COVID Slamming New England Despite High Vaccination Rate
Study published in European Journal of Epidemiology shows higher vaccine levels are not tied to fewer new Covid cases. Researchers conclude we need to “strike the balance of learning to live with COVID-19”.
A week ago, I noted Maine was having a surge in COVID-related hospitalizations. This happened despite 84% of everyone over 12, 85.3% of everyone over 18, and 98.4% of everyone over 65 are at least partially vaccinated.
Now the mainstream media has caught up with the analysis. Reports show that New England is being slammed by a COVID-surge despite the high vaccination rates.
Hospitals across the region are seeing full intensive care units and staff shortages are starting to affect care. Public officials are pleading with the unvaccinated to get the shots. Health care workers are coping with pent-up demand for other kinds of care that had been delayed by the pandemic.
“I think it’s clearly frustrating for all of us,” said Michael Pieciak, the commissioner of the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation who monitors COVID-19 statistics for the state. “We want kids to be safe in school, we want parents not to have to worry about their child’s education and health.”
Even though parts of New England are seeing record case counts, hospitalizations and deaths that rival pre-vaccine peaks, largely among the unvaccinated, the region hasn’t seen the impact the Delta variant wave has wrought on other parts of the country.
New England is hardly the bastion of Red-State-rubes who love Trump and are anti-vax.
According to statistics from The Associated Press, the five states with the highest percentage of a fully vaccinated population are all in New England, with Vermont leading, followed by Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. New Hampshire is 10th.
According to the AP data, full vaccination rates across the six New England states range from a high of 69.4% in Vermont to 61.5% in New Hampshire.
Before the vaccine-faithful start asserting most of the cases are among the unvaccinated, a new analysis published in the European Journal of Epidemiology shows no discernible relationship between the proportions of populations fully vaccinated and new Covid-19 cases.
The study led by a population health researcher at Harvard University has found no meaningful association between new Covid-19 cases that emerged over a recent seven-day period and fractions of populations fully vaccinated in 68 countries.
In other words, having more fully vaccinated people do not necessarily mean fewer Covid infections.
The results actually point to a marginal positive association: countries with a higher percentage of fully vaccinated population had higher Covid-19 cases per million.
Israel, which had 60 per cent of its population fully vaccinated, had the highest Covid-19 cases per million — 6,224 — over the seven days prior to September 3.
India had fully vaccinated about 11 per cent of its population by September 3.
India had around 182 new Covid-19 cases per million over the prior seven days.
The US had fully vaccinated 51 per cent of its population but had 3,039 new cases per million.
Iceland and Portugal had over 75 per cent of their populations fully vaccinated, but both had more Covid-19 cases per million than Vietnam or South Africa, which had less than 10 per cent of their populations fully vaccinated.
The full article makes interesting reading, especially as it reaches the same conclusion about the virus I drew over 18 months ago: We need to learn to live with the virus.
The sole reliance on vaccination as a primary strategy to mitigate COVID-19 and its adverse consequences needs to be re-examined, especially considering the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant and the likelihood of future variants. Other pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions may need to be put in place alongside increasing vaccination rates. Such course correction, especially with regards to the policy narrative, becomes paramount with emerging scientific evidence on real world effectiveness of the vaccines.
…In summary, even as efforts should be made to encourage populations to get vaccinated it should be done so with humility and respect. Stigmatizing populations can do more harm than good. Importantly, other non-pharmacological prevention efforts (e.g., the importance of basic public health hygiene with regards to maintaining safe distance or handwashing, promoting better frequent and cheaper forms of testing) needs to be renewed in order to strike the balance of learning to live with COVID-19 in the same manner we continue to live a 100 years later with various seasonal alterations of the 1918 Influenza virus.
I suspect the Biden administration will have a tough time with the “humility and respect” portion of that very sound recommendation.
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Comments
If 100% of the population is vaccinated then 100% of the cases will be in vaccinated people.
If 0% of the population is vaccinated then 0% of the cases will be in vaccinated people.
That’s called a confounding factor.
To your point of confounding factor, this is an interesting analysis:
“Israeli data: How can efficacy vs. severe disease be strong when 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated?”
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-efficacy-vs-severe-disease-be-strong-when-60-of-hospitalized-are-vaccinated
There ought to be something like a Laffer curve. You know what it is at 0% and 100% but is it higher than the percentage or lower in the middle. It could be higher (more vaccinated than the vaccinated population percentage) even if the vaccine is very effective, the second confounding factor of behavior also changing. Vaccinated people social distance a lot less than unvaccinated people, leading to more picking up the infection in spite of protection.
