Vaccine-resisting idiots

by philg

Before departing from Maskachusetts last month in the Cirrus SR20 (ferry trip to her new home in the Florida Free State), I mentioned to a woman in the old neighborhood that I’d be visiting a family at their oceanfront house as my first stop. “The dad is my friend and he’s the only one who is vaccinated,” I volunteered. “The kids are slender, healthy and in their late 20s so I can understand their point of course, but the wife is around 60 and could perhaps benefit, though she also is slender and fit.”

Neighbor: “They’re idiots.”

Me: “As it happens, they’re Black.”

Neighbor: “Oh, well, ….” (the “idiot” statement was walked back to a discourse regarding why it wouldn’t make sense for Black people to listen to anything that scientists say)

The neighbor’s car (Chevy Bolt with Bernie bumper sticker):

(Bernie wanted her to live in a town where a vacant buildable lot costs $1 million (minimum 2-acre zoning).)

On arrival, I learned that when you have an oceanfront house it seems that you’re going to be quite popular all summer. The unvaccinated kids (late 20s) had about 6 similar-age friends visiting. All of them, as it turned out, were unvaccinated and resented the government’s attempts to coerce them into getting stuck with a medicine that is extremely unlikely to help them unless the mass vaccination campaign breeds a super deadly version of the coronavirus (see Marek’s Disease). I comforted them at dinner (out on the screen porch and following the CDC guidelines that coronavirus cannot spread when unmasked people sit at restaurant tables): “It probably won’t do you more harm than a week of binge drinking.”

(One of the young people had the idea of running a restaurant where students received music lessons and other kinds of education. “If they’re sitting at a table being served food, they don’t need to wear masks, even if the governor orders students in schools to wear masks.”)

My favorite recent Apple News screen, in which a confused grandfather (of a child who yielded $2.5 million tax-free for the smart plaintiff) has lost patience and scapegoats responsible for all of our woes have been identified:

Separately, it seems that the current crop of vaccines may be worthless from a public health point of view (could still be useful for an at-risk individual who stays in his/her/zir/their bunker 99 percent of the time). “Benefit of COVID-19 vaccination accounting for potential risk compensation” (Nature, August 11, 2021):

With very high vaccine efficacy (E = 0.95), substantial benefit is maintained except in situations where there is a very low probability of infection in the population. If the vaccine efficacy decreases to 0.8, the benefit gets eroded easily with modest risk compensation.

Risk compensation needs to be factored carefully when appraising COVID-19 vaccination strategies. The simplified model used here suggests that even negligible risk compensation can eliminate the benefit of a vaccine of low efficacy, and it also takes only 2.5-fold increase in exposures for the benefit of a vaccine of moderate efficacy (E = 0.6) to disappear unless the probability of infection in the population of interest is very high.

(The most familiar example of risk compensation is a person driving 75 mph in a pavement-melting SUV. He/she/ze/they feels invulnerable due to seatbelts, 17 airbags, and 6,000 lbs. of steel. He/she/ze/they would drive only 50 mph, perhaps, in a lighter car without seatbelts or airbags. Since kinetic energy rises as the square of velocity, the risk of death in an accident might end up being roughly the same as if the driver were in a less thoroughly armored vehicle. See “Condoms and seat belts: the parallels and the lessons” (Lancet) for some references.)

In other words, a less-than-perfect vaccine slows down an epidemic only if people don’t change their behavior as a result of being vaccinated. A person who decides that it is okay to travel on commercial airliners once again, for example, is risk compensating. I’ve observed this behavior in New England. The (mostly) vaccinated population ceased wearing masks on the day that the government stopped ordering them to do so (a couple of months later, of course, it was “Simon Says Masks On” and they all complied with that too!). Fauci-following Democrats who refused to meet me outdoors for coffee pre-vaccination would step in for hugs after they’d received the magic elixir.

