israeli booster shot/deaths update 9/26

the relationship between booster rate and death rate remains tightly linked.

two weeks ago, i spoke about the relationship between the increase in booster shot uptake in israel and the uptick in covid deaths.

i updated this a week ago and added what i believe to be a useful metric, the number of people currently in the 2 week “worry window” post vaccination where there has been well demonstrated immuno-suppression, enhanced covid susceptibility, and where we’ve seen many stories of very rapid illness, hospitalization, and death this (and many vaccine deaths called “covid deaths”)

one needs to be very careful just assuming that 2 variables that are both going up are linked (and in what direction) but there was always good reason to suspect linkage here as we know about the window of immunosuppression post mRNA vaccination, so we’re making an educated guess, not engaging in data mining.

but where you can get a better sense of a model/hypothesis is if you can predict inflection points. and it’s looking increasingly as though we have. the rate of booster uptake was very high coming into the sept 15-16th yom kippur holiday. it has since attenuated greatly and we’ve been in a period of much lower uptake and we’re now far enough from the holiday that the data picture has cleared up.

recall that this was the proposed hypothesis:

and we saw booster rates behave as we needed them to in order to preform this experiment.

so let’s take a look at what we saw:

i took the % of israel population having received the booster within the last 14 days (worry window) and plotted it against deaths per million.

we get this:

apart from the one day spike in deaths on the day before yom kippur (which i suspect is a data collection artifact) the alignment remains very precise.

the worry window peak on 9/3 was followed by the deaths peak (ignoring the 9/14 pre YK spike) of 9/5.

and deaths keep trending down as the size of the WW cohort has been reduced.

this relationship becomes even clearer when we compare “new vaccinations” (nearly all boosters at this point) to deaths per million.

even the pre yom kippur spike aligns with a surge in vaccinations. (this could also simply be reporting boluses of both (and probably is), but it does not mitigate the relationship)

and so now having found high correlation and predictive ability on both sides of the rise and fall of booster uptake, we can start to feel more confident about this relationship, especially as we saw the same thing happen with dose 1 back in the spring. (dose 2, so close after dose 1 does not seem to do this. you get more AE’s, but no apparent immunosuppression)

some have sought to argue that the causality here is inverted and that higher death rates drive people to get boosters.

in a free society, i might be more inclined to believe this, but israel is not currently a free society.

vaccination and boosters are mandated and the “green pass” needed to live any real semblance of a normal life, eat out, and attend public venues is now requiring a booster to consider you “fully vaccinated.” i suspect this (and clearly the vaxx before the holiday rush) is the real driver here, not daily fear.

and we may get a way to test this claim more rigorously.

Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid

Israel 🇮🇱 last month: 20% of population unvaccinated Israel 🇮🇱 today: 65% of population unvaccinated After definition of vaccinated was changed to 3 shots.

the green pass now expires 6 months after your second dose and to keep it, you need a third. this will extend the validity for another 6 months. clearly, they look to be planning bi-annual boosters for the foreseeable future and possibly boosters forever world without end.

this seems likely to begin to drive more booster uptake again. if it does, we may have yet another inflection point to assess and it may be at a time of dropping death rates. that would provide a signal i think would start to look awfully definitive in terms of prediction and direction of causality.

will continue to keep an eye on this as this “booster” plan continues to look fraught to me and ill supported by either the science or risk reward analysis.

it appears more and more like a doubling down on a failed policy to persist in pushing leaky vaccines that fail to stop and may accentuate spread because it’s politically easier than admitting how badly you misjudged the way these interventions would work.

machiavellian politics of self preservation are a poor basis for public health mandates.

and falling for them is a poor basis for personal health.

make your own risk assessment based on your own preferences, risk profile, and a sound grounding in the actual data.

it’s an important habit to cultivate.

go in with your eyes open.

there are many surprises lurking out there that you do not want to find out about the hard way…