This is my home town. I think the 99.7% figure has been overstated. My understanding is that it has been calculated as:
(vaccinations carried out in waterford) / (population of waterford)
Waterford is a regional hub for the south east of Ireland. There are many vaccinations for people who reside outside of Waterford carried out in Waterford, including from counties kilkenny, tipperary and carlow.
Things have opened up, cases have gone up. I've heard of one friend of a friend who got covid after vaccination, but no one I personally know in Waterford has got covid post vaccination.
There's more wonky math in the article. It gives a 14-day incidence rate per 100,000 of 404.6 for Co. Waterford, which even if we're generous and use a population of 120,000 comes out to 486 infections in a two-week period. I don't believe that this week they had 470 infections, up from 16 last week.
Covid 19 is more like the cold than measles. Immunity starts to wane after months. This shouldn’t be shocking to anyone who has had a cold.
The fact that virologists weren’t upfront from the beginning about this, and that the epidemiologists weren’t upfront from the beginning that it was clearly endemic by March 2019, has led to much of the dysfunctional response from the public and governments.
I'm starting to hate these articles because they never, ever contain the information needed to deduct anything.
- Who got Covid (vaccinated or not?)?
- How sick are they (did they just test positive, are they in they hospital, ICU)?
Starting to feel like these essential questions are completely ignored on purpose. Well, just like the last dozen times an article like this has popped up, this "statistic" doesn't contain enough information to be relevant at all. It's just click bait crap.
> Based on antibody testing of blood donors, 98.1% of the adult population now have antibodies to COVID-19 from either infection or vaccination compared to 19.7% that have antibodies from infection alone. Over 97% of adults aged 17 or older have antibodies from either infection or vaccination.
pages 13 and onward have nice tabular data on hospitalization, emergency care, and death which have comparisons in terms of Rates among persons vaccinated with 2 doses (per 100,000) and Rates among persons not vaccinated (per 100,000).
Figures based on blood donors were also circulating in the Netherlands earlier this year. But you have to be very careful what you conclude from blood donors because they are not a good representation of the general population. They tended to be healthier in general, have higher rates of vaccination, and also medical personnel are over-represented.
It doesn't have a county level breakdown for hospitalisations and ICU (since counties are too small for every one to have their own hospitals and definitely most don't have their own ICU). Waterford does have both, but I've been unable to find the figures for either the public or private hospital in the city.
Nationwide covid hospital cases: 634
Nationwide ICU cases: 119
Also this site has a more granular breakdown on case numbers:
Without knowing the vaccination status of those who got COVID it's hard to say anything. It's possible that 99.999% of individuals are vaccinated, and a huge wave still occurred. The small percentage unvaccinated could be the surge.
I wouldn't say there's a religious group, but we have our local group of conspiracy theorists that seem more prominent than elsewhere in the country that hop on all the bandwagons like 5g (and 4g before that), covid anti-vax, flouride conspiracies, etc.
Headline says "99.7% of residents"
Then in the article is says "99.7% of all adults," doesn't mention the percentage of eligible people (over 12 y/o), or the percentage of the total population of the county that is vaccinated. Surely 100% of the cases aren't among 18+, but the article just throws out "5% of adults" when 400/100,000 = .4%
It could be possible that [some, (0,100]%, portion of the benefit provided by] the vaccines wear off after a certain amount of time. This makes statistics like 99.7% of Waterford have been vaccinated perhaps less insightful than something like 34% (or whatever the actual number is) have been vaccinated in the last 6 months.
edit: added [some portion, (0,100]%, of the benefit provided by]
The vaccine wears off in a few days. The vaccine tells the body to make copies of the “spike protein”. After a few days, the body breaks down the vaccine. In the meantime, the body makes copies of the spike protein. The immune system sees the spike protein and starts making antibodies to fight it off.
Those antibodies do not last forever. It is my understanding that the lifespan of antibodies is largely determined by the type of virus they are for. For example, luckily the antibodies for measles and polio last decades. On the other hand, antibodies for rhinovirus and coronavirus last months not years, which is part of the reason why you can have more than one cold in your life.
Vaccine does not prevent virus particles from entering and exiting one's body, so it is still about concentration of an aerosol in the air and the number of infected people around you.
What a vaccine does - it primes one's immune system, so it fight the virus way more efficient. And that's it. No miracles or invincibility.
