"At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days (Fig. 1). In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people. Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days. The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated."
"Across the US counties too, the median new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in the last 7 days is largely similar across the categories of percent population fully vaccinated (Fig. 2). Notably there is also substantial county variation in new COVID-19 cases within categories of percentage population fully vaccinated. There also appears to be no significant signaling of COVID-19 cases decreasing with higher percentages of population fully vaccinated (Fig. 3)."
But let's just say that there's something wrong with my inference from this data that vaccines do nothing to reduce transmission. The burden of proof has to be on the pro-mandate crowd. And it is a burden they have not even come close to meeting. The pro-mandate argument is little more than raw moralizing with little to no evidentiary support, and with a growing body of evidentiary support going in the other direction. To vax or not to vax is a personal choice, just like it's a personal choice to exercise, eat vegetables, smoke cigarettes, or drink beer. The vaxxers are way overplaying their hand here and it is going to backfire, big time.
Just took a look at the study. Interesting. I'm not an expert but while it shows a signal, I'm not sure it establishes anything causally. It's just highly suggestive. But to test specifically whether the vaxxes prevent transmission I think you'd have to look at it in the way these other tests do — by looking specifically at households — rather than by inferring from statistics.
That said, I agree that the burden of proof needs to be on the pro-mandate crowd, which is what I basically say in the subhed. And I agree that that burden has not been met, not even close.
It's not 100%. But I think it's better than what they've got on the other side. I'm critical of the country-level analysis in that study because many countries in the global south seem to have both (1) some sort of innate resistance to Covid (weather, genes, culture, etc.) and (2) low vaccination rates. So this could skew the results. But I find it compelling that the data plays out the same way at the county level in the U.S.
Overall, I think doing population level analyses is fair game here because we're talking about population level policies that will supposedly have population level impact. The question is "would the country reduce Covid case numbers if more people/everyone were forced to be vaccinated?" Looking at the population level seems a legitimate way to answer that question.
The "pandemic of the unvaccinated" thesis posits that it is the unvaccinated who are driving continued transmission, and that, but for the unvaccinated, we'd be largely out of the woods. This study pretty much obliterates that thesis.
I don't see why households would have to be the appropriate level of analysis. It can certainly add to the overall picture. But the rates of vaccinated versus unvaccinated positive tests in the UKHSA weekly data seems to be pretty good evidence that the vaccines are not preventing infection. Quite the opposite. The question then becomes whether we can infer anything about transmission from this. Given the CDC's admission that infected vaccinated have the same viral loads as infected unvaccinated, I think it is pretty fair to infer that the vaccinated are every bit as likely to pass it along than the unvaccinated. If anything, more so given that they are more likely to be asymptomatic and thus less likely to stay home sick. I would think this factor outweighs the viral clearance advantage the vaxxed seem to have over the unvaxxed.
I think for the way you're framing it — figuring out whether high vaccination rates bring down caseloads or not — the population data you cite is appropriate. I'm just saying the household view is more useful for the very specific causal question of whether the vaccine reduces transmission from person to person and by how much. Both of these questions should be having the kitchen sink thrown at them to guide any decisions around mandates.
That said, if what Dr. Hisert says is accurate — that vaccinated patients have a window of 1-3 days versus 10-14 for unvaxxed — then I could see the viral clearance advantage being pretty significant even if offset by the higher likelihood that the spread will be asymptomatic. That's a pretty big gap between those two windows.
So that's a valid point, but raises another issue to consider - waning effectiveness. I wonder how many months it takes for the viral clearance advantage to deteriorate? Based on what we know about waning effectiveness between month 3 and month 6, I'd guess we see a commensurate waning viral clearance advantage.
If this were like the vaccines we need for schools - i.e., one and done - that would be one thing. But the nature of the intrusion here is quite a bit more. When we're talking about mandates, we're talking about putting people on a biannual regimen of injections indefinitely into the future. That's quite an intrusion and should require very compelling evidence to support it.
And then of course there's the safety issue, which we're not allowed to talk about in most areas of the web. To justify a policy of vaccine mandates, there would have to be a large long-term trials showing a reduction in ALL CAUSE MORTALITY. The Pfizer trials showed the opposite - people in the vaccine group died at higher rates than people in the control group (21 versus 17 according to FDA documents). Does that prove Pfizer is killing people? Not necessarily. But again the burden of proof has to be with the vaxxers. They have not met that burden.
