There follows a guest post by the German blogger who calls himself eugyppius. This piece, about the soaring case rate in Germany in spite of the same percentage of the population being vaccinated as in the U.K.’s, originally appeared on his Substack account. You can subscribe to that here.
Germany and the United Kingdom have essentially identical rates of vaccination. In both countries, about 67% percent of everyone is vaccinated.
In fact, here in Germany our vaccination rates are likely understated, so we may even be slightly ahead of the British.
Despite all of this vaccination, German mortality is more or less identical to that seen last year. On November 16th 2020, we had around two deaths per million, and right on schedule we are back at two deaths per million now. The United Kingdom is also at two deaths per million right now, but this is just a third of the mortality they had last year, and the curve is totally different:
Why are deaths down in the United Kingdom, but not in Germany?
Well, there is the dry tinder theory, and the United Kingdom surely has much higher levels of natural immunity than we do here on the continent. All that makes a big difference. But there’s probably another reason too. While Germany has vaccinated 85.7% of everyone aged 60 and over, the United Kingdom has vaccinated these cohorts well in excess of 90%:
That might seem a small difference, but it reflects a vaccination campaign more carefully targeted at those most likely to die of Corona infection. One or two hundred thousand vaccinations in these groups can make a serious difference, for we have seen that the vaccines do reduce the risk of severe outcome. The effect fades, but even seven or eight months after vaccination, a vaccinated 80 year-old is the equivalent of an unvaccinated 70 year-old, as far as SARS-2 is concerned.
That’s far less than the vaccinators pretend, but even lacklustre reductions in risk can matter enormously, where that risk is substantial.
Now a familiar but important point:
We know from studies on influenza vaccination, that those most at-risk of dying from the flu are strikingly less likely to receive flu shots. This creates an illusion of high efficacy against severe outcome. There appear to be many reasons for this. Some of the unvaccinated are simply terminally ill patients in palliative care, but a crucial subset will be people who are for whatever reason hard to reach, because they are outliers and as such live at the edges of society. Some of them will be shut-ins, or immigrants who don’t speak German, or mentally ill, or eccentrics who refuse medical treatment in general, or whatever.
The worse you are at offering vaccines to these people, the more likely you will be to enter a bizarre hall of mirrors – a funhouse where overall Corona mortality never really declines, but your efficacy statistics show that the vaccines are fantastic at saving lives.
I suggest that this is what is happening now, and why places like Germany and Austria have been seized by such a frenzy for universal vaccination. Our vaccinators, besotted with the broken efficacy statistics that are to some unknown degree an artefact of failures like these, are manically sticking needles in all and sundry. None of this will do anything to bring deaths down, but as they vaccinate more healthy low-risk people, their efficacy statistics will only improve, which will in turn drive their mania and religious certainty to new heights.
What would very likely have made a difference, would have been finding and offering vaccines to that tiny 0.5% of the unvaccinated who are most likely to die, while the weather was still good and there was little risk of first-dose infection enhancement. We should not deceive ourselves: Many of these people are beyond the help of vaccines and will succumb to Corona anyway, while most of the rest will die soon of other causes, even if the vaccines save them for now. But this is the only place where there are gains to be made. Vaccinating millions of young people will do nothing, aside from causing short-term case spikes and deaths in some subset of them.
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Ah, the report card:
Maths: Tries hard
English: Could do better
History: Imaginative
PSHE: Original thinker
Overall:
Requires ImprovementWhy do parents need Ofsted reports – can’t they see what their children are like.
In the 1950s and 1960s – my school days – patents knew which schools had a good reputation which didn’t.
That doesn’t work anymore. Besides the inspection shpould not just be for parents but also to check on teachers and school management, things may be going on or left undone which a parent outside the gates could not detect until too late.
I am always amazed when teachers get a fit of sweats because an Ofsted inspection has been announced, is under way or has just reported. In the private business sector annual audits are usual and HMRC visits not uncommon. Other regulators also call round.
Even qualified electricians can expect visits to look at their work on site.
Why should teachers be exempt from checks?
The shock is that head teachers are so often shocked at whet the Ofsted report reveals. They are meant to know!
I worked for a testing consultancy that had various accreditations that all carried out annual audits of our procedures and record keeping.
I witnessed the decline of education from the 1990s that seemed at least in part to be caused by the existence of Ofsted, a centralised organisation too remote from teachers and parents, and a typical example of the development of remote over-control from above that was instituted by politicians and bureaucrats. Ofsted should be scrapped and the old system of having school inspectors with more local ties should be re-instituted.
Education began declining in the 70s when the tosser Woy Jenkins brought in ‘comprehensive’ education and shunned education based on ability as well as giving us dumb-downed qualifications in CSEs. CSEs had a damaging effect on further education as courses were dumb-downed to accept those will CSEs as I saw in engineering.
“parents will see four grades across the existing sub-categories – quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development and leadership and management. “
I’ve no idea what they mean by “personal development” nor how you could meaningfully measure it, nor whether it might be a good objective for a school. Regarding the other three, it’s hard to see how they would not be broadly aligned in almost every case.
Good idea. I know of schools rated ‘excellent’ – 7 years ago and still trade on it…..eg my son’s school, rated excellent top 10% in the UK etc etc…except…. in say A levels comp science none of its students in the past 3 years has received an A and 50% failed, and many other courses suffer from the same under performance basically due to inept teaching…..so yeah common sense to have some details against the schools to help tax payers.
I taught a a school which was supposed to be outstanding. Which it was in all categories EXCEPT teaching and learning. How we teacher laughed cynically. Always thought ofstead inspectors were failed teachers who couldn’t cope.
Ofsted, Ofcom, …, off with them all. I have never heard of any other country being so riddled with completely useless, supposedly independent, government controlled institutions.