There follows a guest post by ‘Amanuensis’, an ex-academic and senior Government researcher/scientist. It was first published on his Substack page.
The latest UKHSA Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths data shows a continuation of an interesting trend – while the majority of deaths with Covid occur in the 28 days following their positive test, there appears to be a relatively larger number of vaccinated dying after this point, compared with the unvaccinated.
This effect can be seen in the following table 1, which shows data from the UKHSA vaccine surveillance reports for weeks 36 to 48:
For example, for those over 80 (the final row of the table), there were 480 deaths with Covid in unvaccinated individuals in the first 28 days after their positive test, but an additional 59 in the days that followed, up to day 60 – that’s an increase of approximately 12%. However, for vaccinated individuals aged over 80 there were 3,521 deaths with Covid in the first 28 days and an additional 852 deaths from day 28 to day 60 – an increase of approximately 24%.
This pattern of relatively more deaths with covid between day 28 and 60 in the vaccinated is seen for all age groups:
Note the huge disparity for the younger age groups – for those vaccinated and aged 20-30 there were nearly as many Covid deaths after day 28 as before it.
Of course, this is only for the additional deaths in the second month – how does this effect impact on deaths overall?
You can see that there is a small but non-trivial increase in deaths in the vaccinated compared with the unvaccinated, but, again, note how significant the increase is for the younger age groups.
It is very important to note that each age group has very different absolute death rates – even with significant vaccination levels those aged over 80 still have the highest death rates, and deaths in those aged 20-30 remain very rare.
This is not a trivial matter, for two reasons:
- Official death rates from Covid count only deaths in the 28 days following a positive test. There are clearly more deaths related to the Covid infection in the month afterwards. In the vaccinated this amounted to at least an additional 25% deaths.
- Official estimates of vaccine efficiency compare deaths in the vaccinated versus unvaccinated in the 28 days following the positive test – given that the vaccinated appear to have relatively more deaths between day 28 and day 60 following their positive test, it is likely that official figures overestimate vaccine efficiency. This is of particular concern for young adults, for whom deaths in the vaccinated appear to be nearly double those used for estimates of age-specific vaccine efficiency.
So, why might this be occurring? I can think of a few potential reasons:
- The vaccinated might be getting better medical attention. I think this is highly unlikely – healthcare staff are professionals and would be unwilling to introduce biases into their care.
- The vaccines allow those infected to cope better with severe Covid, and thus they ‘hang on to life’ for longer than the unvaccinated. I think this is also unlikely – severe Covid isn’t a viral disease – indeed, in many cases the virus is completely eradicated during the earliest stages of severe Covid. Severe Covid is an immune disorder where the body’s immune system goes ‘out of control’. Thus the ability of the vaccine-induced antibodies to fight off the viral infection is less relevant.
- The vaccines result in a longer period with minor symptoms, thus delaying hospitalisation and, when it occurs, death.
I believe this latter point is what is occurring. This is compatible with our understanding of the impact of the vaccine on the immune response:
- The vaccines mainly stimulate the immune system to produce longer lasting IgG antibodies. These protect against the virus infecting the whole body, but provide little protection against infection in the upper respiratory tract (this requires IgA antibodies, which are produced by the immune system after vaccination, but which wane very rapidly and are at insignificant levels by approximately day 50 post vaccination, e.g. see here).
- Thus the vaccines will likely offer little protection against infection by SARS-CoV-2 from about 50 days post-vaccination – however, their circulating IgG antibodies will make it less likely for the vaccinated to develop systemic infection with SARS-CoV-2 and thus make serious Covid less likely.
- In some individuals the lack of protection against SARS-CoV-2 in the upper respiratory tract allows any infection to be maintained. This can then repeatedly attempt to infect other parts of the body until the point where either the immune system overcomes the infection and the individual recovers or, in a minority of cases, the virus overcomes the immune system and the individual develops severe Covid.
If the hypothesis above is true, then we might expect to see relatively more unvaccinated individuals in hospital in the first three to four weeks of any emerging Covid wave, but that after this period of time the number of vaccinated individuals in hospitals should increase. We’re appear to be about to enter a new Covid wave in the UK – let’s see how things transpire.
