“No Discernable Relationship” between Vaccines and COVID-19 Cases: A discussion on intelligently interpreting data.

In this video, we learn there is a major disconnect between what we are told about the efficacy of mRNA vaccines as they relate to new cases. This video is an interpretation based on this paper: Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States. To quickly understand what this is talking about can be quickly interpreted by this figure:

Relationship between cases per 1 million people (last 7 days) and percentage of population fully vaccinated across 68 countries as of September 3, 2021 (See Table S1 for the underlying data)

Rising on the left is the number of people per million infected with COVID-19. Across the bottom is the percentage of people in a country vaccinated. In the lower-left are a number of countries that have a low vaccination rate but also have a low infection rate.

A person would make a mistake if they decided this was proof that not only vaccines don't work but also not taking the vaccines protects you from getting infected. My brother doubted the validity of this survey but I asked him to consider the state of infections a year ago in this area. No one was vaccinated but also no one was getting infected. This time of the year we have few visitors to the area and most people were locked down. External factors can account for why people don't get infected.

The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated.

I want to point out Israel. It had the highest infections in this study even though it has one of the highest inoculation rates. Roughly 70 percent of their population have had two injections. How is this possible. Those of you who read my article, Antibody levels decrease after two doses of COVID-19 vaccine - study, from yesterday, will remember that mRNA vaccines lose almost all of their protective value in six months. If you have had both of your doses of the vaccine when was the last time you had a shot? Israel was the first country to achieve a high level of vaccination. By this time the people who had been vaccinated all need to receive boosters.

In summary, even as efforts should be made to encourage populations to get vaccinated it should be done so with humility and respect. Stigmatizing populations can do more harm than good. Importantly, other non-pharmacological prevention efforts (e.g., the importance of basic public health hygiene with regards to maintaining safe distance or handwashing, promoting better frequent and cheaper forms of testing) needs to be renewed in order to strike the balance of learning to live with COVID-19 in the same manner we continue to live a 100 years later with various seasonal alterations of the 1918 Influenza virus.