That’s called the Peltzman effect, where seat belts cause more dangerous driving habits. People tend to run at constant danger, adjusting risks taken to safety devices offered.
“That’s called the Peltzman effect, where seat belts cause more dangerous driving habits.”
*****
Same effect seen from “Mask Mandates”. Any possible marginal effectiveness, maybe 10%, of masks inhibiting viral spread, is more than offset by “Peltzman Effect”.
Some people call that a moral hazard, I just call it being a dumbass.
I’m not sure which unvaccinated people you’ve been around. I don’t social distance at all and I will never take the jab, especially as hard as the nazis in the government have been pushing it. Those who haven’t taken the jab yet, we’re not afraid of the wuhan flu to begin with.
I’m not afraid of black widows, either, but I will kill them on sight. The same thing is true of COVID.
Early outpatient treatment, using zinc and an over-the-counter ionophore, will handle it in 5 days, also provided a person is not deficient in something else, like D, C, or selenium.
In spite of or because of the high vaccination rate? Some researchers are suggesting the possibility that the vaccinations are actually facilitating or causing the new infections.
shhhhhhhhhhhhhh! No one is supposed to know that. Some people are wondering if there will be a surge in types of cancer….
I’d be more worried about surges in dementia and autoimmune diseases. Those were typical side effects in animal studies of mRNA vaccines.
Cancer is one of the concerns being raised about the new Pfizer covid pill, since it has known mutagenic properties.
The US never tells us how many current patients were vaccinated. I think we know why.
Yes they are.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a7.htm?s_cid=mm7037a7_x#F1_down
Well, if they could tell us how many of the patients are illegals we would be able to establish a base line.
Very, very fair comment.
Here’s a better link….vaccine efficacy is dropping in the last two months in protecting against infection, but it is remaining high against hospitalization.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccine-effectiveness
Thanks a lot for the link. Good info is hard to find.
For a long, long time, the government has been absolutely terrible at disseminating information to the public for large datasets. This is not exclusive to COVID or even medicine. They are just flat out terrible at it, and it’s not just the jargon of the field.
Whoever they hire to write their web interfaces are terrible and write clunky and clumsy pages that look like they are only proofread maybe once. They are probably either “favor contracts” or lifelong govt job loafers that do the minimum to get by.
What’s worse is that because of their failures, most people rely on biased journalists who either have an agenda or are flat out wrong in their interpretations while being too arrogant to recognize their deficiencies.
I agree. Thanks for your detailed comment.
They do such a good job of hiding the facts, some might think they’re doing it on purpose. I don’t think that, I know it. It takes a special kind of lowlife piece of garbage to work for the federal government.
“”For a long, long time, the government has been absolutely terrible at disseminating information to the public””
Also known as “lying”.
As someone who has written web/database interfaces, I agree with you completely.
They not even sufficiently competent to provide a date on the possibly decent (but who knows) article for which you provide a URL. The only way one knows that their “February through August” graphs are for 2021 is that the article mentions the delta virus.
Idiots.
Unlike Ironclaw, I doubt they’re doing it on purpose. I’m pretty sure they’re too incompetent for that.
Those looking for explanations should read Dilbert.
Without knowing how many sick and unvaccinated (never to be vacinnated or ever counted properly, for we don’t even know their names and every time they visit an emergency room they use a different name) illegals are pouring into our country, not to mention how many are already here (for the number is in the millions) the figures provided are practically worthless.
They do, but isn’t it amazing how our data is so phenomenally different from the data from every other country? It’s crazy. Our vaccines are super-duper effective. Those other poor chumps must not have gotten to good stuff.
Yes, it is amazing. And it will be ignored.
Our ‘experts’ and politicians ignore what is happening in other countries. As do the politicians and ‘experts’ in Australia and New Zealand.
Most other countries don’t force their kids to wear masks in school either.
Sweden never even shut their schools down.
Chinese vax is pure garbage, might as well be injecting sugar although sugar might do less harm.
Astra Zeneca performs fairly similar to J & J. The other two: Pfizer and Moderna are in a different class because they are different technology.
All garbage that have proven to wear off much too quickly.
What data there is can be misleading and lead to more questions.
The CDC stopped tracking breakthrough cases that were not admitted to a hospital in May. They only have data for breathrough cases admitted to a hospital. So we have no idea how many breathrough cases there really are. And the CDC has admitted the vaccinated can still spread Covid .