Let’s combine the above with July 2021 data (i.e., regarding the delta variant) on breakthrough infections. “Resurgence of SARS-CoV-2 Infection in a Highly Vaccinated Health System Workforce” (NEJM), Table 1:

Vaccine effectiveness was only 65 percent in July 2021 and therefore risk compensation by those who’ve been told by Drs. Fauci and Biden that vaccines are valuable will wipe out the benefit of the vaccines.

I was on a Zoom meeting with some folks from grad school. A friend’s wife is a Ph.D. biologist. She has gone back into her bunker, despite being vaccinated. “The reason that people think vaccines are helpful,” she said, “is that they’re combining data from pre-Delta and Delta. With Delta, the infection and fatality rates aren’t that different for the vaccinated and unvaccinated.”

Israel and the Delta variant:

In a country that has vaccinated 80 percent of those eligible, deaths are about 3/4 of where they were in the fall of 2020, when nobody in Israel was vaccinated.

Related:

  • “It may take ‘many, many’ more vaccine mandates to end the Covid-19 pandemic, Fauci says” (CNN, 9/13): “I believe that’s going to turn this around because I don’t think people are going to want to not go to work or not go to college … They’re going to do it,” Fauci told CNN’s Jen Christensen during an interview at the NLGJA, the Association of LGBTQ Journalists, convention Sunday. “You’d like to have them do it on a totally voluntary basis, but if that doesn’t work, you’ve got to go to the alternatives.”
  • “Fauci says he supports a vaccine mandate for air travel.” (NYT, 9/13): Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, said … that he would support a vaccine mandate for air travelers. “I would support that if you want to get on a plane and travel with other people, that you should be vaccinated,” Dr. Fauci [said]

51 thoughts on “Vaccine-resisting idiots”

  1. The Solution (Bertolt Brecht):

    “After the uprising of the 17th of June
    The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
    Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
    Stating that the people
    Had forfeited the confidence of the government
    And could only win it back
    By increased work quotas. Would it not in that case be simpler
    for the government
    To dissolve the people
    And elect another?”

    (People laugh and shrug off communist references, but Biden’s remark here and the absolutist and humorless way Psaki conducts press conferences are getting me worried. I’ve seen that before.)

    • Thank you for sharing this quote. Seems like this (“…dissolve the people and elect another”) is underway.

    • Bertolt Brecht was a rather revolting commie specimen himself. He was just unlucky in that the other Parteigenossen, as murderous as his own ones, won after the Weimar Republic. Le Wik:
      “[Brecht was] escaping the problem of Stalinism”, ignoring his friends being murdered in the USSR, keeping silence during show trials such as Slánský trial”

      No wonder he was celebrated by his Soviet comrades and his “The Threepenny Opera” was regularly shoved down the spectators throats in Moscow and Leningrad theaters as well as in the provincial ones. I remember from my secondary school years the whole class forced to visit a performance of that thing during some революционный праздник.

      It is quite possible that the quote above suggested to “to dissolve the people and elect another” in all seriousness, just as was practiced by the Soviet regime.

    • Ivan: We know that, but he was a spectacular playwright (his Three Penny Opera is probably his worst work). “Life of Galilei” is largely apolitical and the “Good Human of Szechuan” could be regarded as anti-communist (unlimited giving leads to self-destruction).

      What do you do about Prokofiev and Shostakovitch? Would you erase them from history?

      When he wrote that poem he was disillusioned, he wasn’t stupid. Generally I’m cutting Germans who went to the other dark side shortly after Hitler some slack. Proud Maoists at the universities in the 1970s are another thing.

      But I get that you feel like that if you grew up with that idiocy.

    • No, I would not erase anyone who lived under the threat of almost certain execution for disobedience and had to collaborate in order to survive. I would not even erase J. B. S. Haldane whose scientific contributions redeemed his being a despicable communist.

      Brecht as a human being does not possess any redeeming qualities. He lived in safety in Switzerland, voluntarily returned to the East Germany (ruled by the Soviet puppet regime at the time), and continued to propagandize to contribute to the glorification of communism while drawing money from his hard currency account in Switzerland.