To the contrary, there is no compelling explanation for the explosion of reports of adverse events, including death, in the VAERs database. The responses are no more than handwaving and propaganda. Are the vaccines actually causing all of the deaths being reported? Not necessarily. But the burden again has to be on the vaxxers to PROVE that the rapid rise in VAERS reports is due to some cause or causes other than vaccines killing and maiming thousands of people. Again, they have not met that burden.
Couple that with the supporting anecdotal evidence and this recent paper in Circulation showing the vaccine increases 5-year risk of a heart attack by more than double, https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.10712, and there is reason to be deeply, deeply skeptical of the assurances of "safety" being bandied about. Especially when we're talking about putting healthy kids on a potentially years-long regimen of this intervention to protect against a disease that poses no more than an ordinary risk to them.
I started out firmly in the pro-vax camp, but The Narrative just does not add up anymore. While the vaccines may be saving lives in the upper age brackets, it is far from clear that it is necessary to force vaccinations upon groups that are not at high Covid risk. Applying the "safe and effective" mantra to these vaccines does violence to the plain meaning of the words "safe" and "effective."
I agree with more or less all of this, but would channel Dr. Hisert in pointing out that we don't yet know what the consequence of the boosters is — it could squelch transmission completely and permanently, and nobody would ever need a booster again. I'm not saying that's likely, but we just don't know. So while the indefinite boosters forever scenario makes intuitive sense to me, it's not the only possibility.
Also, we've got that new treatment pill coming very soon, which could change everything. Every one of these calculations will be impacted.
Enjoyed the article. I’m wondering…The infection rates out of Israel, Waterford Ireland, the UK, Gibraltar, and now the 5 most vaxed states in the US (the latter according to the recent Newsweek article), suggests the vax does not reduce transmission. Considering the Dr’s response, I’m not understanding how such an inference from these high volume data points are any less reliable than those taken from individual households. I would have to see the study Hisert referenced, but how many in the study had previously contracted COVID, which offers more broad based immunity anyway, before they received the vaccine (the University Washington St Louis study, Finland, and Cold Harbor Institute studies)? What were the household members’ ages? How many were vaccinated in the household? Would they even show symptoms? What sort of exposure to COVID did they have outside of their own household? Did the participants lockdown as well as vaccinate? The biases have to be weighed with these smaller, controlled studies, No? The numbers we’re seeing worldwide are too overwhelming to dismiss. Fauci has made a career out if dismissing data through manipulation and obfuscation if “controlled” studies. Are we following the model that put the dangerous AZT into HIV infected individuals back in the 80s? Aside from the unconscionable, unconstitutional idea of mandating any invasive medical procedure, the science isn’t anywhere near convincing, as you say in one of the responses to comments. Thanks again for the hard work.
Paul Kingsnorth (whose novels I love) wrote a piece on his substack that made reference to the Ireland and Gibraltar studies, and someone (I think James Poniewozik) took him to task on Twitter, saying that those are studies that have been debunked. I know nothing about those studies, and of course these days you can infer from someone saying that a study was "debunked" no more than you can infer from someone saying a study is legitimate. I haven't looked into them, but what did the studies find, and are you aware of people claiming that they're somehow flawed?
Thanks for the response. I’m not, but these “studies” aren’t studies, they’re data points, which is where empirical evidence begins. The infection rates from these places are part of government reporting regarding vaccinated and infected. I’m not aware that they’ve been debunked, but I’m not certain how they could be.
Regarding the rationales for vaccine mandates -- is the safety of the immunocompromised still a valid argument? I've heard people claim that they have friends with rare conditions such that even a boosted double-vaxx can't guarantee their protection, and so not enforcing a mandate endangers them
It all comes down to balancing people's interests. Even if we put in place maximum vaccine mandates, the virus would still circulate, albeit at a slower pace. So the risk would still exist to that immunocompromised population. So. then the question becomes, is it fair to compel tens of millions of people to get a vaccine they don't want to afford limited protection to however many IMC people there are? And there could be a meaningful debate about that, which would also include any number of alternative strategies that could protect IMC people without mandates. But instead, the IMC thing tends to be used as a moral cudgel, at least in my experience — like, well if you're against mandates then clearly you have a compassion problem because immunocompromised people.