The vaccines aren't stopping respiratory replication and transmission in meaningful ways, and thus don't confer meaningful protection to anyone but yourself. This is hardly what was sold to everyone.
Compare this to, for example, nasal spray influenza vaccines.
Most interviews with experts I listened to in the media did stress at the beginning of the vaccine rollout that they didn't yet know how large the effect of the transmission would be.
So I think it's unfair to say that it was "sold" as anything of the sort, it's mostly people retroactively rewriting the past, either deliberately to fit and agenda or just that their memory is faulty.
That's not true. The largest authorities in the USA prompted headlines like this one from CBS headline in Nov 2020: Fauci says herd immunity possible "reasonably quickly" if enough Americans take vaccine
And in Dec 2020 said things like: "If you really want true herd immunity, where you get a blanket of protection over the country ... you want about 75 to 85 percent of the country to get vaccinated,” Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a live-recorded interview with Rameswaram, the host of Today, Explained. “I would say even closer to 85 percent."
That's very different from stressing that they didn't know how large the effect would be. It was simply billed as being able to stop spread completely, provided enough uptake, with made-up % figures thrown in: https://www.axios.com/fauci-goalposts-herd-immunity-c83c7500...
I too got the impression that most experts stressed uncertainty. But let's assume that what Fauci said in those interview is typical. "Closer to 85%." "…can't be achieved if only 40% or 50% of the population receives the vaccine…"
From that, I hear that the necessary figure is somewhat unknown, but what's needed is likely higher than Waterford's current. If you assume that everyone vaccinated in Waterford lives there (and not in the suburbs) and that they live to be 100 years old on average, then their vaccination share is slightly below 82%. 100 sounds a little high and people in the suburbs do avail themselves of services in the city, so my guess is that the real percentage is lower.
And one sentence I don't see from Fauci is "we'll get almost the same benefit if a little fewer people are vaccinated".
OP made a blanket statement of how 'it was sold to everyone'.
I provide an experience of how it was presented based on my viewings of the experts I listened to in the media, providing evidence against the blanket statement.
So you're telling me what I heard and read with my own eyes is false based on three america-centric articles?
How many news articles and recorded interviews repeat the phrase "safe and effective"? Maybe the "effective" part was a little misleading? Especially when these vaccines were explicitly billed as a solution to containment of the virus, to the degree that mandates were supposedly justified...
Maybe you could argue that there was a disconnect between what virologists/epidemiologists were saying and what media, pharma, and government talking heads were saying, but it absolutely was sold as effective in preventing infection and spread. Hence the term "vaccine" which has since been redefined by the WHO and/or CDC (I forget which one changed the definition listed on their website).
There is too much political momentum for our institutions to acknowledge that they may have made a series of significant errors in their assumptions.
>Especially when these vaccines were explicitly billed as a solution to containment of the virus
My whole argument was that the experts I listened to in the media didn't bill it as such, and your argument to refute that is to restate the argument I'm combating.
>Maybe you could argue that there was a disconnect between what virologists/epidemiologists were saying and what media, pharma, and government talking heads were saying
That's exactly what I'm arguing.
I'm saying "most experts I listened to in the media, from day one, stressed that they didn't know it's efficacy on transmissibility yet"
and your point back is
"ok maybe the experts said that, but what about what the media and phrama and talking heads were saying"?
When did I mention them?
My entire point was that from day one this was being said, but people either weren't listening, or strategically choosing to forget.
It's generally recognized that the mRNA vaccine prevents neither infection nor tranmission of Covid-19. It does confer a certain benefit in terms of the severity of the disease if contracted. It's not an undiluted benefit as is indicated by the UK data (for instance) which documents significant numbers of deaths for fully vaccinated people.
> It's not an undiluted benefit as is indicated by the UK data (for instance) which documents significant numbers of deaths for fully vaccinated people.
It is an undiluted benefit (your chances of survival are much much higher if you are vaccinated), but not a miracle cure, unfortunately.
The UK data you linked still says 85% protection from symptomatic illness for Delta variant with Pfizer, 95% protection from hospitalization.
> What a vaccine does - it primes one's immune system, so it fight the virus way more efficient.
