How well do the vaccines protect from death? The two most recent weekly reports from Public Health Scotland give us death data by vaccination status, and by subtracting one from the other we can work out how many Covid patients died in the week July 9th-15th. The results are shown below.
We see that 38 people died with Covid that week, 37 of whom were over 50. Twenty-eight (74%) were fully vaccinated (18 of whom were over 80 and 24 were over 70). Thirty-three (87%) had had at least one dose. Just five (13%) were unvaccinated.
To fully interpret these we need to know how many people were vaccinated in each age group. The problem with obtaining this information is that the official Scottish statistics appear to use the same method as the NHS for estimating vaccine coverage, which gives figures which exceed the likely more accurate estimates of Public Health England by around 5%.
This means the official Scottish figures show extremely high coverage in the over-60s, implausibly hitting 100% in three of the age bands. If we compare this to the latest PHE figures we can see that the corresponding figures in England, taken from the NIMS database, are more like 90-95% than 100%. In fact, the PHE figures are generally around 10 percentage points lower than the PHS figures for the under-70s. That’s a lot.
Even if the Scottish really are more keen on vaccination than the English (not unlikely, if only because of the smaller minority ethnic population), we know from the English figures that the NHS estimates appear, as mentioned, to overestimate vaccine coverage by around 5%. I’m going to use a very rough estimate then, that around 93% of the over-50s in Scotland have had at least one dose (compared to around 90% in England) and around 91% are fully vaccinated (compared to around 88% in England).
Looking at just the deaths in the over 50s now (so dropping the one in the under 50s), this means that 89% of the deaths in the week 9th-15th July were in the 93% who were vaccinated with at least one dose; 76% of the deaths were in the 91% who were fully vaccinated; and 11% of the deaths were in the 7% who were unvaccinated. This does imply that the vaccines are having some protective effect, but not as much as we might have expected from other sources such as PHE which claim the vaccines are 75-99% effective against death.
Note that these figures suggest that those who had received only one dose were particularly vulnerable to death, as they made up only around 2% of the over-50s population but accounted for 14% of the deaths. Since almost all the over-50s had been offered two doses by this point, this means those who had only one may have had particular reason to avoid the second, such as a bad reaction to the first, or simply being otherwise more vulnerable.
We can use these figures to do a crude estimate of the vaccine effectiveness against death. The four deaths in the seven percent who were unvaccinated imply that if the vaccines have no effect there would have been 57 deaths in total (4/0.07), or 52 deaths in the 91% who were fully vaccinated. There were 28 deaths in the fully vaccinated, meaning the vaccines reduced the expected deaths among the over-50s by 46%. This is 46% overall protection, not protection in addition to protection from infection and hospitalisation, and is considerably below the 75-99% PHE estimate.
This is a very crude estimate, however, as 20 of the deaths were in the over-80s. Once we have more data from the recent surge we may be able to get a better estimate.
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It is to be noted that when things turn out badly the enior civil servants and quango-ists are nowhere to be seen. Behind the scenes they determine policy but with just sufficient space to enable them to shhuffle away out of view.
I therefore wonder where were these highly paid, overly promoted and self regarding mandarins when Boris needed support in his view of being cautious about forecasts. Where were they when he needed more reasonable input information and advice.
They were busy trying to destroy him, of course.
Not interested, sorry!
Nor me. It’s funny how almost every leader in every country also made the same wrong decisions, at the same time.
Almost as if they were working to a script…but no, that can’t be true surely, only a conspiracy theorist would say that…
I also immediately take against any article that refers to the former PM as “Boris”, which as Peter Hitchens points out is a stage name designed to make him appear like everyone’s mate. Apparently it’s not even what his friends and family call him.
His freinds call him “Al”, so he’s known as Al Kemal in our house.
If you check his family background, he is descended from Ali Kemal, who changed his name. From Wiki:
“During the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was one of the Central Powers allied with the German Empire, and Kemal’s son and daughter living in England adopted their maternal grandmother’s maiden name of Johnson. His son Osman also began to use his middle name of Wilfred as his first name. (Osman) Wilfred Johnson later married Irene Williams (the daughter of Stanley F. Williams of Bromley, Kent, by his marriage to Marie Luise, Freiin von Pfeffel, born in 1882[20]) and their son Stanley Johnson became an expert on the environment and population studies and a Conservative member of the European Parliament. His son Boris Johnson, Kemal’s great-grandson, became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on 24 July 2019.[21]
Indeed.
“their son Stanley Johnson became an expert on the environment and population studies” Lol….
No one ever got fired for doing what everybody else is doing.
Isn’t that somewhat circular. Why was everybody else doing it?
Put a known liar together with a known fantasist and you get a fantastic lie!
Regardless of the decision made, why were the Imperial team involved to begin with given their poor track record?
We know they received funding from the BMGF.
Because Gates funded them.
I remember Peter Hitchens saying at an FoS event that it is the role of government and the media to keep a cool head and calm the people during a crisis or panic and not to fan it even further.
Boris failed big time.
He also succumbed to Ferguson’s BS- just 2 days later than the other m*r*ns.
His hunch and comp with BSE was valid and proven right with Covid as well: just 6500 out of 135000 official Covid deaths in England had just COVID as the sole cause on their death certificate.
And that low figure was overblown due to the ridiculous 28day rule and the flawed tests.
And he and everyone else c/should have know that by 18.3.23 already:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says
Computer modelling is an excellent tool for purely material and deterministic processes (eg physics, chemistry, engineering, electronics etc), entirely useless for anything that involves at least some element of human behaviour (such as the speed, extent and harmfulness of viral spread); for the simple reason that we have free will and therefore cannot be assessed in a predictive manner.
And yes that does also render all the human (pseudo) sciences such as sociology, psychology and economics redundant.
Another way of putting the same thing – using computer modelling to predict future social outcomes should be seen in the same light as ancient methods such as augury, divination and astrology.
As Professor Ferguson’s wildly inaccurate and massively harmful track record in the field vividly demonstrates.
Everyone with half a brain cell knew of Fergusons atrocious record In forecasting, if he were any good private enterprise would have employed him and paid millions years ago. They all saw what we did.
Ferguson should have been sacked after the ruin he inflicted on farmers.
That Johnson and his ilk now try to say they didn’t trust Ferguson, they still went ahead and followed his fantasy projections, none of them called him out.
It’s too late now to be sorry, and if it happened again they would use this con artist again.
There is no forgiveness.
“Based on Ferguson’s modelled worst-case estimates, the figures were considered unhelpful in Dame Deirdre Hind’s independent review of the U.K.’s response to the 2009 influenza pandemic.”
No doubt the politicians and bureaucrats at the time were spouting “lessons will be learned”. What a meaningless and vacuous platitude that phrase is.
They did learn lessons after the Swine Flu scam, they were better prepared and got at the media and Universities unlike before. And they were ready to trash the reputation of Wolfgang Wodark making the usual ad hominem attacks.
Since we now know:
* Covid was a bio-weapon developed in China with CIA money channelled through Eco Health Alliance
* the gene therapy which was meant to be the antidote required extensive human testing
* all the NATO countries and the Five Eyes locked down at more or less the same time (noticeable that Sweden was then outside NATO) and kept going until the mass medical experiment had been conducted
it seems pretty obvious to me that Johnson was ordered to lock down, almost certainly by the CIA.
Only five days BEFORE the first lockdown Johnson’s Government, on the advice of public health bureaucrats/scientists, downgraded Covid to a Low Consequence Infectious Disease because they knew it had low mortality rates.
Ferguson’s model was created to JUSTIFY the lockdown, not to cause it.