Anthony Fauci on Sunday said more than 99 percent of the people who died from COVID-19 in June were not vaccinated, calling the loss of life “avoidable and preventable.”
“If you look at the number of deaths, about 99.2 percent of them are unvaccinated. About 0.8 percent are vaccinated. No vaccine is perfect. But when you talk about the avoidability of hospitalization and death, Chuck, it’s really sad and tragic that most all of these are avoidable and preventable,” Fauci told host Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
(Mx. Fauci does not merit the “Dr.” title to join Dr. Jill Biden?)
Situation across the pond, July 2 (WSJ):
Data from Public Health England show that there were 117 deaths among 92,000 Delta cases logged through June 21. Fifty of those—46%—had received two shots of vaccine.
So… 46 percent of the deaths from the Delta variant (soon to be the only form of coronavirus that anyone has, at least until the “Delta Delta Delta” variant is available) are among the fully vaccinated in the U.K. The corresponding number in the U.S.? Around 1 percent.
You might say “Of course this makes sense. The U.K. has a higher vaccination rate than the U.S. If 100 percent of people in the U.K. were vaccinated, 100 percent of COVID-19 deaths would be among the vaccinated.” Yet the vaccination rates are not that different….
(Since we just celebrated July 4th, consider that if we hadn’t traitorously rebelled, we would still be part of the U.K. and would therefore be enjoying a far superior COVID-19 prevention strategy (more lockdowns (exceptions for the elite), more vaccines!). We would also have been spared four years of Donald Trump’s maladministration, racism, anti-LGBTQIA+ policies, etc.)
How do we explain the fact that the vaccines work so much better at preventing death in the U.S. compared to in the U.K.? These are more or less the same vaccines that are authorized for emergency use (not “approved”) here. The U.K. has our three plus Oxford/AstraZeneca (NHS).
Is it possible that The Delta Variant is more well-developed in the UK due to its closer ties to India and that the US will catch up soon?
The footnotes seem to suggest there’s a “death with, rather than from Delta Variant” problem in the UK statistics.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/997418/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_17.pdf
‡ Cases where specimen date is the same as date of Emergency Care visit are excluded to help remove cases picked up via routine testing in healthcare settings
whose primary cause of attendance is not COVID-19. This underestimates the number of individuals in hospital with COVID-19 but only includes those who tested
positive prior to the day of their Emergency Care visit. Some of the cases detected on the day of admission may have attended for a diagnosis unrelated to COVID19.
^ Total deaths in any setting (regardless of hospitalisation status) within 28 days of positive specimen date
The UK also relied heavily on the Astrazeneca vaccine for elderly people early on, and added Pfizer later with preference for younger people, due to the clotting concerns on the AZ vaccine. So the most vulnerable population mostly has a vaccine not in use in the US.
https://www.businessinsider.com/india-variant-pfizer-astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-one-shot-effectiveness-2021-5
The lower efficacy of AstraZeneca’s vaccine after two doses, compared with Pfizer’s, could be down to the fact that it was given mostly to older people, who tend to have weaker immune responses, the study’s authors said.
Other data has indicated that AstraZeneca’s vaccine can take longer than Pfizer’s to reach maximum effectiveness after the second dose.
This. AstraZeneca’s efficiency was already around 60% with the original virus, when BioNTech/Moderna were in the 90%+. For Delta, BioNTech goes down to ~65%, one can imagine that AstraZeneca will be even worse. Yay for British exceptionalism! Ahead of everyone.
That’s not correct. First of all, you have to differentiate between the efficiency of preventing an infection and hospitalization / death. AZs effectiveness against infection was lower than the mRNAs effectiveness, and in the 70s%, while mRNA are >95%. The efficiency against death was still 100% in the trials (but, of course, very sick people don’t participate in trials, so the numbers in the trials will always be better).
Against Delta infections, it’s still at about 70%: https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/articles/2021/astrazenecas-covid-19-vaccine-shows-effectiveness-against-indian-variants-of-sars-cov-2-virus.html
The confidence intervals in those studies are huge though. The 95% CI is specified as 43.6% to 84.5%…
AstraZeneca prevalence
US vaccinated people aren’t tested for covid when admitted into hospitals, because you can’t died from covid if you haven’t tested positive for covid. Believe the science!