My understanding is that it does not really fight the virus (viral load stays the same), but that it does prime the immune system so as not react too violently. In other words it prevents a cytokine storm:
Who cares? I think these are non controversial statements: (1) if you’re vaccinated, common sense suggests you’d be more likely to go back to normal as compared to pre-vax (increasing chances of getting covid), (2) the vaccine never prevented people from getting covid, (3) the vaccine may have lowered transmission of the early virus but has little effect on transmission of delta, (4) this article only matters if it shows an ineffectiveness in outcomes as compared to non-vaccinated folks.
>(1) if you’re vaccinated, common sense suggests you’d be more likely to go back to normal as compared to pre-vax (increasing chances of getting covid)
This statement may be true. But it's not obvious to me. You could also argue that many people who got fully vaxed and even boosters where available are also more cautious in general, other things being equal. Again, not arguing this statement is untrue but a lot of people are still being cautious in various ways and I'm pretty sure there's a lot of overlap between that group and those who got vaccines early on.
Oh, I didn’t mean as compared to general population. I meant for themselves. Presumably the vaccine would give folks some confidence in getting out more (if not, then why even bother getting it?)
Singapore because of small it is and the control it has on its borders. Has great stats to show infection rate and death for the vaccinated/unvaccinated etc
https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/statistics/
Most places don't know how large their population is, that's why censuses are carried out. The city I live in knows a minimum number of vaccinations that have been carried out within city limits, and a maximum, but it doesn't really know how many of the people vaccinated live within city limits and how many live in the suburbs, and also doesn't really know how many people live within city limits. Calculating the percentage is a matter of dividing one approximate number by another, or if you will, dividing one number that doesn't mean exaxtly what readers assume with another that also doesn't mean exactly what readers assume.
I know that these problems are common. People move in with their SOs without filing paperwork everywhere, not just here.
However, if you want to keep track of how many people are vaccinated, you are going to have a counter. And if you want to tax people, you are going to have a number of inhabitants. Dividing one by the other is tempting, and it's accurate when you start doing it, because when 2% or 12% of the taxpayers have been vaccinated the count is fairly accurate. It only becomes really inaccurate as you approach 100%, and by that time changing the way you count breaks your time series, if you're using this data yourself.
It's an UK news outlet focused at according to them, Irish in the UK. But I've mostly seen it from Irish Americans. This isn't the first time I've heard of it, so it is a real outlet, but it is a out of country tabloid.
Depends on how you measure efficacy. If its preventing infections then the efficacy isn't great. If its preventing hospitalization and death then its extremely effective.
My 90 year old grandma had an outbreak in her care home in Ireland a couple of weeks back. All survived and with relatively minor symptoms - not pleasant but a stark contrast to the reports of care home outbreaks last year.
It's maybe not as perfect as we might have hoped but I'd say it's certainly having a hugely positive effect.
It would be more important to look at the counties hospitalization rate and death rate. We know the vaccine doesn't stop breakthrough infections, but it does reduce morbidity and mortality.
The UK is releasing good stats on vaccinated/non-vaccinated outcomes that are thankfully broken down by age groups [0], since comparing an un-vaccinated 20 year old to a vaccinated 90 year old is extremely different. Overall it seems that the vaccinated cohort are contracting COVID at a higher rate per capita, while having lower hospitalization and morbidity rates than the unvaccinated once they are sick. The higher illness rate is surprising though and one reason the stats have raised some eyebrows in the UK government. [1]
Some people will have issues with the commentary on this blog. I'm posting it in reference to these UK statistics because it's the only place I've seen the tabular data visualized, if you want to examine the raw UK government data yourself it's linked through from the blog.
Normally I would think that perhaps the behaviours of the vaccinated group differ from the unvaccinated and therefore affecting their risk profiles (ex. vax going out more, seeing other people), however, I don't think that is the case. Those that are unvaccinated are in that state by choice, and therefore they are unlikely to be unvaccinated and abstaining from risky behaviours.
I wonder if the willingness to get tested might have something to do with it. If you are unvaccinated and sick, do you go get tested knowing that you'll have to face the onslaught of "told you so"... "this wouldn't have happened if you got vaccinated". So perhaps vaccinated people are more likely to also get tested and therefore skew the data?
> Those that are unvaccinated are in that state by choice, and therefore they are unlikely to be unvaccinated and abstaining from risky behaviours
Your model of unvaccinated people seems a little too simplistic. There is a cohort of folks who have recovered from covid, seen the published evidence around natural immunity, and consider getting the vaccine to be an unknown risk with a known small benefit. That kind of risk/reward calculation is the kind of thing that might have them avoiding (for example) packed indoor spaces.
