Continuing my dive through your writings, I wonder if your thoughts on this piece have changed at all in the last 9 months? I'm still working my way through, but if you already addressed any updates on this topic and happen to see this comment - mind pointing me toward them? :)
I have not done an update on this one, as I have noticed that the statistics that would help bolster this point of view have not actually been collected in the U.S.
In my most recent post where I recorded an overall look at U.S. mortality:
I do make note of differences in COVID mortality in 2020 and 2021, but make little reference to vaccination. I have ceded ground to other people here, as I do not have good vaccination data sets I can use to cross-reference with mortality. I have preferred to focus on excess mortality from non-COVID causes of death, because I find that has gotten short shrift.
A year ago, in my effort to "not allow people to be wrong", I too was out there explaining "base rate fallacy" and Simpsons Paradox to friends, acquaintances, and strangers - linking them to explanations from Matt Shapiro, Katleyn Jetelina (YLE), Unbiased Science Podcast on why it seems like so many full vaccinated people were getting Covid but this was actually statistically expected and not unusual.
As 2021 moved on, what was once "everyone I know who has covid happened to be vaccinated" shifted to "everyone I know who is vaccinated also got covid" - I'm trying to avoid hyperbole here, but that's how it was. All my friends got Covid anyway. My kids school, it ran through all the teachers. My wife (a physician), had it run through nearly their entire hospital staff (maybe coincidental, but right after booster drive in the fall, was when it took off). Social media personalities, journalists, politicians, PH experts - all got Covid. The responsorial "But I am grateful to be fully vaccinated and boosted" always following their announcement.
This shouldn't be how a vaccine works, no? When they rolled out Polio vaccines in the 50's, Polio ended, it didn't explode. When after decades they finally got a decent Varicella vaccine in the 90's, Chicken Pox ended, it didn't rapidly spread through kids suddenly.
I can't help but notice the language shift the last year. Breakthrough infection went from being a statistical anomaly - only noticeable because everyone is vaccinated - to "we never said you wouldn't get Covid after vaccinating, we only said it reduced your chances of a bad outcome" It's very strange as we have the receipts of what was said, how this was pitched. It would make zero sense to even bother with mandates if it wasn't a vaccine in the traditional sense. The media even dropped the "Breakthrough" prefix when describing someone who has Covid over the past few months.
Now I am seeing the CDC commit the base rate fallacy themselves, making cute infographics claiming that "9 out of 10 hospitalized kids with Covid were unvaccinated", never considering that 80% of kids during that period were unvaccinated, and a quick adjustment for race likely puts the base at 95% unvaccinated (60% were black or hispanic in their cohort) https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7116e1.htm
As you noted "the statistics that would help bolster this point of view have not actually been collected in the U.S."
And this is very troubling to me. Why aren't we sharing that data? Surely we are collecting it, we have the data somewhere, but efforts are made not to share it.
Other countries were collecting and sharing it. The UK and Canada for example, but as the data failed to tell the story people seemingly wanted to hear, they stopped reporting the data altogether. Now it seems we are blind.
Vaccinated success stories like Denmark, Vermont, Israel, South Korea all had higher all-cause mortality after vaccine roll-out. I'm not suggesting the vaccine caused this, but it's hard to weigh the claim that we finally figured out how to make an efficacious ILI vaccine after 80 years of failure when South Korea had all-cause mortality spike +86%, higher than even the worst spikes the US had in 2020 and early 2021.
Continuing my dive through your writings, I wonder if your thoughts on this piece have changed at all in the last 9 months? I'm still working my way through, but if you already addressed any updates on this topic and happen to see this comment - mind pointing me toward them? :)
I have not done an update on this one, as I have noticed that the statistics that would help bolster this point of view have not actually been collected in the U.S.
In my most recent post where I recorded an overall look at U.S. mortality:
https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/us-mortality-trends-through-the-pandemic?s=w
I do make note of differences in COVID mortality in 2020 and 2021, but make little reference to vaccination. I have ceded ground to other people here, as I do not have good vaccination data sets I can use to cross-reference with mortality. I have preferred to focus on excess mortality from non-COVID causes of death, because I find that has gotten short shrift.
A year ago, in my effort to "not allow people to be wrong", I too was out there explaining "base rate fallacy" and Simpsons Paradox to friends, acquaintances, and strangers - linking them to explanations from Matt Shapiro, Katleyn Jetelina (YLE), Unbiased Science Podcast on why it seems like so many full vaccinated people were getting Covid but this was actually statistically expected and not unusual.
As 2021 moved on, what was once "everyone I know who has covid happened to be vaccinated" shifted to "everyone I know who is vaccinated also got covid" - I'm trying to avoid hyperbole here, but that's how it was. All my friends got Covid anyway. My kids school, it ran through all the teachers. My wife (a physician), had it run through nearly their entire hospital staff (maybe coincidental, but right after booster drive in the fall, was when it took off). Social media personalities, journalists, politicians, PH experts - all got Covid. The responsorial "But I am grateful to be fully vaccinated and boosted" always following their announcement.
This shouldn't be how a vaccine works, no? When they rolled out Polio vaccines in the 50's, Polio ended, it didn't explode. When after decades they finally got a decent Varicella vaccine in the 90's, Chicken Pox ended, it didn't rapidly spread through kids suddenly.
I can't help but notice the language shift the last year. Breakthrough infection went from being a statistical anomaly - only noticeable because everyone is vaccinated - to "we never said you wouldn't get Covid after vaccinating, we only said it reduced your chances of a bad outcome" It's very strange as we have the receipts of what was said, how this was pitched. It would make zero sense to even bother with mandates if it wasn't a vaccine in the traditional sense. The media even dropped the "Breakthrough" prefix when describing someone who has Covid over the past few months.
Now I am seeing the CDC commit the base rate fallacy themselves, making cute infographics claiming that "9 out of 10 hospitalized kids with Covid were unvaccinated", never considering that 80% of kids during that period were unvaccinated, and a quick adjustment for race likely puts the base at 95% unvaccinated (60% were black or hispanic in their cohort) https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7116e1.htm
As you noted "the statistics that would help bolster this point of view have not actually been collected in the U.S."
And this is very troubling to me. Why aren't we sharing that data? Surely we are collecting it, we have the data somewhere, but efforts are made not to share it.
Other countries were collecting and sharing it. The UK and Canada for example, but as the data failed to tell the story people seemingly wanted to hear, they stopped reporting the data altogether. Now it seems we are blind.
Vaccinated success stories like Denmark, Vermont, Israel, South Korea all had higher all-cause mortality after vaccine roll-out. I'm not suggesting the vaccine caused this, but it's hard to weigh the claim that we finally figured out how to make an efficacious ILI vaccine after 80 years of failure when South Korea had all-cause mortality spike +86%, higher than even the worst spikes the US had in 2020 and early 2021.
/rant
This is helpful and rational. Thank you.