The impossible confounder: Quantifying the limits of alternative explanations for COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness

Abstract

Background Observational studies have consistently reported large reductions in COVID-19 risk among vaccinated individuals. However, critics have raised concerns that unmeasured confounding may entirely explain these associations. Methods We combined the classical Cornfield inequality with a Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis to evaluate whether unmeasured confounding alone could plausibly account for the observed effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. The Cornfield inequality provides a lower bound on the strength of confounding required to explain a given association. The Monte Carlo analysis simulates uncertainty over possible confounder–exposure and confounder–outcome relationships by drawing from weakly informative prior distributions, allowing us to estimate the frequency with which such confounding would be sufficient. Results For an observed risk ratio of 0.08—consistent with early estimates for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine—the confounder would need to be both highly imbalanced (e.g., 10 times more prevalent among vaccinated individuals) and strongly protective (e.g., reducing disease risk by 99%). Simulation results showed that, under the specified assumptions, fewer than 2% of draws satisfied this condition. Even in the more moderate case of a risk ratio of 0.25 (e.g., AstraZeneca), the proportion remained below 6%. Conclusions Our findings suggest that while residual confounding may attenuate effect estimates, it is statistically and epidemiologically implausible that unmeasured confounding alone could fully account for the magnitude of observed vaccine effectiveness. This framework combines the falsificatory logic of Cornfield bounds with the flexibility of simulation-based sensitivity analysis, providing a transparent tool for evaluating confounding-based explanations in observational research.