Thursday, February 03, 2022

Boosted People Are Dying

I did work! I made a table!

UK Deaths Within 28 days Of A Positive Test 1/2/2022-1/23/2022.

I'm using the latest data from the UK (long .pdf, this is from page 45) because it's not hobbled by various issues with US data. This is the number of deaths in a 3 week period in January, near the peak (hopefully) Omicron death period, broken down by age and vaccination status.

(The relevant US numbers appear to be similar enough and there isn't really any reason they wouldn't be).

You can do some more calculations yourselves, but I highlighted the percent of deaths among boosted people in each age group (in red) and then the cumulative by age (in purple), meaning, for example, 12.28% of the deaths under 60 (505 total) were boosted (62 total).

The final column (blue) is the % of deaths in each age category with 2 or more doses.

If anyone still reads the very fine blog, lots of people will be telling me I'm an idiot or missing the point because the mortality rates for the boosted are much lower. Yes, yes they are! Get your booster! You probably won't die! Still this virus is killing lots of people who are fully boosted.

And even worse for people with "only" 2 doses (which we have been, and still call, FULLY VACCINATED, which is perhaps not the best marketing).

An additional point is that in the UK it was understood early and communicated broadly that vaccine efficacy was declining and people really needed to get their boosters. This was before Omicron even hit, at which point the booster program went into overdrive.

In the US, the powers that be dragged their feet on the boosters,* and it's been pretty half-hearted since with barely a peep about it recently. As I said, all my theories about why this is are not good ones!

But, basically, they didn't want to switch from "vaccines are magic! get them!" to "oh, shit, gotta get your 3rd one" because that would step on all their EVERYTHING IS FINE plans that they were going with.

Anyway, Zients shoud be fired, so of course he will be promoted and people will just keep yelling at hippies as they always do.

*There are multiple agents here and one can never discern who the true villains are among the people who were probably on the correct side of things, but Zients took the job as big boss with much fanfare and well...