Many of the unvaccinated who are hospitalized and test positive for Covid on admission were not admitted for having Covid related symptoms. They were admitted for something unrelated to Covid. They are counted as ‘hospitalized for Covid’ when they were actually hospitalized for something else.
Even if they were tracking it, they wouldn’t have accurate counts of breakthrough cases because so many are mild that they go undetected.
Vaccines do help. The data actually demonstrate that.
By the way, most states are tracking it. Here’s my home state for example.
https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/covid-19-in-virginia/covid-19-cases-by-vaccination-status/
I’ve never said they didn’t
How much they help and for how long is not well known. Especially using past standards of determining these things.
And by any past standard of evaluating vaccines these are still experimental ‘vaccines’, using the term loosely.
Who and how much they harm is unknown.
The extent of short terms side effects is unknown. Possible long term long term side effects are completely unknown. Especially the long term effects on kids.
The consequences of less than a 97-98% vaccinated population are unknown.
Also, there’s no justification for vaccinating those who have acquired natural immunity.
The CDC, Fauci, and The Regime don’t seem to care about any of this. Just do as you’re told and get the jab, peasant, or else we’ll ruin your life in every way we can. Unless your an illegal immigrant who recently crossed the border. Or in one of the select exempt groups.
We’re talking about a virus with an IFR only marginally greater than the seasonal flu. Maybe twice as high. Maybe a bit less. Maybe a bit more. Another unknown. But we know the range. And we do know it’s much lower in kids.
The American people have a right to make their own decisions. They have a right to ask questions and have them answered honestly, transparently, and forthrightly by the government. They have a right to not be censored. And they have a right to demand that the government address the unknowns honestly and openly.
And by any past standard of evaluating vaccines these are still experimental ‘vaccines’, using the term loosely.
And by any standard of evaluating vaccines- these are all failures. Tetanus, yellow fever- booster after 10 years. Most others? Once, lifetime. (Flu vaccine is different every year… counts as once for each variety.) These? Every 6 months- and they don’t keep you from getting it anyway.
Vaccines do help.. absolutely for some.. for other poor souls they seem to cause a slew of terrible conditions.. blood clots, myocarditis, etc.. we have all heard the horror stories. Most reasonable people take a look at the odds overall and make a decision. But that option has been removed. Bless and keep those who are forced into this..
I should trust this data why? They’re lying about almost everything else.
The southern states had their surges in the summer. Now batting: the northern states. It’s not called the ‘cold and flu’ season for nothing.
The important thing is the death rate for vaccinated vs unvaccinated, when ages are controlled.
Another thing to consider is that social distancing went out the window when nearly everyone got vaccinated.
A third thing to consider is the death rate in New England compared to, say, Florida or Texas. The absolute number of people dying in Vermont .hovers near zero.
Might want to factor obesity as well as it is also a key contributor to death and hospitalization from Covid.
Has anybody done a comparison of hospitalizations/death controlled for age and obesity rates?
It’s been done- but never publicized. The military consists mostly (60%) young healthy people from 18-26. 1.3 million active duty, last number- 20 deaths among them. The military puts out total deaths- including reserve/NG- that number is up to 58. I suspect that there are zero deaths in the 18-26 year old range. The AD rate- about 0.0015%. That’s at least two orders of magnitude lower than the civilian death rate. Total with the reserve/NG components- double that, or 0.003%. Reserve/NG forces are older. Breaking it down again- 0.005% among thte reserve/NG component- almost double the total numbers. That’s using 1.3 million for AD, 700,000 for the rest. Total US death rate from covid- 707K/329 million- 0.22% Average death age from covid overall is >80. Quick google- average death age USA 2019- 78.79 years.
I don’t know if Coast Guard numbers are included in that- since they’ve now homeland security.
When the vaxed carry a viral load 251 times that of the rest of us, is there any wonder why they had an outbreak?
Hey, you can read the CDC data. Well…okay. Couldn’t say that with a straight face.
CDC Director Rochelle ‘Gun Grabber’ Walensky recently admitted the vaccinations do not prevent the vaccinated from spreading Covid.
If the vaccinated are even more likely to spread Covid than the vaccinated, well, that could explain several things that otherwise seem a bit odd.
And it could also be a setup for another round of lockdowns. The Dems are desperate and need distractions.