Okay, so I'll try not to go into a rant, but I *hate* our education system right now. If you can get a disease so badly you can be hospitalized and die from it (as the vaccinated can), you sure as hell can transmit it. That this is even a question cannot be attributed to the mysteries of science but the mysteries of the human mind and the power of propaganda. Common sense would tell you all this. We don't need experts and scientists and fancy letters after people's names. It's sort of along the lines of if it's raining, you're going to get wet level of common sense.
As for the 10 days plus to "mount an immune response," I also find this ridiculous because I know people who have gotten over COVID in days. If it took that long for your immune system to kick in regardless of vaccination status, we'd be dead.
As for its effectiveness at "reducing hospitalizations," you would have to have much better (and impartial) numbers than we do to even begin to make that definitive claim. It seems it may, but . . . and this a "but" of King Kong proportions . . . at what cost?
Let's take this a step further into territory that will probably get me torn apart. The vaccines are not "safe." I don't care how much they spout that line. I can tell you from the experiences of people around me, they make people deathly ill, and that's the immediate effects they're willing to cop to. Just this morning, El Gato Malo on Bad Cattitude published this piece on athletes having heart issue post-vaccination: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/is-it-vaccines-or-is-it-covid-causing. Go digging. There's so much more than this.
Then we have the fact that the vaccines may short-circuit your immune system so you may never have the ability to gain any natural immunity to COVID through Original Antigenic Sin. See this article by Eugyppius: https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/mass-vaccination-may-permanently.
All of this, and I mean *all* of it, needs to be taken into account. We are headed for a train wreck of epic proportions and some of us, the much more cynical, have come to the conclusion that the vaccine mania is about eliminating a control group, but if you take that step, you have to conclude that they at least suspect (if not know) the disaster coming and yet are forging ahead anyway.
Just responding to your first point: I agree it's crystal clear that if you get sick as hell from the virus you can transmit it, whether vaccinated or not. But I think everyone's in agreement that the vaccinated can transmit it. The question is whether vaccination *reduces* that transmission, and by how much. And that's particularly relevant for the cases that don't match what you describe — the asymptomatic cases — since that's going to be more typical for the vaccinated.
True, but they started out telling us that the vaccinated couldn't transmit it at all, and then we saw the vaccinated getting sick, but still, per Smart People, they can't transmit it at all. That was the line. The line was never a spectrum. The line was they couldn't, full stop. Of course, they also went back and forth on whether asymptomatic people can transmit it. I'm not sure we ever came to a conclusion on that one. Of course, we don't really know if there is asymptomatic or just false positives on the PCR test, which is much less reliable than advertised. But that's a whole other discussion. However, within hours and often overlapping, we had people saying "no the vaccinated can't transmit the virus" but everyone, including the vaccinated, you need to put your masks back on, which should have told anyone with eyes that they were "misrepresenting" their conclusions even before they moved the goalpost from "can't" to "cuts down." We still have the paradox of only testing unvaccinated people for certain events and travel or issuing "vaccine passports," as if the vaccinated can't get it or carry it, which is a whole other level of insanity that smacks more of politics and rewards for compliance than actual science. And, finally, while I agree that you personally have the freedom to only address my first point, the institutions that have caused this circus do not. They have to address it all, including the things they don't want to address that people are seeing with their own eyes around them and in the data. And they have to do so before the institutions we look to for guidance lose all semblance of credibility, if they haven't already.
All good points. The challenge for me has been trying to discern what's good faith revisions of opinions based on new information, and what's obfuscation. Even if you were to grant everyone the benefit of the doubt though that they're all acting in good faith, you're still left with a vaccine that is clearly far less effective than advertised. And that would be fine — hey, sometimes things don't turn out to be as great as they first appear — except that we still seem to be devising policy around the vaccines as if they were close to 100% effective at preventing both infection and transmission. We should be constructing a blended approach, which combines vaccines (but not mandates) with strong guidelines around distancing and masking where necessary (and not where it is not), as well as other things we're not even talking about, like promoting exercise and time outdoors, and then factoring in all kinds of other factors like economic stability, mental health, etc. Basically I think we're at the point where we should stop approaching this like a fire that needs to be put out, and start treating it like what it is, which is basically a permanent situation that requires measures that are socially, economically, and politically sustainable.