Finally, I note that if the above hypothesis is true then a proportion of vaccinated individuals will be infected with a high viral load for a relatively long period of time – does this explain the very high Covid case numbers we’ve seen in so many countries around the world since vaccination levels reached a high enough threshold?
Stop Press: In the latest report from the ZOE Covid Symptom Study, the authors warn that early Covid symptoms like headaches and fever could be mistaken for vaccine side-effects and the recently jabbed may be unwittingly spreading the virus.
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So when the Fascist pigs want to terrify their own people, each scariant is deadlier than the last, including the Kentiscariant. But when Macron wants to score a point against Britain (how very novel for a French leader!), our Fascists suddenly find that the Kentiscariant is a tame lapdog.
Well well.
I am not giving Macron a ‘pass’ here, he should have resisted the enormous pressure from his ‘experts’ that sometimes make SAGE look like poodles. But in his speech he was careful not to phrase reference to the Kent ‘variant’ as if it was a ‘britsh/brexit’ issue, which is how most of the UK MSM and this article are painting it. This doesn’t help anyone.
I agree that the almost linear rise in ‘cases’ is more a function of increase tests than anything else, but its also reflected in numbers of hospitalisations and ICU admissions, again in a linear increase.
This is highly unusual behaviour for a virus. There is no explanation I have seen for this.
I suspect some of the numbers are very suspect, and are part of an attempt to convince at least part of the 50% of the French population that are saying no to vaccination.
If people will need a booster jab in September that’s billions more in profit for big pharma and another reason to reintroduce restrictions if there is a seasonal rise in cases before everyone has their booster. I wonder who is lobbying who to push the largely nonexistant dangers of all these variants.
Since viruses continously mutate, and presumably have done for hundreds of millions of years it seems obvious that the immune system would evolve to be able to fight variants of a virus as well as the strain that is currently circulating. Any organism that was immune against new variants and not just the old one would have a competative advantage and be more likely to pass on the genes for developing this immunity. This is another reason why it would’ve been better to allow the virus to spread among people at low risk of serious illness. Natural herd immunity is likely to be better than vaccine induced immunity. Sadly this is one more basic principle of biology/virology that the “experts” seem to have ignored, for reasons only they can know.
Not yet.
A few months ago someone leaked the contract. They can choose to make a profit from July, if I recall correctly
It depends on who gets to call the end of the emergency at which point
1. AstraZeneca can start charging market rates.
2. Authorisation for use under ’emegency’ provisions must surely be called into question ?
… which gives the rationale for continually upping the ante in terms of new Scary Fairies, and continuing the suppression of possible cheap prophylactics like Ivermectin.
They are experimenting on millions of subjects for free, whilst getting lots of coverage, that’s a nice win-win
Your link to the PHE study is hilariously, embarrassingly wrong.
It is actually the link to a BMJ study (March 10) concluding that the Kent variant is indeed much more deadly.
Please provide the correct link.
Yes – even in the report written by the “Swiss Doctor” there is only a link to an article in the Daily Telegraph. The study seems not to have been published (or peer reviewed) yet, and its existence is only known due to a press conference at 10 Downing Street.
There could be an easy explanation for increased hospitalization rate not accompanied by higher mortality rate. The propensity to admit could have been increased compared to the first wave ie less sick cases admitted. The health care sytem did not collapse in the first wave might increase “overhospitalization” ie doctors admit more,knowing it would have less effect on the system. Really the excess mortality and the the true C-19 mortality is the only way to estimate if a variant really is more dangerous.
The Swizz doctor is a bit leaning to van den Bosche scenario saying if neutral antbodies are affected as above could be problematic although they allude to something called T-cells immunity. But another study published a few days ago,again showed that T cells have a broad immunity incl. against variant.
One would bet that natural acquired immunity ,is the most effective T cells response as known by everybody pre 2020 and that an artificial immunity like vaccine can never come up to that level. The article above is down here
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ofid/ofab143/6189113#.YGTXD75sdDQ.twitter
CD8+ T cell responses in COVID-19 convalescent individuals target conserved epitopes from multiple prominent SARS-CoV-2 circulating variants
This study examined whether CD8+ T-cell responses from COVID-19 convalescent individuals (n=30) potentially maintain recognition of the major SARS-CoV-2 variants suggesting that virtually all anti-SARS-CoV-2 CD8+ T-cell responses should recognize these newly described variants.