vaccine evasion and an OAS signal in ontario
a look at some data that a lot of people seem to be misinterpreting
there is some really interesting data coming out of ontario on vaccine efficacy and vaccine evasion from omicron.
it also seems to be being widely misinterpreted/misread, so i want to put a paw in here and opine.
this is the key chart. (generated from the ontario gov’t website HERE)
and it shows something incredibly interesting. it shows vaccines working to stop cases until mid december and then suddenly inverting. this is presumably due to omicron.
vaccination just fell to a -33% VE for cases and this looks to be worsening rapidly, likely because of a rise in omicron prevalence.
this is consistent with not just vaccine escape, but vaccine driven acceleration.
the vaccinated are getting covid at higher rates than the unvaxxed and that rate looks to be increasing rapidly as omi gains viral share.
many are denying this and calling it a simpson’s paradox (SP) where each subgroup is actually showing strong VE but where the way they aggregate causes the net figure to invert and imply an erroneous relationship that does not actually pertain. such things have been common in covid data.
i think this claim is incorrect.
firstly, if this is an SP, then why did that not manifest before? why did the relationship for case reduction invert so suddenly? it was certainly not a massive, sudden change in who was vaccinated.
this confusion has been greatly amplified by the website itself. when you select for any given age cohort, it shows positive VE for cases. this seems to be an open and shut case for this being an SP.
but it’s not. such claims contain a severe error. can you spot it?
look closely at the dates. see where they end?
all the age cohorted data ends in october.
the same is true of the data in the table above. it’s full blown apples and oranges. there seems to be no post october age delineated data in this system at all.
but the change in vaccine efficacy pattern did not occur until mid decemeber. so, this is an irrelevant comparison to the current data and current situation. it actually agrees with the first chart.
whether this is just carelessness or sloth on the part the ontario health agencies or a subtle and cunning manipulation is anyone’s guess and i’m not going to wade into that. but i HAVE seen an awful lot of smart people miss this. (i missed it at first too) you simply do not expect to see the data truncate like that on the same graphing tool.
just one more cautionary tale on data handling…
ADDENDUM OF EXCELLENT GRAPHIC FROM GATOPAL™ ORWELL2024.
and an additional catch:
“The https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data says: "Due to technical difficulties, the case rate by vaccination status by age group is not available".
We can lockdown the entire economy, but can't fix a dashboard that would help showing what's going on?”
this is what team work looks like and it’s how we make progress.
(END ADDENDUM)
but the conclusion here looks to be that this data (along with data from many other places) is consistent with omicron being not just a vaccine escaping variant, but one that is actually vaccine enabled.
if it was just escape, we’d see parity with the unvaxxed. having it go strongly negative is a sign that the vaccine is making it worse either though OAS/antigenic fixation or some other mechanism.
and this data starts to get STARK when you isolate the omi variant alone.
this leads me to predict that the curves will continue to separate in ontario as omicron becomes more prevalent and that we’ll start seeing VE’s that look more like denmark.
will keep an eye on it (and hope they keep reporting the data).
I live in Ontario and about a week after this inversion of vaxxed seeing Much higher cases per (at first absolute numbers for several weeks and then the final straw , per capita) govt have totally changed what data they now report. They won’t focus on cases anymore. They say it’s due to lack of testing capacity as cases explode .
They also mislead the public by reporting on news hospitalizations as vaxxed , partial , and unvaxxed but neglect a huge ‘vaccine unknown’ category which now makes up the majority in hospitals and plurality of those in ICU. The unknowns are presumably mostly vaccinated.
I am Texan. I live free. No "reasonably" here. BTW about 5 days into covid and feeling pretty good. It was like a medium to strong cold. Took nothing for it. No vitamins, no IM, no Hydroxy, although 2 nights I did take some aspirin. 67 YO and in good health.. Just go live your life ignore the noise, besides doing so infuriates the other side like poking them in the eye.