(One of those measures, by the way, should be substantially expanding ICU capacity.)
You're absolutely right about the ICUs. One lesson we should have learned from COVID is how woefully inadequate our hospital system is to handle even the slightest crisis, though that seems to be the one of the things no one is talking about, except maybe you (not surprising, since you seem to address a lot that no one else talks about). Also, yes, we need to treat COVID as if it is here to stay and vaccines are only one of many ways to mitigate the damage.
And I'm sorry about the rant. My frustration comes down to the use of the pronoun "we." You use it as it should be used, all of us deciding together what is the best balance of individual freedom vs the good of the whole. However, "we" has come to mean, regarding COVID policy, the small minority of elites who make the rules and sacrifice nothing for them and the rest of us who are supposed to unquestioningly follow the rules even though they make little to no sense and have cost some of us greatly.
This is an excellent framing of the questions that we should all be concerned with. So long as the cultish pro-mandate crowd ride on an unproven (and increasingly suspect) assumption that vaccines reduce transmissibility, they can continue to blame the unvaccinated for our sorry state of affairs. It is too painful to acknowledge that the vaccines have not delivered as promised, and that lockdowns and mandates have exacted a devastating financial and social toll without meaningful benefit. Perhaps most humiliating of all, we should have forseen that this virus, not unlike influenza and the common cold, would be more wily and innovative than we are, and focused on treatments rather than eradication through vaccines.
How do you ignore this study from Harvard professors published in the European Journal of Epidemiology? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
"At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days (Fig. 1). In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people. Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days. The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated."
"Across the US counties too, the median new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in the last 7 days is largely similar across the categories of percent population fully vaccinated (Fig. 2). Notably there is also substantial county variation in new COVID-19 cases within categories of percentage population fully vaccinated. There also appears to be no significant signaling of COVID-19 cases decreasing with higher percentages of population fully vaccinated (Fig. 3)."
Also, there's the UKHSA reports that have consistently shown, week after week, that the vaccinated actually have HIGHER rates of infection than the unvaccinated, while still having lower rates of hospitalization and death: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-weekly-surveillance-reports
But let's just say that there's something wrong with my inference from this data that vaccines do nothing to reduce transmission. The burden of proof has to be on the pro-mandate crowd. And it is a burden they have not even come close to meeting. The pro-mandate argument is little more than raw moralizing with little to no evidentiary support, and with a growing body of evidentiary support going in the other direction. To vax or not to vax is a personal choice, just like it's a personal choice to exercise, eat vegetables, smoke cigarettes, or drink beer. The vaxxers are way overplaying their hand here and it is going to backfire, big time.
Just took a look at the study. Interesting. I'm not an expert but while it shows a signal, I'm not sure it establishes anything causally. It's just highly suggestive. But to test specifically whether the vaxxes prevent transmission I think you'd have to look at it in the way these other tests do — by looking specifically at households — rather than by inferring from statistics.
That said, I agree that the burden of proof needs to be on the pro-mandate crowd, which is what I basically say in the subhed. And I agree that that burden has not been met, not even close.
It's not 100%. But I think it's better than what they've got on the other side. I'm critical of the country-level analysis in that study because many countries in the global south seem to have both (1) some sort of innate resistance to Covid (weather, genes, culture, etc.) and (2) low vaccination rates. So this could skew the results. But I find it compelling that the data plays out the same way at the county level in the U.S.
Overall, I think doing population level analyses is fair game here because we're talking about population level policies that will supposedly have population level impact. The question is "would the country reduce Covid case numbers if more people/everyone were forced to be vaccinated?" Looking at the population level seems a legitimate way to answer that question.
The "pandemic of the unvaccinated" thesis posits that it is the unvaccinated who are driving continued transmission, and that, but for the unvaccinated, we'd be largely out of the woods. This study pretty much obliterates that thesis.
