What Does a Country Do When There Are No More Unvaccinated to Blame?
Most countries are villainizing a dwindling population of unvaccinated as COVID rages. One place even ran out of such people to blame.
There have been several unbelievable developments this week as it relates to COVID and vaccines. Our government in America continues to push a narrative that COVID would be done right now if it were not for all those irresponsible people who failed to get vaccinated. The US is in good company. Many highly vaccinated European countries are also playing the blame game as they experiencing fresh outbreaks with infection rates that exceed what the US has ever seen. One country is locking the unvaccinated in their homes. Another is talking about following suit. Amidst the mayhem, two European countries are more circumspect, bravely publishing what the science is now telling us, namely how, after just a handful of months, vaccines do nothing to stop the spread of cases.
OSHA mandates are halted
First let’s cover some very important news as it pertains to vaccine mandates in the US. This week, President Biden’s federal mandate of private companies forcing vaccines on their employees was suspended. Don’t expect to read about this in the American press as the mainstream media was largely silent on this. Let me explain exactly what is happening.
In early September, Biden announced that, in addition to vaccine mandates on government workers and contractors, he was instructing the Operational Safety and Health Administration known as OSHA (which is within the Department of Labor) to draft a mandate that required all private companies with greater than 100 employees to require COVID vaccination of all employees or require them to undergo regular testing. This mandate was officially released on November 4. The administration knew it would be immediately challenged in court, which it was. On November 6th, a federal appeals court in New Orleans issued an order to halt the mandate while it reviewed the situation, citing "grave statutory and constitutional issues." The court followed up on November 14th upholding its stay of the order.
Additional challenges and lawsuits from 27 states were filed in a variety of jurisdictions. In such a situation, the Justice Department must randomly select one regional appeals court to review all the cases together. Presumably, the Biden administration was waiting to see whether this case would be heard in a left-leaning region like the West Coast that would be more favorable to the mandate or a more conservative area. On Tuesday (Nov 16) that game of chance resulted in one of the most conservative venues (Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals) for the case. In the 6th Circuit some 20 of the 27 judges were appointed by Republican presidents. That dashed the administration’s hope of a quick ruling in their favor. Wednesday morning, OSHA announced that they would not be enforcing the mandate while the cases are being heard. This could take a while and, given the initial court’s ruling, the mandate has a good chance to be struck down.
For now, private employers are no longer under a mandate. Mandates for federal employees, city/state mandates, and restrictions on federal contractors are likely still in effect. Mandate or no mandate, the White House continues to tell companies to get their employees to get vaccinated, spinning the tail that COVID would be over were it not for the unvaccinated.
Thankfully, a few countries are beginning to show us how wrong that really is.
Vaccine effectiveness goes negative
This week researchers in Sweden released their latest findings on vaccine effectiveness in a paper submitted to The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world. This research evaluates vaccine effectiveness over time. They found that starting in the third month after being fully vaccinated, the effectiveness of stopping the spread of symptomatic infection begins to decline. Nothing new here. Even Pfizer’s own research shows this.
The Swedes went further though by stating emphatically effectiveness goes to zero. In their words, “from day 211 and onwards no effectiveness could be detected.” By this they mean that once a person is seven months past their second dose, there is no difference between them and an unvaccinated individual. Hence why there is so much discussion of boosters.
Then they raised something even more interesting. In their chart, effectiveness doesn’t just drop to zero. It goes negative. In the chart above (taken directly from their paper) you see a black line is the calculated effectiveness declining over time. The grey region represents their “confidence interval,” effectively their margin of error which gets wider over time. The black line and the grey envelope don’t just drop to zero. They go negative.
Negative effectiveness is hard to believe. Did they really mean to say that by month 7, a vaccinated person could become more likely to catch COVID (including symptoms) than an unvaccinated person? Yes, they did. And they are not the only country saying this. The data is entirely consistent with that coming out of the United Kingdom.
Each week the UK puts out something called the COVID-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report. The most recent one is available here. This report tracks uptake in vaccine by age and then chronicles effectiveness relative to those who haven’t received the vaccines (mostly Pfizer and AstraZeneca). Their vaccine rollout was centrally controlled. As a result, the UK has very high-quality data from which we are learning what vaccines are actually doing (or aren’t doing). Authorities were methodical about keeping to the dosage schedule and that those 80 and older go first. Then those older than 70 years of age, then those above 60 – all the way down to kids. This, of course, took many months. The critical point is that the older you are in the UK, on average, the longer it has been since your second dose.
The UK authorities report real-time data of how often individuals are contracting the disease, becoming hospitalized, or dying from COVID. In doing so, they rigorously compare vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. Unlike the US government, the UK reports data from just the last month. This allows us to see how vaccines perform as a population gets further away from its second shot. They are finding that many of the groups that have been vaccinated more than five months prior are catching COVID at a rate greater than that of the unvaccinated. Pretty much every vaccinated person above 30 years old in the UK is at a higher risk of catching COVID than are unvaccinated individuals. In ages 40-69, they are than two times as likely.