Correction: If the vaccinated are even more likely to spread Covid than the unvaccinated…
The easiest way to solve the covid crisis is to interview the scientists who created this chimera virus, Eco Health Alliance and Bill Gates who pushed it, Fraudci and his gang who funded it, then execute them for crimes against humanity.
Rumor has it the so-called ‘vaccinations’ do not work very well against the Delta variant. Rumor has it the ‘vaccinated’ might even be more vulnerable to infection from the Delta variant than the unvaccinated.
Considering the effectiveness of the vax wanes at 4 months then drops precipitously at 6 months while many of the adherents of the new religion of vax truly believe that the vax has made them immortal re Covid by their self serving virtue in receiving it’s communion …..
It’s no wonder that the vaxed are being infected with the Delta which is less serious but much more transmissible, exactly as we would expect a virus to evolve. The vaxed are being infected with the mostly healthy simply asymptomatic or with a mild case and spreading it as much as the unvaxed.
MO, the same population subsets who were most at risk are still most at risk; the infirm elderly, the obese and those with a weak immune system. We should confine the booster availability to this population at the discretion of the individual and ease up on the virtue signaling and ritual condemnation of the personal health decisions of adult citizens, lest a future regime decide some other aspect of healthcare be taken over by the State.
From ABC News: More Americans have died from COVID-19 this year than from the virus in all of 2020, according to newly updated data from Johns Hopkins University.
In other words, the VACCINE is the virus.
Connect the dots, people.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/live-updates/covid-delta-surge/?id=80391228#80432735
“Connect the dots, people.”
I did and I ended up with a Rorschach test.
You realize that almost half of America is not fully vaccinated?
And that’s entirely meaningless. Every time the government mandates an extra booster shot that they didn’t previously, everybody in the country suddenly becomes “not fully vaccinated” again.
I get that. But to say the vaccine is the virus is absurd.
And yeah I also know people who have been fully vaccinated have died. There was a lady near me who had the booster shot and died of coronavirus.
No one is telling people the truth about anything, which leads to people making up absolutely crazy shit.
It’s a non sterile leaky virus. Look up the science on that before you say it’s BS
It’s actually scary
This.
That’s what happens when politicians, government ‘experts’, and the state supporting media are caught lying and/or telling half-truths and/or saying things they have little or no evidence to support that later turn out to be false.
And when these same people also actively work to suppress and censor information they don’t like because [fill-in-the-blank]. Information that is later shown to be the truth. Sometimes only days later,
The spike protein has been demonstrated to be pathogenic in a minority of the population. Thus administration of the vaccine(s) increases absolute risk, whereas previously the risk of infection and disease progression was conditional.
You know what’s absurd? These lab results that look like AIDS. And they were 100% caused by the vax.
“The vaccine is the virus” is may be an overstatement, but not by as much as you think.
The mRNA vaccines were supposed to stay in people’s arms, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they travel, and when they do, they wind up in all kinds of inconvenient places, such as capillaries in the brain, heart, and lungs. The traveling vaccines infect cells other than the desired muscle cells, and those cells produce that business end of the COVID-19 virus, namely the highly poisonous spike protein. These cells may have longer lifetimes than originally expected, too, so dosage is uncontrolled.
The physical misery inflicted by mRNA vaccines that travel and infect the wrong classes of cells looks remarkably like COVID-19 infection, because it’s simply COVID-19 via artificial virus.
We still have no way to tell which persons may be affected this way.
How soon after the booster? Are you certain she actually died of coronavirus? These “vaccines” can induce symptoms that are indistinguishable from covid itself, and they’ve officially killed thousands already. It wouldn’t surprise me if vaccine deaths are being recorded as covid deaths.
What’s the difference? The vaccines were designed for a variant we haven’t even seen in a year. They don’t protect against infection from current variants and if a so-called vaccine can’t even protect you against infection, it’s worse than worthless.
Wrong, Col. More than three-quarters of American adults have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
But that’s not the point. Last year: no vaccines, fewer deaths. This year: vaccine, more deaths. The two aren’t unrelated.
The first rule of holes is STOP DIGGING.
I thought this site had more intelligent readers
I don’t think he’s unintelligent, just falling for the old “people eat more ice cream when it’s hot, violent crime increases when it’s hot, ice cream CAUSES violent crime” fallacy.
