OXFORD, UNITED KINGDOM — A COVID-19 vaccine study authored by a group of scientists from University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and originally released in June has now garnered new attention.
The peer-reviewed study, published in The Lancet, focused on investigating possible associations between Body Mass Index (BMI) and COVID-19 outcomes. The data encompassed a very large sample – 9,171,524 participants – all British residents over the age of 18.
The study didn’t raise much attention until independent journalist and researcher Alex Berenson wrote about it on September 23. Berenson didn’t focus so much on the relationship between BMI and outcomes; rather, he dug through the data and discovered that the results indicate a significantly higher risk of falling ill with COVID-19 in the vaccinated group.
“By mid-2021, fully vaccinated people had a higher risk of being infected with Covid, the study shows. They had only about 65 percent protection against hospitalization and death – after accounting for age, sex, and other risk factors,” Berenson writes.
“Patients were nearly twice as likely to be hospitalized for three weeks after the first dose, and more than twice as likely to be infected. In the second week, when infections peaked, they were almost four times as likely to contract the coronavirus,” he added.
The Lancet study argues that the COVID-19 vaccines “were highly protective against severe outcomes when comparing data of people who are vaccinated with that of those who are not vaccinated in all BMI categories.”
But it also notes that falling ill with COVID-19 was significantly more common in those who had received both first and second dose of the shot. Perhaps surprisingly, this was not the case for the group that had received a third (booster) dose:
“There was also a significantly higher likelihood of confirmed SARS-COV-2 infection after the first and second doses in participants who had been vaccinated versus those who had not, but lower after the third dose with significant heterogeneity by BMI category,” the authors state.
Will Jones, in an article in The Daily Skeptic, states that vaccination increased infection risk by 44 percent, based on the statistics included in the Oxford study:
“The third figure shows that two weeks or more after the second jab – which during 2021 was regarded as ‘fully vaccinated’ – individuals were 44% more likely to be infected than their unvaccinated counterparts. This is negative vaccine effectiveness (where infections are higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated) of minus-44%. This negative effectiveness is in line with what was seen in the raw data from England at the time and also in studies from other countries,” Jones writes.
