I will be the first to tell you that there is no one right answer about whether or not to get the vaccine. Based on the science, most healthy people shouldn’t need it. Also many unhealthy people can get healthy enough not to need it if they just had the right health and lifestyle information.
That said, some people can benefit from the vaccine. My brother had so many ailments last year that if the vaccine could reduce his risk of getting Covid even a little bit, it would have been worth it to lighten the load on his body.
Below are excerpt from The Model Health Show Episode 477 where host Shawn Stevenson speaks with Dr. Ron Brown about the peer reviewed evidence we have about mRNA medications.
SHAWN STEVENSON: That really leads into today's guest as well. Because this individual has authored over a dozen peer-reviewed studies in the US National Library of Medicine, and the National Institutes of Health, and many of the most prestigious medical journals. And in addition to his epidemiological research on infectious disease and vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, his current areas of research include prevention of cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia and other chronic diseases. And his name is Dr. Ronald Brown. And Dr. Brown just really blew me away when I got a chance to review one of his most recent peer-reviewed studies, really looking at the difference in vaccine trials with relative risk and absolute risk.
And this is one of the most important insights that we're really going to have in all of this experience with COVID-19 and the evolving conversation with vaccines. If we don't understand the difference with a relative risk and absolute risk, we're really missing on a huge chunk of the conversation. So I’m really, really excited about this episode, and really excited to bring this conversation to you and keep this conversation going. Expand it, expand our thinking and really start to look at things from multiple perspectives, so we can really usher in some positive change and help to move our society forward. So let's jump into this conversation with the incredible Dr. Ronald Brown.
Dr. Brown, can you share the details of your recent peer-reviewed study on the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine clinical trials?
DR. RON BROWN: I would be glad to Shawn. I just want to say that this problem between getting the information about the relative risk reduction versus the absolute risk reduction has been known for decades. And I'll get into the details as you said. But I just want to just outline the overall problem. So people are not aware of this. It's not just the public, it's the practitioners, it's the clinicians, it's the doctors. They're not aware of this either. The people who are the most aware of it are the actual researchers who collect the data on these clinical trials, and they use relative risk reduction to compare the efficacy of vaccines between trials.
So relative risk reduction, actually, that's the statistical version of what we call vaccine efficacy. Efficacy means how well does the vaccine work under experimental conditions as opposed to out in the population where you have unhealthy people, healthy people and those conditions. So vaccine efficacy is really relative risk reduction. And those are the numbers, as you said, that are usually advertised for the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines. The Moderna was 94.1%... Something like that. And then 95.1% for the Pfizer. So that's pretty high. So the public, thinks, "Hey, what do you got to lose?"... Instant protection.
By the way, protection from what? It's not protection from death from the coronavirus, it's not even protection from hospitalization from the coronavirus, or even severe illness from the coronavirus. And it's not protections from asymptomatic infections from the coronavirus. All it is, is protection from mild infections. In other words, you have a positive infection test plus at least one clinical symptom, that's it.
That's a problem because then we have what we call breakthrough infections, or infections in people who have been fully vaccinated. The problem is, if you've been fully vaccinated and you think you're protected and you wake up one day with a sore throat, mild, how likely are you to report that and go back and get tested again?
Well, I'm a fully protected I just have a little sore throat. Now, I don't know the answer. But I'm just proposing that those breakthrough infections are probably under-reported. And the effect of that is that it makes the vaccines appear much more effective than they are. So getting back to the vaccine efficacy, the relative risk reduction. Before I describe exactly how that's calculated, let's talk about the absolute risk reduction. Okay. And to understand that, you have to understand a little bit of how a trial works.
So here we go. You have a randomized trial. That means that you take all the people who are going to be in the trial and you randomly assign them to two different groups, the vaccine group, and the group that gets an injection, but it's not the vaccine it's saline solution, so the placebo group. Okay. Now why do we randomize people? We do that so that we evenly distribute all what we call the confounding factors between those two groups. Confounding factors are factors that give you the same result you're looking for, but for another reason. So how do you account for that? The best way to do that is to evenly distribute them between the two groups, at least theoretically.