> So perhaps vaccinated people are more likely to also get tested and therefore skew the data?
Anecdotal, but I think most of the people in my circles are vaccinated and I never hear of them getting tested, even when they have symptoms. Everyone has their own pet hypothesis in these situations, but who knows if any of them are even close.
The simple model of "no covid vaccine" = "antivaxxer" = "dumb/irresponsible/shameful/etc" may feel satisfying and may be heavily pushed by the talking heads, but I don't think it's actually useful.
>There is a cohort of folks who have recovered from covid, seen the published evidence around natural immunity, and consider getting the vaccine to be an unknown risk with a known small benefit.
I guess this depends on your jurisdiction. Where I live (Alberta) we have a vaccine passport system in place so you need to be vaccinated to get into many places. Therefore my assumption was based upon people not taking their past COVID history into account, and rather get the vaccine based upon their desire to go to a restaurant for example.
My theory on who is getting tested or not is admittedly skewed toward the vocal minority of anti-vax protestors that take up more airtime then they truly occupy. I suspect that small group would be hesitant to get tested in hopes of avoiding the "told you so's".
My anecdotal experience currently is that all my friends are vaccinated and get tested when sick. I know this because it derails plans every weekend..."Have to cancel Saturday plans, family is sick and booked a test for tomorrow". It happens almost every weekend in my life!
About that "rare" part... I'm gonna go ahead and say that 5% of the population in a week is no longer "rare", nor can we use the phrase "breakthrough infections" with a straight face anymore. We should just be done with that.
The larger point about being effective against severe illness and death still stands, and seems to be so robust that it's not going to change now, so the vaccine is still very much worth it.
The vaccine was never touted as being 100% effective.
For Pfizer the (Lancet study) efficacy numbers ranged from 88-93%, the first month after full vaccination.
After 4 months the effectiveness waned to 47-67% (depending on the variant). So now the focus on boosters.
My point is that 100% vaccination should never have led to the expectation of 0 cases of covid. But the main thing was reducing ICU numbers/severe infections.
"The vaccine was never touted as being 100% effective."
We have overloaded the very term "vaccine" in a fairly misleading manner. One one hand we have vaccines that are highly effective in the longterm and can virtually eradicate dangerous diseases. On the other hand we have flu & covid vaccines, which can help control the severity of the disease, but are incapable of preventing regular widespread outbreaks.
Childhood vaccines are from the first category. Let's enumerate: polio, smallpox, tetanus, hepatitis b, hepatitis a, rubella, hib, measles, pertussis, pneumococcal strep, rotavirus, varicella, diphtheria, mumps. Some of these had no cases for decades, for others very rare localized outbreaks make the news. From the second category, flu and covid have regular outbreaks in highly vaccinated communities and there is no hope for herd immunity.
Perhaps it's time to clear up the semantic overload and create a new term to delineate the important difference between the two classes of vaccines. For example, use "vaccines" for the first category and "immunity stimulants" for the second.
>And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We're vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials but it's also in real world data.
Early CDC guidance only counted breakthrough cases when a positive result occurred at relatively low CT and, later, only if they required hospitalization.
According to UK statistics breakthrough cases are not rare - the majority of newly infected are now those previously vaccinated, per capita even.
As for reduction of adverse symptoms it's unknown since deaths of vaccinated vs unvaccinated within 30 days of COVID is tracked, but not how many deaths occur within 30 days of vaccination for comparison.
According to Wikipedia, the population of Waterford County is 116,176.
With an infection rate of 405.7 per 100,000, that means ~471.3 total infections at present.
At 99.7% vaccinated, that leaves 348.528 unvaccinated.
So that could mean all of the unvaccinated got infected + 122.772 breakthrough infections, which would mean the vaccine is approximately 99.895% effective at preventing infection based on these numbers.
My point, which I thought obvious given the question I was responding to, is that the numbers from the article are not good evidence of vaccine ineffectiveness at preventing transmission, and shouldn't be taken as such.
Let's assume the worst case scenario from the numbers given, that all the cases are breakthrough cases and none of the unvaccinated are infected (unlikely to say the least). At that point based on these numbers the vaccine can be considered 99.6% effective at preventing transmission. So if you're going to challenge vaccine effectiveness, do it with better data.