      E.g. when Stalin died he wrote: “The oppressed of five continents, some who are already liberated and all of those who fight for peace, must have had their heartbeats stop when they heard Stalin was dead. He was the embodiment of their hope. But the spiritual and material weapons he provided are still here and so is his mes sage to produce new ones.”

      The same year, when the Soviets crushed the workers uprising on June 17, he wrote this to Walter Ulbricht (the East Germany commie first secretary) supporting the crackdown: “History will pay its respects to the revolutionary impatience of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. The great discussion [exchange] with the masses about the speed of socialist construction will lead to a viewing and safeguarding of the socialist achievements. At this moment I must assure you of my allegiance to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.”

      And then he wrote his stupid little poem, either trying to whitewash himself, or really supporting the crackdown in poetically, as it were

    • Ivan: When Brecht was in U.S. exile, he was questioned by a McCarthyist committee in 1947. He was forbidden to travel to West Germany by the Allied Forces in 1948, so he moved to East Germany.

      In 1949 he tried to get a permanent residence in Switzerland, which was denied. He could have moved to Austria but chose East Berlin later.

      The above info is from the German Wikipedia, I hope it isn’t infiltrated by communists :-). It does sound more nuanced than him going straight for East Germany.

      Yes, he was a well known hypocrite. There’s a joke: “His worker’s cap had to look so proletarian that it could only be tailored by the most expensive men’s tailor.”

    • Anonymous: Not sure why you are trying to whitewash this person.

      I did not say he went directly to East Germany. After leaving the USA, he went to France and then to Switzerland where he obtained a temporary residence permit and worked there for a year or so.

      When the Swiss refused to renew his permit, he applied for Austrian citizenship in 1949 and asked one of the Salzburg festival directors, Gottfried von Einem, for help in obtaining it. The latter obliged, and Brech became an Austrian citizen the same year. In return, Brecht promised to write a Jedermann replacement(called Totentanz) for the Salzburg festival which he never did (beyond some sketches) and thus in a typical commie scumbag fashion let von Einem down.

      As a result, von Einem was fired, and Brecht left for East Berlin in 1950 to glorify beauties of building communism with Austrian citizenship in his pocket just to be on the safe side.

    • @ZORC, Strange but when US lawmakers and security services did their jobs and pressurized assorted commies USA was more equatable place not at verge of lapsing into the tyranny.

  2. “With Delta, the infection and fatality rates aren’t that different for the vaccinated and unvaccinated.”
    That can’t be correct, it would imply no effect at all. At least the hospital admissions tell a different story. Currently 90% unvaccinated.

    • Sendak: I admire your willingness to question #Science (in the form of this PhD biologist). And I have read https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/561585-fauci-more-than-99-of-people-who-died-from-covid-19-in-june-were-not and the other Magnum Opera of St. Fauci. However, I find it implausible that the righteous are concerned about the Deplorables (the unvaccinated). If preventing hospitalization/death via coronavirus is as simple as getting a vaccine, I don’t think the (vaccinated) elites would be too concerned about some vaccine-refusing Trump voters being harvested. If we assume these 99.2 percent and/or 90 percent numbers as true, the vaccinated should actually be grateful to the unvaccinated for reducing the pressure on the coronavirus to evolve into a more deadly form (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marek%27s_disease ).

      Consider crime in poor neighborhoods of Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, etc. Have the elites ever been seriously concerned about murder rates higher than those prevailing in the Central American countries from which migrants are purportedly “fleeing violence”?

      I’ll update the original post with data from Israel. High vaccination rate and deaths are close to where they were in the fall of 2020 no-vaccine situation.

    • It is not clear where the 90% figure comes from. As far as I know, no state collects this sort of information.

      Israeli sources had used to publish a vaccinated/unvaccinated hospital admission breakdown during the beginning of the 4th wave until recently, but not for the last week or two. At least I was unable to find the data anymore. The previous breakdowns were more or less consistently 55% vaccinated vs. 45% unvaccinated (keep in mind that 80% of the entire population is vaccinated so the probabilities should be adjusted accordingly). That was before they started the third shot campaign, so perhaps the situation will improve. So far, it has not substantially:

      “10,000 new COVID cases, Coefficient of infection rises”
      https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/313324

    • Ivan they like to repeat like mindless parrots 90% 90%….