It is not in the least surprising that we have seen more WuFlu deaths so far in 2021 than we did in all of 2020. What is surprising is that anyone would attribute this to the vaccine and not the virus itself. The vaccine has indeed killed people, including children over the age of 12, but it’s not the reason for the surge. The “vaccine” (which is not really a vaccine in the traditional and scientific definition of the term) is not as effective as say the (actual) Smallpox vaccine was. Smallpox was wiped out without a 97-99% vax rate Biden is pimping, and it was a truly deadly disease that killed otherwise healthy people (300 million people died worldwide from smallpox). WuFlu mostly kills the elderly, the infirm, the obese, the immuno-compromised, and the otherwise already health-compromised (those with diabetes, etc.). It is not a threat to the vast majority of the population, and that it is being treated like the bubonic plague against a 12th century medical knowledge background (the bubonic plague is now readily treatable) is the cause for the hysteria on both sides. Pendulums swing, and it’s not unreasonable to expect some backlash to the crazy mixed messages from the Biden admin and his CDC, Fauci clown, et al.
tldr; I don’t think his skepticism is unintelligent.
It does. You seem to have a problem with them.
And, sorry fuzzy. Accidental downtick trying for uptick.
Heh, no worries, Dathurtz. 🙂
It’s called antibody dependent enhancement. The vaccinated are actually more infectious than the unvaccinated. Big Pharma sped ahead with these experimental vaccines despite warnings from the likes of Dr. Peter Malone.
Everything is a scam today. How many people know that the more Radon in one’s home the less likely one is to contract lung cancer? This is well known to government scientists and buried in footnotes.
This is called antibody dependent enhancement. The vaccinated are more infectious than the unvaccinated due to these new rushed vaccines.
“…we want parents not to have to worry about their child’s education and health.”
Huh? Isn’t worrying about your child’s education and health just part of being a parent? Big Daddy Gubmint is going to prevent that? In what bizzaro world would that EVER be true?
“Reports show that New England is being slammed by a COVID-surge despite the high vaccination rates.”
“Winter is coming…”
And the s0-called vaccines don’t work for shit, there’s your proof.
Winter has been here for 2 years
The winter of our discontent.
Despite or because? Whereas natural immunity has been established to be more robust and durable, vaccinated immunity has proven to be non-sterilizing (with excess adverse events) in a minority of the population, and a premature progressive effectiveneness in a larger population. Silent spread.
Regarding the story headline: despite? Or, because of?
I’d believe despite as well. It’s a flu. Winter is indeed coming. It’s New England. The vax doesn’t stop you from catching it or passing it on. Therefore, it’s not going to reduce the “number of cases.” Hospitalizations and deaths are the interesting numbers. As far as this article reports, nobody is bothering to correlate the vaxed/unvaxed with the hospitalizations and deaths. And when that correlation is missing, it’s easy to suspect that it was because it was purposely left out, like the race of a criminal perp.
If it doesn’t stop you from catching the disease, it should even qualify to be called a vaccine.
“”it should(n’t) even qualify to be called a vaccine.””
Sure it can. They just changed the definition.
In some places they’ve made those correlations, like in Israel and the UK. Didn’t work out so well for the vaxxed.
The youtube video at the end of your article seems to support vaccination while your article seems to say something else? Is that a fair assessment?
I look forward to hearing about the failure of Covid policies imposed by the d/progressive Gov during the seasonal surge up North. The media and our public health community has an opportunity here to tell the truth v continuing their propaganda narrative.
They can still redeem themselves if they do so. I doubt that they will bother. Unfortunately, the consequences for their failure will be to make permanent the widespread public loss of confidence and loss of any reason to even listen to any future pronouncements much less obey. They will in fact be lucky to achieve a state of neutrality where the public isn’t actively resisting their policies. The current state of passive resistance on the part of many will be considered quite mild in comparison should that ever eventuate.
“I suspect the Biden administration will have a tough time with the “humility and respect” portion of that very sound recommendation.”
Is there a vaccine for that?
It’s too bad that more people need hospitalization at the same time dictatorial governors have “mandated” the firing of front-line doctors, nurses and other hospital employees who are not vaccinated.
Don’t worry, medical students and foreign nurses will pick up the deficit, they say.
Good luck with that.
It isn’t too bad, it’s deliberate chaos, fomented for the purpose of creating the pretense necessary for additional restrictions on US residents.
Think about what that implies: the mRNA and viral-vector covid vaccines are not statistically better than placebo at preventing transmission of covid. These do not seem to be vaccines in any historical sense of the word. Since “stop the spread” is what we were sold, and they manifestly are not doing that, government and private vaccine mandates must be halted at once.
Given how much lying is going on regarding these medications, I’m not even convinced the claims of symptom and hospitalization relief are true and correct.