On Wednesday October 8, 2025, my news feed contained an article about how the latest New England Journal of Medicine study found COVID shots to be effective in veterans. I obtained this study and analyzed it. As I suspected, this study had the same flaws found in most other such studies. The duration of this study was only 6 months. As I have already commented on previous posts, the study from Qatar by Chemaitelly et al. demonstrated that the mild improvement in COVID shot effectiveness (46.6% in their study) that occurs early on plummets in a linear fashion, turning NEGATIVE 5-6 months after shot administration. By 7-8 months, the effectiveness was -17.8.
Had the Chemaitelly study been extended, who knows how low it would have gone. So you see, by only looking at the first 6 months, you are getting a false impression of the shot’s performance. It’s dishonest and misleading.
Poor duration and timing selection can also be used the other way, making something look worse than it really is. For example, let’s take anti-virals. Anti-viral treatments work best when administered early on because that is when viruses replicate the most. Each day the treatment is delayed, it becomes less effective. Most are not recommended after 5-7 days of symptoms. So what if a group of scientists tried to study the effectiveness of potential anti-viral COVID treatments but only in hospitalized patients that have been sick for over 7-10 days…? Does that make any sense to you? No. Of course it does not. But that is exactly what happened early on during COVID.
Another problem I found in the NEJM study was ALL participants had to have received a COVID shot in the 2023-2024 season. Why is this a problem? As I have commented in previous posts, the more COVID shots one receives, the worse off they are. The Cleveland Clinic study clearly shows that each additional shot increases risk of COVID infection.
If participants with few or zero COVID shots were allowed into this study, they would have performed the best, revealing that the COVID shot group actually had an increased risk of infection compared to the control. By requiring all participants to have a COVID shot the year before, they diminished that potential problem.