I don't see why households would have to be the appropriate level of analysis. It can certainly add to the overall picture. But the rates of vaccinated versus unvaccinated positive tests in the UKHSA weekly data seems to be pretty good evidence that the vaccines are not preventing infection. Quite the opposite. The question then becomes whether we can infer anything about transmission from this. Given the CDC's admission that infected vaccinated have the same viral loads as infected unvaccinated, I think it is pretty fair to infer that the vaccinated are every bit as likely to pass it along than the unvaccinated. If anything, more so given that they are more likely to be asymptomatic and thus less likely to stay home sick. I would think this factor outweighs the viral clearance advantage the vaxxed seem to have over the unvaxxed.
I think for the way you're framing it — figuring out whether high vaccination rates bring down caseloads or not — the population data you cite is appropriate. I'm just saying the household view is more useful for the very specific causal question of whether the vaccine reduces transmission from person to person and by how much. Both of these questions should be having the kitchen sink thrown at them to guide any decisions around mandates.
That said, if what Dr. Hisert says is accurate — that vaccinated patients have a window of 1-3 days versus 10-14 for unvaxxed — then I could see the viral clearance advantage being pretty significant even if offset by the higher likelihood that the spread will be asymptomatic. That's a pretty big gap between those two windows.
I love that you're trying to think non-reductively about this, unlike most of us. Please keep writing on this.
So that's a valid point, but raises another issue to consider - waning effectiveness. I wonder how many months it takes for the viral clearance advantage to deteriorate? Based on what we know about waning effectiveness between month 3 and month 6, I'd guess we see a commensurate waning viral clearance advantage.
If this were like the vaccines we need for schools - i.e., one and done - that would be one thing. But the nature of the intrusion here is quite a bit more. When we're talking about mandates, we're talking about putting people on a biannual regimen of injections indefinitely into the future. That's quite an intrusion and should require very compelling evidence to support it.
And then of course there's the safety issue, which we're not allowed to talk about in most areas of the web. To justify a policy of vaccine mandates, there would have to be a large long-term trials showing a reduction in ALL CAUSE MORTALITY. The Pfizer trials showed the opposite - people in the vaccine group died at higher rates than people in the control group (21 versus 17 according to FDA documents). Does that prove Pfizer is killing people? Not necessarily. But again the burden of proof has to be with the vaxxers. They have not met that burden.
To the contrary, there is no compelling explanation for the explosion of reports of adverse events, including death, in the VAERs database. The responses are no more than handwaving and propaganda. Are the vaccines actually causing all of the deaths being reported? Not necessarily. But the burden again has to be on the vaxxers to PROVE that the rapid rise in VAERS reports is due to some cause or causes other than vaccines killing and maiming thousands of people. Again, they have not met that burden.
Couple that with the supporting anecdotal evidence and this recent paper in Circulation showing the vaccine increases 5-year risk of a heart attack by more than double, https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.10712, and there is reason to be deeply, deeply skeptical of the assurances of "safety" being bandied about. Especially when we're talking about putting healthy kids on a potentially years-long regimen of this intervention to protect against a disease that poses no more than an ordinary risk to them.
I started out firmly in the pro-vax camp, but The Narrative just does not add up anymore. While the vaccines may be saving lives in the upper age brackets, it is far from clear that it is necessary to force vaccinations upon groups that are not at high Covid risk. Applying the "safe and effective" mantra to these vaccines does violence to the plain meaning of the words "safe" and "effective."
I agree with more or less all of this, but would channel Dr. Hisert in pointing out that we don't yet know what the consequence of the boosters is — it could squelch transmission completely and permanently, and nobody would ever need a booster again. I'm not saying that's likely, but we just don't know. So while the indefinite boosters forever scenario makes intuitive sense to me, it's not the only possibility.
Also, we've got that new treatment pill coming very soon, which could change everything. Every one of these calculations will be impacted.
