"Introduction
We recently became aware of a Research Letter by Xie et al. published in JAMA on April 6, 2023, in which the authors analyzed data from patients admitted to VA healthcare facilities between the dates of October 1, 2022, through January 31, 2023 for either influenza or COVID-19...
Methods and Findings
Upon closer inspection of the data presented in this analysis, we noticed that the COVID-19 and influenza vaccination percentages of the two cohorts were nearly identical both before and after propensity score weighting...
Discussion and Conclusions
If ideal vaccines existed that prevented hospitalization entirely for each virus, one would expect the two cohorts to differ dramatically in the percent (%) vaccinated for the corresponding disease resulting in hospitalization...
Yet, the opposite was true: there was little difference between the two cohorts as summarized in Table 1. In fact, the vaccination percentage difference between the two cohorts was among the lowest of all the characteristics measured; all standardized mean difference (SMD) values were under .05 (the actual values were .01, .02, .03, .04, and .05). Even more troubling, of those who took the COVID-19 booster (which should have had the largest difference between the two cohorts if the vaccine performed as expected), [sic] actually had the smallest difference of any of the 21 baseline characteristics measured in the study: a SMD value of only .01.
We are not aware of any viable alternative explanation for the observed data other than that neither vaccine provided any protection against hospitalization. This conclusion is consistent with previous research findings."
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