p hacking. If the numbers doubled at worst I'd be willing to wager that there was at least one month where the "worse" year had a *lower* figure than the less bad one. Which would deflate their narrative somewhat.

 

[Mendel]

from my understanding of the vaccine it dosnt even stop you dying from the coof. it just makes you less likely to die. i saw this coming out of israel who has one of the best vaccine programs on the planet yet still 16% of the people who have died have had either one shot or both shots of the vaccination.

Yes. The vaccine is supposed to prepare the human immune system, but the body is quite complex, and things can go wrong. But even if the immune response isn't perfect, it'll usually be less severe. Also, the vaccinations don't work instantly, so if people get infected before the vaccinations have had the full effect, the defense is worse.

loads of truthers till only focus in on the thing that proves their point, if you zoom out the map most things are put back in perspective

Yes, "cherry-picking the evidence" is a sure-fire way to arrive at biased conclusions. That's why it's important to restore context to many of these claims. I've tried to do that above.