'Raw moralising' is a helpful phrase for understanding most politically-inflected conversation at this point. I'll borrow that one 👍🏻
Enjoyed the article. I’m wondering…The infection rates out of Israel, Waterford Ireland, the UK, Gibraltar, and now the 5 most vaxed states in the US (the latter according to the recent Newsweek article), suggests the vax does not reduce transmission. Considering the Dr’s response, I’m not understanding how such an inference from these high volume data points are any less reliable than those taken from individual households. I would have to see the study Hisert referenced, but how many in the study had previously contracted COVID, which offers more broad based immunity anyway, before they received the vaccine (the University Washington St Louis study, Finland, and Cold Harbor Institute studies)? What were the household members’ ages? How many were vaccinated in the household? Would they even show symptoms? What sort of exposure to COVID did they have outside of their own household? Did the participants lockdown as well as vaccinate? The biases have to be weighed with these smaller, controlled studies, No? The numbers we’re seeing worldwide are too overwhelming to dismiss. Fauci has made a career out if dismissing data through manipulation and obfuscation if “controlled” studies. Are we following the model that put the dangerous AZT into HIV infected individuals back in the 80s? Aside from the unconscionable, unconstitutional idea of mandating any invasive medical procedure, the science isn’t anywhere near convincing, as you say in one of the responses to comments. Thanks again for the hard work.
Paul Kingsnorth (whose novels I love) wrote a piece on his substack that made reference to the Ireland and Gibraltar studies, and someone (I think James Poniewozik) took him to task on Twitter, saying that those are studies that have been debunked. I know nothing about those studies, and of course these days you can infer from someone saying that a study was "debunked" no more than you can infer from someone saying a study is legitimate. I haven't looked into them, but what did the studies find, and are you aware of people claiming that they're somehow flawed?
Thanks for the response. I’m not, but these “studies” aren’t studies, they’re data points, which is where empirical evidence begins. The infection rates from these places are part of government reporting regarding vaccinated and infected. I’m not aware that they’ve been debunked, but I’m not certain how they could be.
Regarding the rationales for vaccine mandates -- is the safety of the immunocompromised still a valid argument? I've heard people claim that they have friends with rare conditions such that even a boosted double-vaxx can't guarantee their protection, and so not enforcing a mandate endangers them
It all comes down to balancing people's interests. Even if we put in place maximum vaccine mandates, the virus would still circulate, albeit at a slower pace. So the risk would still exist to that immunocompromised population. So. then the question becomes, is it fair to compel tens of millions of people to get a vaccine they don't want to afford limited protection to however many IMC people there are? And there could be a meaningful debate about that, which would also include any number of alternative strategies that could protect IMC people without mandates. But instead, the IMC thing tends to be used as a moral cudgel, at least in my experience — like, well if you're against mandates then clearly you have a compassion problem because immunocompromised people.
Okay, so I'll try not to go into a rant, but I *hate* our education system right now. If you can get a disease so badly you can be hospitalized and die from it (as the vaccinated can), you sure as hell can transmit it. That this is even a question cannot be attributed to the mysteries of science but the mysteries of the human mind and the power of propaganda. Common sense would tell you all this. We don't need experts and scientists and fancy letters after people's names. It's sort of along the lines of if it's raining, you're going to get wet level of common sense.
As for the 10 days plus to "mount an immune response," I also find this ridiculous because I know people who have gotten over COVID in days. If it took that long for your immune system to kick in regardless of vaccination status, we'd be dead.
As for its effectiveness at "reducing hospitalizations," you would have to have much better (and impartial) numbers than we do to even begin to make that definitive claim. It seems it may, but . . . and this a "but" of King Kong proportions . . . at what cost?
Let's take this a step further into territory that will probably get me torn apart. The vaccines are not "safe." I don't care how much they spout that line. I can tell you from the experiences of people around me, they make people deathly ill, and that's the immediate effects they're willing to cop to. Just this morning, El Gato Malo on Bad Cattitude published this piece on athletes having heart issue post-vaccination: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/is-it-vaccines-or-is-it-covid-causing. Go digging. There's so much more than this.
Then we have the fact that the vaccines may short-circuit your immune system so you may never have the ability to gain any natural immunity to COVID through Original Antigenic Sin. See this article by Eugyppius: https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/mass-vaccination-may-permanently.
Finally we have the Marek effect (basically, the vaccinated unknowingly pass along the virus to the unvaccinated). This article from Eugyppius explains the Marek effect: https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/the-marek-effect. And these two from El Gato Malo flesh out the evidence for this happening with COVID: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/are-leaky-vaccines-driving-delta and https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/leaky-vaccines-super-spreads-and
And then we have this from Alex Berenson: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adults-under-60
All of this, and I mean *all* of it, needs to be taken into account. We are headed for a train wreck of epic proportions and some of us, the much more cynical, have come to the conclusion that the vaccine mania is about eliminating a control group, but if you take that step, you have to conclude that they at least suspect (if not know) the disaster coming and yet are forging ahead anyway.