I should add that the OP I was responding to was literally questioning vaccine effectiveness, with a vagueness that suggests some sort of anti-vax dog-whistling. And I am sick and tired of the vaccines being questioned by people who refuse to engage even childhood math skills to analyze the crappy data they bring to the table, but yet speak with triumphant, quippy rhetoric like imitating their favorite TV characters somehow lends credence to their argument. Am I projecting too much onto the OP? Maybe, but I've been in enough of these conversations to know what they're likely to sound like.
The previous time they measured this, as stated in the article, the county with the lowest vaccination rate had the highest incident rate.
All you can say is that the _rank_ of a county by incident rate seems uncorrelated with its vaccination rate _given_ just these two points of evidence.
There are 26 counties and vaccination stats and incident rate stats going back nearly a year which suggests this sample size (2) is too small to draw any kind of useful conclusions about the overall relationship.
In any case it makes little sense to look correlations with the _rank_ (within the counties of Ireland) of the infection rate. The rank will have much higher variance than the underlying rate if the numbers are low for example which could be responsible for more outliers and it's outliers that attract media reports which can create a misleading impression.
Someone more local to Waterford than me might be able to shed some light, but I believe Ireland used significant numbers of J&J single dose vaccines to speed up initial rollout.
My understanding it that it had reduced efficacy against infection initially, which could be even more pronounced since Delta became dominant.
J&J was the initial vaccine planned, as its weaker effectiveness against spread of Delta was discovered, they moved to favouring Pfizer and Moderna. While there was a decent rollout of J&J prior to that, the biggest group of J&J vaccinations was after they made that decision, they gave young people the option of going to a chemist to get a J&J vaccination ahead of schedule to deplete their stock while the regularly scheduled rollout continued with Pfizer and Moderna.
I think people who originally got J&J did get the option to get Pfizer later.
The article would be more interesting if it was able to include a breakdown of the types of vaccines in the population for the period of time it's referencing.
The vaccine relies on the human immune response to fight the disease it learned.
If there is a health-pandemic, that suppresses the imune-system (like unrecognized diabetes/ vitamin-d deficiency / rheumatic suppression medication) the disease will wage its attack against a weakened imune-system.
Which creates ideal conditions for a full disease break-through.
So Covid only highlights all sorts of failing health systems.
The common pattern I'm seeing is people misinterpreting statistics then going on to conclude that the vaccinations available to us are useless and spamming this misinformation everywhere they can, mistakenly believing that they've hit the scoop of a lifetime. Only afterwards do we find out the real reason behind any apparent anomalies. But by then it's too late - the antivax crowd already have another factoid that circulates through their communities and bolsters their beliefs.
In this case Waterford has reported an increase in cases week-on-week (470, which is a lot for a county of 116k people) then this website completely flubbed the calculation and somehow decided that meant 5% of the adult population have it. That is unless Waterford comprises 9,400 adults and 106,000 children in which case I am quite alarmed but for an entirely different reason.
The first was as it started spreading. No vaccination, no testing, lots of deaths, not much detected cases.
The second was on the first attempt at reopening with "social distancing". Lots of cases, lots of deaths - detection was better but vaccine distribution didn't support the reopening that happened.
The third is the post-vaccination opening. Since it's basically "all rules are off", there's a lot of cases (but not as many as the second wave, and maybe not as many as the first wave, but that wasn't measured right as the death count indicates). Despite the rising cases, death counts haven't reached the first or second wave. That is what vaccination does.
It’s true that the vaccines don’t seem to be super effective against getting infected. I have several friends who got sick and tested positive despite being double-vaccinated. They recovered quickly though, more quickly than I did from getting infected before vaccines were widely available.
I also have a physiotherapist friend who’s been working Covid wards at an NHS hospital in London. Lots of bad Covid cases right now, but the vast majority are unvaccinated.
According to this document, in terms of absolute numbers there are indeed more vaccinated being admitted to hospitals in many age groups than unvaccinated. But of course in terms of overall population, you're much more likely to end up in hospital if you're unvaccinated.
(vaccinations carried out in waterford) / (population of waterford)
Waterford is a regional hub for the south east of Ireland. There are many vaccinations for people who reside outside of Waterford carried out in Waterford, including from counties kilkenny, tipperary and carlow.