And therefore what the difference that emerges between the two groups has nothing to do with anything other than the treatment itself. So that's why a randomized trial is considered the gold standard. So let's say you have 100 people, just as an example, in the vaccine group and a 100 people in the placebo group. And let's say you have one person in the vaccine group who gets an infection. Because remember what we're looking for in this trial is whether people get a SARS COVID-2 infection along with at least one symptom.
That's it. So let's say there is, in this case, this example, there is one person in the vaccine group that gets the infection. And let's say there's two people in the control group that get the infection. Okay? So we call those infections events. And the event rate in the vaccine group is 1 out of a 100, so 1%. And the event rate in the placebo group is 2 out of 100. So that's 2%. So what's the difference between 2% and 1%? 1% right? There's your absolute risk reduction. The reduction from the treatment reduced the risk by 1% compared to the placebo group.
That's all you need to know. That's the clinically relevant statistic, the absolute risk reduction. But that statistic is rarely given to the public. So where does the relative risk reduction come? Well, if you take the absolute risk reduction divide it by the event rate in the control group that gives you a relative risk reduction. In our example, that would be not just 2% or 1%, it would be 50%, because you're dividing 1% by 2%. See, there's a mathematical property about dividing by percentages. You divide a number by a percentage, and which is really just a decimal or a fraction, you get a larger number, not a smaller number.
Usually when you divide numbers, you get a smaller number, right? In the case of a number, that's a fraction or a percentage or a decimal, when you divide a number by a percentage, you get a larger number. So there's... That's the mathematical magic behind converting an absolute risk reduction to a relative risk reduction.
So why do that? Well, because technically think of it this way: If you take the reduction in the risk of the disease from the treatment, that's the absolute risk reduction, right? How is that relative to the people who didn't get the treatment, the control group? So basically, you're dividing the event rate in the vaccine group, the 1%, that absolute risk reduction by the 2% in the control group. 1% divided by 2% is 50%.
There's the magic. Okay? Now, the FDA and some other groups had said when you're dealing with the public, you have to let them know what both numbers are, not just the absolute risk. You got to let them know both... And the relative risk. Why? Because the relative risk isn't really relevant to public health and clinical outcomes, it's the absolute risk that people need to know.
SHAWN STEVENSON: This is specifically what I want you to say. We know the relative risk, so the relative risk with Pfizer 95%. The relative risk with Moderna 94%. What is the actual absolute risk for both of those?
DR. RON BROWN: For the Pfizer, the absolute risk is 0.7%. And for Moderna it's 1.1%. Now, I have to tell you, when I did the calculations for the Pfizer and I saw 0.7%, I just stared at it. Like, "Wait, what is this? Is that 70%? No, is it 7%? No. It's seven-tenths of 1%, 0.7, is seven-tenths of one... It's less than 1%.
SHAWN STEVENSON: So that's the absolute risk reduction of the Pfizer vaccine?
DR. RON BROWN: Yeah. That's right. And for Moderna it's not much difference, it's 1.1%.
SHAWN STEVENSON: That's dramatically different from the 95%...
DR. RON BROWN: Yeah, tell me about it. You think?
SHAWN STEVENSON: That's marketing. But the thing is, the 95% is true as well, it's just what's being shared with the public, there's a part being left out.
DR. RON BROWN: Exactly. So you're misleading people by leaving out other information to put the information you get into proper context. Right? There's a word for that. Misleading by omission. Something like that, right? So yes, it's true. It's 95% and 94% vaccine efficacy according to the standard way of doing it, the relative risk reduction. And by the way, they've done it that way for decades. Nothing new about that. Except for decades, the journal article editors and all these other agencies are saying, we need more information than that, especially when you're dealing with the public. And for decades it's been ignored. That's why, and we're going back to how we started this conversation, the timing was right now to put this information in front of the public. If there was no Coronavirus, now, if there was no pandemic, and if there was... There were no vaccines, and I'd put out an article like this, would anybody read it? No, that's the difference.
This was just one little super enlightening nugget from Shawn’s interview with Dr. Ron Brown. This interview was packed with insights and information. To check out the full interview, you can watch the video below. It’s very long, but well worth it!
Cheers,
Emily