Actually you can in the US. All the hospital has to do is make sure “probable COVID-19” is on the death certificate and they get that 20% bonus from Medicare and Medicaid even if the deceased never tested positive for SARS-COV-2.
More on AstraZeneca versus Pfizer (and perhaps Moderna by extension)…
https://fortune.com/2021/06/28/mixing-covid-19-vaccine-doses-produces-potentially-better-immunity-study-finds-astrazeneca-pfizer/
One take away, following AstraZeneca with Pfizer produced 9x more antibodies than 2 doses of AstraZeneca. But 2 doses of Pfizer were even higher than this.
Judging from https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55274833, it looks like one could argue that roughly 50% of the UK vaccinations were likely Pfizer and roughly 50% were likely AstraZeneca. The actual math is different, but one has to do a little guessing / assuming predicated upon what they’ve ordered versus what has actually been approved.
Based on the premise that no official covid-related numbers are trustworthy, I wonder why they came up with such different messages? The UK admission that the vaccines don’t work very well seems to me smarter. They can pressure the vaccine refusniks with “you fiend, you must get the jab or you’ll kill your (already vaccinated) grandma!”.
In the US by contrast, if they’re telling the refusniks that the risk is all on them then I suspect the reaction will usually be “OK with me!”. Another problem for the US line is, if the vaccines work so well how do you promote “vaccines today, vaccines tomorrow, vaccines for ever”? What’s the pretext for “booster shots” if the existing vaccines are so good?
My prediction is that the US message will be “corrected”, i.e. it will be “discovered” that the vaccines didn’t work so well after all and there is only one solution – more vaccines!
Why would the vaccines work against the delta variant at all? You have to get flu vaccines every year, too (or rather had to, since the flu seems to have been eradicated).
Look forward to the epsilon variant next summer.
Expert witnesses will be gainfully employed for the next 100 years, testifying about the government’s evil unapproved vaccine only saving 99% of us instead of 100%. mRNA vaccines are only 30 years old. Surely another 50 years in the FDA approval process would have made the difference.
> “If you look at the number of deaths, about 99.2 percent of them are unvaccinated. …
This is wonderful news and is a breakthrough for medicine! In few months we achieved a 99.2%, not 99%, success rate against COVID death, but yet after years and years of research and perfection, birth control pill [2] is at 99% effective and condom [1] is at 98%. What a failure!
Got to love the 99.2% number, specially the .2 added to 99.
[1] https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/birth-control-pill/how-effective-is-the-birth-control-pill
[2] https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/birth-control-condoms
Condoms are 71-88% effective, according to https://www.alabamapublichealth.gov/alphtn/assets/112114BirthControl.pdf
(Or closer to 0% effective in jurisdictions where child support profits are unlimited. See https://www.thestar.com/life/2017/10/17/how-birth-control-sabotage-affects-men-ellie.html for example.)
Well, CDC guidance says Ct for post-vaccination SARS2 dagnosis should be 28. The common screening test uses Ct of 40. 4000x difference is sensitivity. Isn’t it wonderful – having the knob you can dial up and down to get the numbers you want? Because science.
https://sentinelksmo.org/cdc-maximum-28-ct-for-post-vaccine-covid-pcr-tests/
The link to the CDC site in the article is broken.
But most machines don’t tell you the ct, only a yay/nay after a fixed number of cycles, and the samples aren’t grouped by vaccination status, so I’m not sure how this guidance is supposed to work.
From the start it would have been nice to confirm all positives with ct > 25 with another test after a day or two, but the testing capacity was too low and the ct numbers weren’t available so it wasn’t an option. And now changing it would be a huge political risk, so nobody wants to do it.
The Guardian: Why most people who now die with Covid in England have had a vaccination
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/commentisfree/2021/jun/27/why-most-people-who-now-die-with-covid-have-been-vaccinated
“But the risk of dying from Covid-19 is extraordinarily dependent on age: it halves for each six to seven year age gap. This means that someone aged 80 who is fully vaccinated essentially takes on the risk of an unvaccinated person of around 50 – much lower, but still not nothing, and so we can expect some deaths.”