We were greeted by good news yesterday. A new UK population study from the University of Oxford, based on the ONS Infection Survey, shows that in fully vaccinated people asymptomatic infections were down 70% and symptomatic infections by 90%. The Telegraph has the story:
In the first large real-world study of the impact of vaccination on the general population, researchers found that the rollout is having a major impact on cutting both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases.
Sarah Walker, Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at Oxford and Chief Investigator on the Office for National Statistics COVID-19 Infection Survey, said that Britain had “moved from a pandemic to an endemic situation” where the virus is circulating at a low, largely controllable level in the community.
The new research, based on throat swabs from 373,402 people between December 1st last year and April 3rd, found three weeks after one dose of either the Pfizer or AstraZeneca jab, symptomatic infections fell by 74% and infections without symptoms by 57%.
By two doses, asymptomatic infections were down 70% and symptomatic by 90%.
But is it all as it seems? I wrote last week about vaccine studies that have glaring issues that everyone, including the authors, seem content to gloss over. Sadly, the same appears to be true of this study.
Here’s one of the key figures. Look at diagram A in the top left. The dots represent the infection rate in seven different groups of people defined by how long before or after vaccination they are and whether they’ve had Covid before.
It starts at the top with the group of people who are more than 21 days prior to being vaccinated and who haven’t had Covid before (and who may not have a vaccine booked or even be eligible yet for a vaccine). This group is the baseline so is given the value 1, and the number of infections in other groups are compared to this as a proportion. So the next group are those people who are less than 21 days before their first jab and who haven’t had Covid before, and they had 0.28 of the rate of infections that the first group had (once adjusted for various confounding factors such as location, age and sex).
This is the first oddity. Why do those less than three weeks before their first jab have around a quarter of the infections of those more than three weeks away from their jab? What is it about crossing that three-week threshold that has such a massive impact on infection risk, by far the biggest effect in the study?
The authors do offer a brief explanation, putting it down to “changes in behaviour due to either receiving the vaccination invitation letter or knowledge that individuals from their age or risk group are about to get vaccinated in their area”. But they offer no evidence of this mass change in behaviour triggered by the approach of the vaccination, and the vaccine invitation letter includes no advice to make any new effort to avoid people. In any case, it means the headline finding of the study should probably have been that being less than three weeks before your jab cuts infections by 72% – even more than being fully vaccinated!
Whatever the explanation (which I’ll return to below), this effectively gives us a new baseline for what we see next. Which is something that has become very familiar from Covid vaccine studies: the post-vaccine spike in infections. The infection rate rises to 0.38 in the first week after the first jab and then 0.45 in weeks two and three, a 61% jump above the pre-jab ‘baseline’. Yet this worrying phenomenon, which appears consistently in Covid vaccine studies, passes once more without mention. Why are researchers so uninterested in this?
We then see the infection rate drop until it hits 0.3 after the second dose, which would be encouraging were it not higher than the 0.28 pre-jab ‘baseline’.
Another point to note is that during the post-jab spike the proportion of symptomatic infections versus asymptomatic infections increases (look at the blue and yellow dots getting closer together 2-3 weeks post-jab in diagram C in figure 3, above). Since asymptomatic infection is associated with immunity (see the blue and yellow dots further apart for the fully-vaccinated and post-infection categories), this is corroborating evidence that the mechanism causing the spike may be a depression in immunity, possibly caused by the reduction in white blood cells post-jab observed in both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca trials.
Why is the infection rate in the more-than-21-days pre-jab group so much greater (nearly four times higher) than in the less-than-21-days pre-jab group? The authors propose (without evidence) mass behavioural change, but I’d suggest it’s more likely to do with when the tests were done. The period covered by the study is December 1st to April 3rd. In that period vaccinations increased by about the same amount each day and the halfway point was around February 14th. This means the less-than-21-days pre-jab group came on average from much later in the period than the more-than-21-days pre-jab group, as most of the jabs occurred after mid-February. This is significant since according to the ONS (below) infections declined very quickly in the first half of February so that any group weighted towards the latter half of the study period would have a much lower infection rate than one weighted to the earlier part.
Another possibility is that it was to do with age, as the vaccinated, and hence the less-than-21-days pre-jab group, were mostly over-60s, which was a low prevalence age bracket in this period. It may be both.
The authors control for a number of confounding factors, including age, location and high-exposure occupation (e.g. patient-facing health care worker), so in theory they should have eliminated many of these biases. However, presumably not all of them, as something must explain the 21-day threshold drop.