      Even more outrageous statements like “this individual is lucky he got vaccine, without it his/hers/zirs Covid case would be much more severe”, how the hell do they know without living in parallel universe where that individual does not get vaccine and gets exactly the same dose of Covid infection escapes me.

    • Alex22b: Yes, this is one of my favorites too! We’ll read about a vaccinated 30-year-old who got COVID-19 and was sick with flu-like symptoms for several days. He/she/ze/they will then be quoted as thanking God and Fauci for the vaccine, without which death would surely have occurred. Nobody will bother comparing to stories in the same publication from the dark pre-vaccine ages in which 30-year-olds were infected with coronavirus and usually had no symptoms at all.

  4. I don’t want to sound like a prophet of doom or anything, and I surely don’t wish any harm (financial or otherwise) to come to your former neighbor but…

    https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/recall-all-chevy-bolt-vehicles-fire-risk

    I also feel very badly about this because the engineering of the Bolt EV system in general is excellent. It’s a shame that it looks like they got a batch of bad batteries to damage their reputation. It’s things like this that alter the pecking order in the EV market because some people are so easy to scare and are hypervigilant about IDIOTS.

    • Alex, one lady was sold Chevy Bolt EV and now she can not return it. She did not know that she needed new electrical hookup for faster charging and no longer can she venture 70 miles from home. She lives in rural suburbs and she has to drive about 10 miles for closest hookup and charge Volt EV there for a couple hours. She is uncomfortable charging her vehicle at home for good part of a day, she needs it frequently. This is the only vehicle she got and her dealer does not take the vehicle back.

    • > She did not know that she needed new electrical hookup for faster charging.

      I hate to say this, but you can’t fix stupid. She should attempt to sell the car if it is still running well and find something else. If her dealer didn’t inform her of that, or she bought it from a used car lot or Carvana – or a relative or “friend” – that’s a sad story, but not unlike many other sad stories of people who buy cars and trucks. They don’t know what they’re getting into, or are being taken advantage of and have a bad case of buyer’s remorse.

      Caveat Emptor! Once you put your money down, you’re on your own in a lot of cases.

      In another sense, this is why I still prefer hybrid vehicles that derive all or most of their propulsive energy from gasoline and use the electric motor and battery to recoup energy and improve mileage. I live in a semirural area prone to power outages. When I know a bad storm is coming, I fill the tank in my FEH and go to bed knowing I’ve got at 450 miles of range. If Ford offered a plug-in Hybrid option on the newer (much improved over 2013-2020) Escape Hybrids, I’d buy one.

      https://www.ford.com/suvs-crossovers/escape/models/escape-se-hybrid/

      When I mention the engineering of the Bolt EV, I’m referring to the well-thought-out liquid cooling and heating system designed into the battery packs, which extend the battery life through proper thermal management. Chevrolet itself is discovering that packs manufactured elsewhere (in this case I believe all of them were made by LG in South Korea) can result in difficult circumstances and uncomfortable surprises.

  5. > “With Delta, the infection and fatality rates aren’t
    > that different for the vaccinated and unvaccinated.”

    According to Public Health England’s vaccine surveillance report for week 36 “In individuals aged 40 to 79, the rate of a positive COVID-19 test is higher in vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated” (see also table 4).

    They still claim substantial protection against severe symptoms, by reference to data from mid April to mid June – i.e by ignoring the last three months. So we have vaccines that can apparently enhance rates of infection and have waning protection against disease. Heckuva job there, #Science!

    • Lord P: This is exactly consistent with what the Ph.D. biologist quoted in the original post says. Public health technocrats claim success by dragging in a lot of irrelevant pre-Delta data.

