"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.