Just responding to your first point: I agree it's crystal clear that if you get sick as hell from the virus you can transmit it, whether vaccinated or not. But I think everyone's in agreement that the vaccinated can transmit it. The question is whether vaccination *reduces* that transmission, and by how much. And that's particularly relevant for the cases that don't match what you describe — the asymptomatic cases — since that's going to be more typical for the vaccinated.
True, but they started out telling us that the vaccinated couldn't transmit it at all, and then we saw the vaccinated getting sick, but still, per Smart People, they can't transmit it at all. That was the line. The line was never a spectrum. The line was they couldn't, full stop. Of course, they also went back and forth on whether asymptomatic people can transmit it. I'm not sure we ever came to a conclusion on that one. Of course, we don't really know if there is asymptomatic or just false positives on the PCR test, which is much less reliable than advertised. But that's a whole other discussion. However, within hours and often overlapping, we had people saying "no the vaccinated can't transmit the virus" but everyone, including the vaccinated, you need to put your masks back on, which should have told anyone with eyes that they were "misrepresenting" their conclusions even before they moved the goalpost from "can't" to "cuts down." We still have the paradox of only testing unvaccinated people for certain events and travel or issuing "vaccine passports," as if the vaccinated can't get it or carry it, which is a whole other level of insanity that smacks more of politics and rewards for compliance than actual science. And, finally, while I agree that you personally have the freedom to only address my first point, the institutions that have caused this circus do not. They have to address it all, including the things they don't want to address that people are seeing with their own eyes around them and in the data. And they have to do so before the institutions we look to for guidance lose all semblance of credibility, if they haven't already.
All good points. The challenge for me has been trying to discern what's good faith revisions of opinions based on new information, and what's obfuscation. Even if you were to grant everyone the benefit of the doubt though that they're all acting in good faith, you're still left with a vaccine that is clearly far less effective than advertised. And that would be fine — hey, sometimes things don't turn out to be as great as they first appear — except that we still seem to be devising policy around the vaccines as if they were close to 100% effective at preventing both infection and transmission. We should be constructing a blended approach, which combines vaccines (but not mandates) with strong guidelines around distancing and masking where necessary (and not where it is not), as well as other things we're not even talking about, like promoting exercise and time outdoors, and then factoring in all kinds of other factors like economic stability, mental health, etc. Basically I think we're at the point where we should stop approaching this like a fire that needs to be put out, and start treating it like what it is, which is basically a permanent situation that requires measures that are socially, economically, and politically sustainable.
(One of those measures, by the way, should be substantially expanding ICU capacity.)
You're absolutely right about the ICUs. One lesson we should have learned from COVID is how woefully inadequate our hospital system is to handle even the slightest crisis, though that seems to be the one of the things no one is talking about, except maybe you (not surprising, since you seem to address a lot that no one else talks about). Also, yes, we need to treat COVID as if it is here to stay and vaccines are only one of many ways to mitigate the damage.
And I'm sorry about the rant. My frustration comes down to the use of the pronoun "we." You use it as it should be used, all of us deciding together what is the best balance of individual freedom vs the good of the whole. However, "we" has come to mean, regarding COVID policy, the small minority of elites who make the rules and sacrifice nothing for them and the rest of us who are supposed to unquestioningly follow the rules even though they make little to no sense and have cost some of us greatly.
This is an excellent framing of the questions that we should all be concerned with. So long as the cultish pro-mandate crowd ride on an unproven (and increasingly suspect) assumption that vaccines reduce transmissibility, they can continue to blame the unvaccinated for our sorry state of affairs. It is too painful to acknowledge that the vaccines have not delivered as promised, and that lockdowns and mandates have exacted a devastating financial and social toll without meaningful benefit. Perhaps most humiliating of all, we should have forseen that this virus, not unlike influenza and the common cold, would be more wily and innovative than we are, and focused on treatments rather than eradication through vaccines.