    • > “In individuals aged 40 to 79, the rate of a positive COVID-19 test is higher in vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated”

      For explaining this, I don’t see any need to go for the nefarious “vaccination increases infections”. Change of behaviour in vaccinated persons could be enough to explain it – risk compensation, incentivized by lockdown and hygiene fatigue – people are tired with taking precautions, and feel safe to abandon them once vaccinated, thus exposing themselves to infection much more, enough to overcome the vaccine protection. The report also proposes differences in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, which makes sense.

    • OC, other than for covid, what vaccines have been associated with increased rates of infection?

    • I am with OC on this. A crummy vaccine combined with the 180-degree behavior changes that I have observed post-vaccination.

    • @OC, @Philip,

      Isn’t this a proof or at least data point that getting the jab for COVID is ineffective? And that what somewhat “flattened” the curve was the lockdown, not the jab? Given this, isn’t the only way to win the war on COVID is to lockdown everyone? No?

      More lockdown == Less COVID

  6. Inre: Risk compensation. That’s exactly what I’m consciously avoiding right now. I am vaccinated but I have a health issue and my doctor is aware of the phenomenon also. He advised me not to get too confident in the efficacy of the vaccine and think seriously about a booster shot. I also bought 50 N95 folding masks from Aegle, and I keep my distance from other people.

    Risk compensation is very very real and you don’t need a 6,000 pound SUV to observe it in action. Modern cars and tires with all their “helper” features are very reassuring to drive – sometimes too reassuring. Despite the 65MPH speed limit on I-84 in CT, for example, on some days – even in the rain – the prevailing speed on that highway (in lighter traffic) gets up into the 80s without much provocation, ditto the Mass Pike. Why is this dangerous? Especially in light rain, with the oil rising out of the road surface, it’s quite dangerous to drive that fast *particularly when you do not know where the speed traps are.* People see the constabulary, slam on their brakes and I’ve seen folks almost lose control despite their ABS and stability control systems kicking in to save them. See that once or twice and you slow down and keep your distance even if you’re in a hurry.

    • Alex: By expressing skepticism regarding the efficacy of the vaccines, your doctor risks losing his license.

      See https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/94455 (especially note the prohibition against “denigrating” vaccines)

      Medical boards in the U.S. continue to voice their support for sanctioning physicians who spread falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccines.

      The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) and American Board of Pediatrics (ABP) issued a joint statement Thursday supporting the Federation of State Medical Boards, which warned physicians in early August that their licenses could be taken away or otherwise sanctioned by state boards if they disseminated misinformation about the COVID vaccines.
      …
      “We also want all physicians certified by our boards to know that such unethical or unprofessional conduct may prompt their respective board to take action that could put their certification at risk,” the joint statement read. “Spreading misinformation or falsehoods to the public during a time of a public health emergency goes against everything our boards and our community of board certified physicians stand for. The evidence that we have safe, effective and widely available vaccines against COVID-19 is overwhelming. We are particularly concerned about physicians who use their authority to denigrate vaccination.”

    • @Philg: Roger that and I’m aware, that’s why I’m not using his name. It’s also part of the reason I trust him – he’s been square with me! I brought it up with him, and I said: “Look, tell me what you really think, I’m a pretty smart person and I can take it.” This was in a quiet office with a big heavy door on it.

    • From philg’s link:

      “We also want all physicians certified by our boards to know that such unethical or unprofessional conduct may prompt their respective board to take action that could put their certification at risk.”

      [x] unethical

      [x] unprofessional

      [x] conduct

      [x] general vague threats

      The woke bingo card is full. I’ve studied their power talk for the last two years and it’s always the same. Unbelievable that people still buy this, but I guess if more than 50% of people get their salaries from the woke complex (redistributed from the real workers), they love the language as well.

    • @Philg @Anonymous: Risk compensation also happens occasionally at gun ranges. It’s relatively rare and if you have a good RO, etc., watching things it’s usually caught very quickly, but it happens because people get too comfortable and don’t follow the Five Rules. If you have a lot of people shooting, you need to have a couple of other people who do nothing but watch so that safety is maintained. That usually only takes a gentle reminder and the person who makes the mistake is almost always deeply embarrassed. Spend enough time with shooters and everyone has a story to tell. Luckily there’s no sanction for people who step up and do the gentle reminding.