That same report (graph not shown here) shows that for the age group 30-39, the UK reached a majority being vaccinated by early June and so as they look at late-October/early-November vaccine performance you are seeing what happens when a group gets to be 5-6 months from full vaccination. They are seeing the vaccinated now more likely catch COVID than a non-vaccinated person, just like the Swedish data. In older groups that were vaccinated prior, it is worse.
How could this be? One explanation is that the “unvaccinated” population includes many people who have recovered from COVID natural immunity which has been proven to be more effective at stopping the spread of the virus than the vaccines are. I shudder to think about any other explanations as most of those would imply the vaccine ultimately leaves you more vulnerable once it wears off. I am not ready to think that.
Effectiveness waning – this is not new. Published data in Israel and Qatar has for months demonstrated protection is all but gone by month six. The Veteran’s Administration has shown substantial drops in vaccine effectiveness at stopping infection in American vets. The Swedes and Brits are the first findings to suggest that vaccine effectiveness goes negative. These countries know that COVID can’t be ended just by forcing vaccinations on everyone.
Thus, good science and the spirit of transparency allow us to see three things:
- Vaccine effectiveness at stopping symptomatic infection is 80% to 90% for the first three months after your second shot.
- Vaccines are effective at reducing hospitalization and deaths by a factor of 3x relative to a non-vaccinated person, at least until month nine.
- By month six that vaccine effectiveness at stopping disease spread is all but gone relative to a non-vaccinated. After that a vaccinated person may be more likely to catch and spread COVID than a non-vaccinated person.
The myth that COVID breakouts are due to low vaccination rates
Sweden and the UK are exceptions in showing such stark vaccine outcomes. We can confidently say that today’s outbreaks around the developed world are not the result of vaccination rates. That narrative is politics at their worst. The virus simply rages on. Everyone country will eventually come to terms with this. The only question is how much damage we do to our society between now and then.
Nevertheless, some other countries continue to villainize the 20% or 30% who haven’t gotten vaccinated. Austria is most interesting.
In a policy move the American bureaucratic elite only wish they could implement, Austria has told all of their unvaccinated residents that they are now under lockdown, only allowed to go to work or to the store or to the doctors. Germany is considering a similar policy. The Netherlands is contemplating a more ordinary lockdown. As if that wasn’t enough, today, Austria announced everyone will be forced to take the vaccines, making them the first country in the first Western country to do so. I wonder who will be second and third. Here is why:
From the above chart, you would be tempted to think Austria and the Netherlands were behind in vaccinations. Let’s look at the vaccination rates of these developed countries. For reference, the United States which sits at a 68% vaccination rate. Singapore (93%), Iceland (83%), Germany (70%), and the Netherlands (76%) all are good comparison countries. Austria, interestingly, has the exact same rate as the US (68%).
It turns out, there is no correlation between the vaccinations and infection breakouts. Researchers from Harvard University recently published an article showing that whether they looked at county to county in the United States or they survey across countries globally, they saw no correlation between case counts and vaccination rates. Highly vaccinated countries do not have lower rates of COVID infection. In some cases, they are slightly higher. It seems the Swedes are on to something.
Of all these highly vaccinated, developed countries, only France has a lower rate of new infections than the US right now. Give it a few weeks and we will see what France looks like.
When there are no unvaccinated to blame, cancel Christmas
It makes you wonder what a country would do if absolutely everyone was fully vaccinated and they still had a surge in cases. Wonder no more. For this we have Gibraltar, which is technically not a country. Gibraltar is a small British territory at the southern tip of Spain. It is famous for the 1,400 ft limestone cliff known as the “Rock of Gibraltar” that juts out into the Mediterranean Sea, forming the southern-most tip of Europe. From the chart above, Gibraltar is off the charts on vaccination rates (121%) with more than two shots per every resident.
Officially, everyone is vaccinated. Not just adults – everyone. Yet, it is also off the chart in infection rates (two charts back), at a much higher infection rate than Austria. They are averaging 66 cases per day over the last week and it is rising quickly. That running case count puts them more than halfway to their peak before vaccinations became available.
This daily case average of 66 doesn’t sound like a lot but Gibraltar only has 33,677 residents. Precisely because they are a small territory, they have reportedly achieved a 100% vaccination rate. Despite all that work, they are rewarded with an infection rate this week of 2,000 cases for every million people in the population, higher than Austria. At its worst, the US never had more than 800 daily cases per one million of population. The United Kingdom peaked a little below 900.
So, what do you do when you have the highest infection rate of any country, but essentially everyone has been fully vaccinated? You declare that Christmas is canceled. Sadly, that is where we are. Until countries act less like the US and Austria, and we start acting more like Sweden and the UK, we are going to be an angry, bitter people.
Let’s remember who is really in control. There is a Rock for us to stand on which is far more substantial than that of Gibraltar.
“On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand; All other ground is sinking sand,” – Edward Mote from the song The Solid Rock
Thank you for the truth!