A further confusion is where the claim in the Telegraph article that “by two doses, asymptomatic infections were down 70%” comes from, as the post-second dose asymptomatic dot (the blue one) is 0.51 or 49% down, not 70%. Perhaps the 70% was taken from the drop in overall infections for the fully vaccinated. But if so this is, at best, sloppy reporting.
The 0.51 figure for asymptomatic infections for the fully vaccinated is relatively high, and is identical to the figure for the asymptomatic infection rate among those who have had Covid before. It most likely reflects immunity, as asymptomatic infection is typical of the immune system working (as is infection with low viral load, seen in diagram B in figure 3 to be more common in the fully vaccinated and previously infected). But those who believe in the myth of asymptomatic transmission will likely worry about this.
As before, I’m not trying to suggest that the vaccines don’t work. We know they are effective at increasing antibody prevalence and this must presumably have a significant impact on a person’s level of immunity. But this study is not a good example of how to show that they work. It has the oddity of the 21-day threshold drop in infections, and appears to show the vaccines being less effective than being in the pre-jab group. This is likely because it doesn’t differentiate the vaccine effect from the drop in infections that occurred anyway in January and February. It also has, once again, the worrying post-jab infection spike, that we are still waiting for anyone in a position of authority or influence to acknowledge, let alone investigate.
In the meantime, we’re left wondering. How much of the pattern of Covid surges coinciding with vaccine rollouts in various countries is occurring despite the vaccination programme, and how much because of it? Until the question is properly investigated – which will mean governments releasing data on the vaccination status of all who have died of all causes – the troubling questions will remain.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Invasion of the technocrats.
A macro version of cancelling local elections.
I suspect the French people won’t tolerate it.
‘Saving Democracy’. There might be a pattern here, but I am too stupid to see it.
Shows how much conviction they have in their arguments doesn’t it, that they feel the need to remove any opposition…
According to Mike Benz the “elites” have said we have to redefine democracy from being the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of “democratic institutions” – meaning US – the military, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the MSM, the NGOs….
His interview a year ago with Tucker Carlson is a revelation of how the current state of censorship evolved to what it has become today:
https://rumble.com/v4e8hof-tucker-carlson-on-x-episode-75-mike-benz-on-the-national-security-state.html
In order to save democracy, we have to burn democracy…Paraphrasing from ‘the village’.
I’ve no idea whether she is guilty of what she’s been convicted for and don’t much care. I think this is probably a good thing on the whole as it makes it more obvious to more people what’s going on.
Nice to see the Telegraph getting in a holier than thou dig at the apparently “toxic” brand of RN.
You could probably find embezzlement in every party at some point. Even on the BBC someone pointed out that it’s probably money for the party rather that for personal gain, like BLM.
SNP got away with it so why is RN considered so bad?
Just a cockup/coincidence
Through an unfortunate turn of events, I had to listen to the BBC’s brand of news this morning. They described RN as “Hard Right”. It made me think how, decades ago, parties would be described as “on the left” or “on the right”, leaving room for distinction between the mainstream parties and the extremists. Nowadays, the main broadcast media never talk about parties that are right of centre without feeling the need to add the adjectives “hard”, “far” or “extreme”. Even if they occupy the space left by the former Conservative party.
Something similar is true of many Wikipedia entries. TV stations, newspapers, journalists on the political left are never described as such – the distinction is only made for anyone on the “right”. The message is – there are reasonable people who can reasonably disagree within reason – and then there is the “right wing”.
And nobody defines Hard or Far or Extreme Right. These are epithets are used to imply Fascist or Nazi.
F A Hayek: Socialism, Fascism, National Socialism all share the same roots – elevation of the State over the individual; central economic planning and control.
That being so… hands up Starmer, Macron, whatever fool is now running Germany which of you is not Hard/Far/Extreme Right. And evidently Stalin and Mao were.
Based on previous prosecutions of French Presidents, corruption appears to be a requirement of the Office.
Romania, Germany, France – The Dark Hand of the Left descends across Europe.
Watch your back, Nigel.
As for Nigel, I think his attitude is, if you can’t beat them, join them. This is also similar to what happened to Imran Kahn, as soon as he had a meeting with Putin, he was removed.
Didn’t they try this on Farage already? I seem to remember an investigation or threatened investigation about misuse of EU funds.
This is the same EU which has never been able to get auditors to sign off on its accounts.
Still haven’t heard anymore of VDLs TXT messages to Albert Bourla. I remember that Romanian MEP holding blacked out documents, where is the justice!