      A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I was on an organized rifle team at our home range and one of the competitors was unboxing his gun setting himself up. I noticed that he took it out of its case and the bolt was closed. He picked up the gun and started to walk toward the range as though nothing was wrong. I stopped him in his tracks, pushed the barrel toward the ground and said:

      “Time out here. Do you see? The bolt is closed. You just took the gun out of the box like that. How do you know there isn’t a round in the chamber?”

      “I don’t. Thank you. I’m sorry.”

      Bolt open, nothing was in there. He was sixteen years old, I was seventeen.

    • When ever I visit my Dr. for checkup, he goes though a checklist, one of them which he always asks me “Do you wear seatbelt when you are in a car?” When he first asked me about it so many moons ago, I asked him why are you asking about “seatbelts”? He answered that not wearing seatbelt is a leading cause of car accident death.

      I had my checkup last fall, he went though the usual checklist. I was surprised that he did NOT ask me if I was wearing my mask in public, et. al.! My Dr. is old fashion, I guess he knew not to bother and add “mask” to his checklist? Or maybe he forgot? In any case, I will ask him when I see him next month. However, he did tell me that life will not be the same now that we have COVID-19. I guess he know what was coming up.

      As for cars being safer. It is true that cars are much safer today than they ever were, but at the same token, because of that, drivers are far more idiots today than say 40 years ago. Some drive with no real experience of how to handle a car or simply because their car has all the safety features assume they will be safe at all cost. This goes hand-in-hand with those who got vaccinated that think the jab is all it takes to be safe.

      I remember when I was growing up, my dad used to take me on test drives in the parking lot during and after snow storms or rain to teach me how the handle the car and why driving on dry road is not the same as driving on wet road. I had fun spinning the car in the parking lot and learned from it. This was some 40 years ago when malls were closed on Sundays and you had the parking lot for yourself!

  8. I like the anecdote about your former Maskachusetts neighbor — talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations. I wonder what the percentage is of Americans, especially in places like Maskachusetts, NYC, Los Angeles etc. who think that black people should be treated like children? I wonder why seemingly a substantial number of black people seem ok with this? Most of us don’t like to be patronized — even in return for free stuff.

  9. John Gall pointed out that a collapsing system spends exponential amounts of time and resources on internal communications and becomes less able to respond and adapt to external events.

    I think the ‘covid system’, however loosely defined has reached that point where it’s just impossible to keep coordinating the daily-changing firefly-in-lightning storm rationalizations. (working class essential-worker heroes to unvaccinated villains killing the rest of us, BLM to unvaccinated BL-don’t-M and must be coerced).

    You can’t coordinate this kind of activity at the scale being attempted with current comms technology.

    When you hit about 7 active contradictions you’re going to see the equivalent of cognitive task saturation and collapse at the individual nodes.

    Getting very close now. We’re probably at about 4-5.

    • And I think something changed with the “losing patience” speech. It felt like open contempt from the locally coreferent Head of State and Head of Government. Strange place, time, and manner to bet all of one’s political capital. Won’t end well (for the administration). Will go into history with the Carter “malaise” speech.

  10. Covid op is over. The mentally broken are broken, everyone else no longer cares about the common cold and people with diabetes being killed by the common cold.

  11. More sciencey facts: [US teenage boys] with no underlying medical conditions, are 4-6 times more likely to be diagnosed with vax-related myocarditis (50% 5-year mortality?) than ending up in hospital with covid.

    source: https://archive.is/08BXk

  12. Nobody mentions constitutionality, or rather non-constitutionality, of such federal mandate. It is the most important aspect of current development. Assuming that such mandate can be made, which I highly doubt, it can come only from individual US States governments. Huge overreach of Biden administration with potentially disastrous remote effects.

  13. Is this an accurate translation of the Hebrew?
    https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1437136657422200839
    Israeli Ministry of Health recorded saying “There is no medical or epidemiological justification for the Covid passport (“green pass”), it is only intended to pressure the unvaccinated to vaccinate.”

