In a paper published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, Haas and his colleagues argued that the Pfizer vaccine averted over 5,000 deaths in Israel in the first quarter of 2021, during the Covid wave that coincided with the first vaccination campaign (Figure 1).
I will show here that their claim is false. If any deaths have been averted at all, the number is far from their estimate — undetectable in mortality statistics.
There is more than one way to show the falsehood of claims about exceptional benefits of Covid vaccines. I will rely on comparative data from Sweden. The country that showed the world the futility of lockdowns and mask mandates will prove helpful again.
Both Israel and Sweden faced a major Covid wave in the winter of 2020-2021, but the timing deferred by about one month (Figure 2). In Sweden, the mortality wave began in November and peaked in late December, whereas in Israel the mortality wave began in December and peaked in late January. Case waves (not shown) are shifted to the left by about two weeks.
To allow for a fair comparison, I will examine mortality in a five-month period that contains the full mortality wave in Sweden: November 2020-March 2021.
Read More: The Covid Vaccine Did Not Save “Thousands of Lives” in Israel – and Sweden Proves It
