Avoidable Intensive Care Resource Use of Unvaccinated COVID-19 Patients: Interpretation and Policy Implications

Abstract

Given that population COVID-19 vaccination does not appreciably reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission, instead, the potential to reduce hospitalization has been used to justify coercive vaccine passports. We aim to use a recently published research study as an example in order to demonstrate how data can be misinterpreted and result in deriving misleading ethical and policy implications. Bagshaw et al wrote that unvaccinated patients with COVID-19 in Alberta, Canada “had substantially greater rates of ICU admissions, ICU bed days, and ICU related costs than vaccinated patients did. This increased resource use would have been potentially avoidable had these unvaccinated patients been vaccinated.” The authors in Bagshaw et al then concluded that their findings “have important implications for discourse on the relative balance of increasingly stringent public health protection (restrictions), including mandatory vaccination policies, and the sustainability and function of health system infrastructure and capacity during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.” Here we show the following. First, the effect of vaccination on intensive care admissions were grossly over-estimated due to several limitations of this and almost all other vaccine studies. Second, an effect of vaccination on access to acute care and on all-cause excess deaths was grossly over-stated due to several more likely causes being omitted from discussion and from the common narrative. Third, policy implications were overstated and at best unclear due to missing consideration of more relevant aspects required to inform policy. Overall, the data cannot support what Bagshaw et al called “increasingly stringent public health protection (restrictions), including mandatory vaccination policies”.

Long COVID as a functional somatic symptom disorder caused by abnormally precise prior expectations during Bayesian perceptual processing: A new hypothesis and implications for pandemic response

“…What a better response would look like, led by emergency management experts following the emergency management process, is beyond the scope of this review, and is described elsewhere. 233,256,[269][270][271] Second, in functional syndromes, the symptoms and disability are real and genuinely experienced, and not feigned or faked. Third, clinicians must take the symptoms and disability seriously, and explain clearly that there is a diagnosis, this diagnosis is common, the mechanism is functional, and therefore the condition is potentially reversible and treatment can help.…”