    Very detailed discussion of how Delta has made the vaccines obsolete:
    https://theexpose.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Pierpont-Why-mandated-vaccines-are-pointless-final-1.pdf
    Conclusion:
    Given all the above evidence, mandating others to take a vaccine is a potentially harmful, damaging act.

    Since the principal reason for COVID-19 vaccine mandates—protecting others from infection—has evaporated with the ascendance of the Delta variant, those who mandate COVID-19 vaccines may wish to seek legal counsel regarding their culpability and liability including personal) for potential long-lasting harm to those whom they pressure into accination with threat of exclusion from employment or education or other public activity. Remind your attorney that if an unborn or nursing baby is damaged, liability persists until the child is age 23—plenty of time for discovery of the ways whereby vaccine producers and government regulators may have suppressed important information about harmful effects.

    • Pavel: Thanks for the link. It is hard to reconcile these data with those we get from Israel and the UK (plenty of fully vaccinated folks in the hospital with COVID-19). Either the virus is different in North America or our record-keeping system is different (so we’re calling people “unvaccinated” when in fact their vaccination record is in some other disconnected computer system). And these data aren’t consistent with selfish human nature. As noted above, in the context of high crime rates in poor neighborhoods, it is common for people to say that they care about others, but it is rare for elites to actually care about what happens in neighborhoods that they never need to visit. If vaccination were as effective as these data suggest, I find it tough to believe that the vaccinated would spend a lot of time worry about what happens to the unvaccinated.

      Let’s consider what happens with the vaccines that actually do work, e.g., for measles. The vaccinated enjoy heaping scorn on the stupid anti-vaxxers, but don’t make serious attempts to coerce them into getting vaccinated, despite the fact that measles can kill the unvaccinated (formerly responsible for about 2.5 million deaths worldwide when the world population was around 3 billion (i.e., would be comparable to 7 million deaths today)). With respect to measles, the elites don’t say that they’re losing patience with the non-elite unvaccinated. The elites enjoy their vaccinated status and almost never say anything about the 140,000 children who die every year from measles (see https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/measles ).

    • The Israeli MoH has a dashboard in Hebrew that you can Google translate in Chrome and download the source data. The picture is rather interesting. In the middle of August, the severely ill hospitalized vaccinated vs. unvacinated ratio was 1.2:1 (60% vaccinated vs 40% unvaccinated), then the curves intersected around Aug 22 and now the ratio is 2:1 in favor of the vaccinated:

      Absolute numbers:
      bv v uv
      15 311 214 Aug 15
      53 320 313 Aug 22
      59 168 437 Sep 13

      bv – booster vaccinated
      v- vaccinated
      uv – unvaccinated

      https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general?utm_source=go.gov.il&utm_medium=referral

    • philg, In the freedom loving province of Alberta (aka the Texas of Canada), the Vaccination rate is 79% one dose and 71% two doses, similar to BC. They currently have 198 in ICU and 78% of those in hospital are either partially vaccinated or not vaccinated. BC has about 15% higher population and about 50% less people in ICU, so there are definitely more factors that are influencing the numbers, given the similar vaccination rates you would expect the ICU and hospital numbers to be closer. It could be that people in BC are more healthy than in Alberta, with the obesity rate of 19% in BC vs 25% in Alberta. There could also be other factors, like the probability of people meeting indoors and etc. Looking at the hospitalization numbers in both BC and Alberta, would suggest that it is wiser to get the vaccine.

      https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-reports-4-740-new-cases-1.6174381

    • Pavel: “it is wiser to get the vaccine”? You are not going to qualify this with respect to age or health status? For example, you would say that a slender healthy 13-year-old who decides to stay home rather than take two 40-minute roundtrip car trips to a vaccine clinic and get the Pfizer vaccine (authorized for emergency use in 12-15-year-olds) is “unwise”? Stefanos Tsitsipas (age 23; #3 player in the world) is “unwise” for not getting a COVID-19 vaccine? (see
      https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/sports/tennis/usopen-covid-vaccine-atp-wta.html and https://www.atptour.com/en/players/stefanos-tsitsipas/te51/overview )

    • Some recent vaccine effectiveness figures are in a covid report from Public Health Scotland, table 16 in particular. (I’m assuming the column “No. of Cases” is mislabeled and should be “No. of Admissions”). In the week ending 27th August they had 21, 7 and 173 acute hospital admissions for the unvaxxed, single- and double-jabbed respectively, for people aged 60 and over. I.e. 89% of covid hospital admissions among the 60+ were for the jabbed.