If they don’t get them through the voters, they get them through the courts.
Shocking, not shocked.
Wow.
I’m stunned. I shouldn’t be. But I am.
I just thought that appearing to be too brazen would hold these people back.
Romania is one thing. But France? Really?
Clearly they no longer worry about appearances, so I’m not sure there is very much left to protect us from this horrid techno totalitarianism that reigns supreme in Europe now.
What might save us is exactly that brazenness. Overreach.
Maybe. Hopefully.
You’d think that tyranny eventually gets found out. And generally it does. But not always. The North Korea example freaks me out.
Well, North Korea has not been going that long, in relation to human history. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed. Communist China have cleverly allowed a mixed economy, to deliver the goods that keep people happy. But unpleasant if you have to live through it.
I don’t like those timescales. It’s hard for me to get enthusiastic about things that might happen after I’m long gone.
I don’t like them either, for the same reason. Meanwhile we keep buggering on as best we can.
Rona was about as brazen as it gets (utter lie, scamdemic, murder, destruction etc).
Micron et al will preach about their ‘thriving democracy’, where you put your enemies in jail or kill them.
They could declare a one party state and convince most of the sheeple that the dictatorship was a ‘thriving democracy’.
I wonder what they will do to Le Pen when she is in prison? Epsteined?
“Rona was about as brazen as it gets (utter lie, scamdemic, murder, destruction etc).”
I am still gobsmacked that they got away with it.
TCW — Germany’s mad rush to conscription’
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/germanys-mad-rush-to-conscription/
Obvious, I know. Still funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0dWo31hwpI
Thanks for posting that – yes still funny (and aren’t they skinny?)
Put a new RN candidate on the ballot (doesn’t matter who) and have Marine Le Pen stand behind them, silently, for every public appearance. And if the Powers That Be take further action against her then…
On GBN coverage of it all, the point was made that the appeal process is so sclerotic that she is, in effect, not capable of being a candidate at the next election, whatever the outcome of the appeal. So they will need another candidate – at least a physical one, if there is someone capable of taking over.
The process is the punishment
Fair point from Paul Weston, highlighting the corruption that is the EU and who the real crooks are. However, despite you guys no longer being part of the EU, we’ve seen what passes for ‘democracy’ these past years in the UK. This here makes me even less hopeful Reform will win the next election, in-fighting aside, because even if they are the front-runners leading up to the election, I don’t think they will be *allowed* to win. You just know some sort of shady shenanigans will go down nearer the time. I think polls can give a false perception and it’s rarely as black and white as whoever has the most votes wins.
”Barred from standing in the election. Fined, and jailed for two years (house arrest). Her crime? Threatening to win the French Election. This is Ursula von der Leyen’s dictatorship in action. And our Ursula is currently under investigation for real corruption, unlike the Lavrentiy Beria Lawfare waged against Le Pen. For those who don’t know, von der Leyen made an awful lot of money buying billions of euros worth of Covid-19 vaccines directly from Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla via SMS messages on her phone…. which she has now lost….”
https://x.com/PWestoff/status/1906692905177158074
When all else fails…
So now unaccountable Bureaucrats in the EU, using their provisional arm in the Judiciary, have decided that they have the authority to decide who may become a politician and be elected.
All those in UKIP pre 2016 who pointed out that there is nothing democratic about the EU are being completely vindicated.
I’ll be surprised if the French quietly put up with this despotism.
Governments and other powerful interests have been using a form of lawfare forever in the form of financial costs. Those with the deepest pockets get the best judicial outcomes. This is changing a bit where nefarious charges are brought against political opponents. The whole concept of a balanced and fair judiciary has always been questionable. It is just more overt now. This is openly revolutionary.
You have hit the nail squarely on the head! It is the Judiciary everywhere that is causing all the problems, either by giving a veneer of legitimacy to dictators trampling upon democracy, or by becoming dictatorial themselves, using “Judicial Overreach” and “Legislating from the Bench”, like that Communist Oaf de Moraes in Brazil.
All part of the Globalist dream of establishing a Global Kritocracy = Rule by Judges.
Le Pen should seek political asylum in the UK or USA and wage political war against Macron’s dictatorship.
I wish Navalny had done that, instead of walking straight into the jaws of the Lamprey Putin, now busy grinding up Slavs in the Meatgrinder War along with his secret friend the Lamprey Zelensky. Both of them happily massacring White Men in open genocide, trying to reduce the 7% down to 5% even faster.
Both Lampreys should be arrested and charged with Crimes Against Humanity.