germany's vakzine fail

despite over 67% fully vaxxed covid looks worse than 2020

germany reached 50% fully vaxxed on july 27th. that figure is now over 67%.

it is making NO difference.

all else equal, just given prior surges and the greater past generation of natural immunity you’d expect a drop.

but we’re seeing a major rise instead.

to make this easier to see, i grabbed the our world in data data and plotted it year against year starting august 1.

cases are MUCH higher. they are currently 124% higher as a 7 day moving average than this date last year.

as they have been higher throughout, i also plotted this as cumulative cases.

those are 122% higher overall.

they have had well over twice the full period case count vs a year ago.

this is not an artifact of testing.

testing is actually down year on year.

so the reality is actually worse than described above if one were to adjust for sample rate.

cases would be more like triple last year’s count.

so much for “stopping spread.” that looks like spread acceleration (which was predictable)

the vaccinated superspread hypothesis

that is WAY too big a variance to be a 20-45% difference in variant infectiousness.

but that ship had largely sailed.

few with any real familiarity with this data are still claiming that these vaccines stop spread. the evidence has been clear for some time and even the CDC has stopped arguing it.

if "unvaccinated" were a drug to stop covid spread, you could probably get it FDA approved

but perhaps it works on severity?

nope. on a societal scale, it does not seem to. the hospitalization data was sparse and incomplete for germany, so i looked at deaths instead.

they have been higher all along and are basically indistinguishable now.

taken as a cumulative, deaths are 84% higher than the same time span a year ago despite a variant with notably lower CFR.

much of this may be higher case count. higher cases with lower CFR could land you here. it could also be consistent with some vaccine efficacy.

we’re into the realm of error bars too big to do any useful math on that, but it seems plausible to me that we’re seeing a situation like the UK where despite some VE on death, it’s being swamped by the vaccinated being at higher risk for cases and by a leaky vaccine increasing CFR on delta variant so even the vaccinated have become more likely overall to die of covid.

(if you have triple the cases and triple the CFR vs what you would have had, you’d need 89% VE just to break even. none of these vaccines are even close to that in practice)

we’re obviously playing a bit of a mosaic game here, that would be my odds on bet.

this is the shape of the disaster starting to play out all over the world.

these vaccines have not attenuated covid. they have rekindled its spread.

the vaccinated have become a potent vector to carry the disease and to actually make the disease itself worse because leaky vaccines invert the evolutionary gradient and select for hotter rather than milder strains.

leaky vaccines, super-spreads, and variant acceleration

this is going to keep happening as regions come into season. people will blame “the variants” but the fact is that the reason delta case fatality rate basically tripled on an age cohorted basis over the summer (when it should have been dropping) IS the vaccines.

this was not exogenous to human action. it did not “just happen.” this is such an outlier outcome that it might as well be water flowing uphill. when you see that, you have to suspect external forcing and there is an obvious culprit, the timing matches, and we know that this is what leaky vaccines do.

boosting is just going to make it worse and invert the viral gradient even further. any short term help from boosted antibodies (at the price of another round of dangerous adverse events) will just run up a bigger bigger bill to pay when it comes due later, and it’s far from clear that this booster strategy even provides short term help.

it did not help israel.

in fact, there is basically no evidence that their high vaxx rates, green pass, and heavy restrictions accomplished ANYTHING when compared to the neighbors.

i see no way to look at this and say “vaccines worked.”

vaccines seem to be having no effect on covid death rates in israel when compared to low vaxx palestine

this is the outcome no one wanted but that many (including certain internet felines) warned against.

rolling out a functionally untested vaccine t this sort of scale was a wildly reckless global epidemiological joyride. it’s not going well.

i wish i had better news here, but this is unfortunately playing out just as one would predict for a vaccine accelerated double dip pandemic driven by hotter substrain selection and reduction of sterilizing immunity.

i suspect the OAS issue here is very real (and possibly permanent in the vaccinated even post live virus exposure and recovery).

original antigenic sin

there are going to be some rotten surprises for those who thought they had vaxxed their way out of this.

this was not a fire extinguisher.

more and more, it looks like it was gasoline.