      This is an effective vaccine? Yes, the bureaucrats would say, look at those “% Admissions”, much better for the vaxxed! Let’s take a look at that.

      From the small print in appendix 9: “Unvaccinated” includes those who tested positive less than 22 days after their first jab, i.e they moved some cases (they don’t say how many) from single-jabbed to unjabbed, increasing the numerator.

      The denominator, the “Eligible or Vaccinated” number, is of those “currently registered with a GP practise” which they say “may over-estimate the population size as they will include, for example, some individuals who are no longer residents in Scotland.” How fast are people fleeing Scotland and thereby boosting that case-rate denominator? According to National Records of Scotland in 2019 “All of the projected population increase comes from inward migration to Scotland.” Maybe someone at National Records should have a word with someone at Public Health!

      Conclusion: they exaggerate the count of unvaxxed cases and undercount the population, in their increasingly difficult struggle to make the vaccines look good.

    • Israel mortatlity last week(b -booster, v-vaccinated without booster, u-unvaccinated):

      all population:
      b v u b+v
      07-09-2021 0 15 21 15
      08-09-2021 8 7 11 15
      09-09-2021 4 3 13 7
      10-09-2021 1 6 9 7
      11-09-2021 5 10 11 15
      12-09-2021 5 3 11 8
      13-09-2021 3 3 11 6
      Average: u: 12.42857143 v:10.42857143

      >60 year old:
      b v u b+v
      07-09-2021 0 15 19 15
      08-09-2021 8 7 10 15
      09-09-2021 4 2 11 6
      10-09-2021 1 5 8 6
      11-09-2021 5 10 11 15
      12-09-2021 5 3 9 8
      13-09-2021 3 3 8 6
      Average: u: 10.85714286 v:10.14285714

  16. I just updated the original post with a recent CNN article that combines St. Fauci with LGBTQ (but not LGBTQIA+?):

    “It may take ‘many, many’ more vaccine mandates to end the Covid-19 pandemic, Fauci says”

    “I believe that’s going to turn this around because I don’t think people are going to want to not go to work or not go to college … They’re going to do it,” Fauci told CNN’s Jen Christensen during an interview at the NLGJA, the Association of LGBTQ Journalists, convention Sunday. “You’d like to have them do it on a totally voluntary basis, but if that doesn’t work, you’ve got to go to the alternatives.”

    https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/13/health/us-coronavirus-monday/index.html

    • > “I believe that’s going to turn this around because I don’t think people are going to want to not go to work or not go to college … They’re going to do it,” Fauci told CNN’s Jen Christensen

      Wow. What a logical thinker! Finally! Why not apply the same logic to, let’s say welfare recipients? Cut their welfare and they start working, no? How about illegal immigrants? Don’t accept them and they will start coming here legally, no? Government subsidies, all kinds, medical, housing, farming, you name it. Eliminate them. I can go on and on and on.

  17. Since Mx. Fauci speaks to a privileged group of LGBTQ[IA+] journalists, I wonder if the establishment has neglected HIV?

    “Based on the WHO’s coronavirus (COVID-19) dashboard, there have been over 200 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, including over 4 million deaths due to the disease. Meanwhile, since the beginning of the HIV pandemic, there has been almost 80 million cases of HIV infection. Of these, nearly 37 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses.”

    If one were malicious, one might suggest that the establishment — despite their apparent and truthful LGBTQIA+ love — are less interested in an issue that might not affect them personally.

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