The big news in the last week was that the authorities in Scotland have decided that enough is enough; they’re going to stop publishing data on infections, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccine status. This isn’t surprising – the best way to stop people knowing that your public health interventions have failed is to stop giving them the information that will inform them that they have failed. Without these data the Scottish authorities can keep on saying that the vaccines are magnificent and have saved the nation, whereas the data suggest that even if they had some short term positive impact, they at best ‘paint a complex picture’.
At least in England there is still fairly good data being published on the performance of the vaccines, for now…
And onto this week’s update. I saw a good summary of the most recent UKHSA data on the Freedom Podcast Twitter feed:
We’re clearly in a situation where the Covid vaccinations haven’t solved the Covid epidemic, and might even have made things worse (deaths). It certainly isn’t the case that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, when 72% of hospitalisations and 87% of deaths are in the vaccinated. Of course, the devil is in the detail, and in this specific case the variation between different age groups (older people are more likely to be vaccinated but also more likely to die). This week’s data indicate that infections continue to tumble for all age groups and vaccination status – the December and January Omicron wave appears to be receding fast. The data continue to show that for nearly all age groups the more vaccine doses you have the higher your risk of infection with Covid.
Two age groups stand out as different from the others – those aged under 18 and over 80. For those aged under 18 it is likely that the higher infection rate in the unvaccinated at least partially reflects their more recent vaccination (for all doses). It isn’t clear what is going on for those aged over 80 (and, to a certain extent, those aged 70-80). It is always worth remembering that the immune system of those under the age of about 12 and over the age of about 65 isn’t the same as for the majority of adults and you might expect to see different disease patterns and characteristics in these groups.
From the infection rate data we can again estimate the vaccine effectiveness against infection – negative for all age groups other than those aged under 18, and significantly so for those having taken a booster dose.
For this week we’ve got enough data to present graphs of vaccine effectiveness against time (this year) for all age ranges – as this is now rather a lot of data to present in one go I’ve split it into a graph for those aged under 50 and another for those aged over 50. First the changes with time for those aged under 50:
One dose of vaccine appears now to offer a relatively low but stable increase in the risk of infection, two doses offer a stable but higher risk of infection, while the risk of infection appears still to be increasing for those that have had a booster dose – those in their 40s being up to three times more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated. The silver lining in these data is that the impact of the vaccines in terms of increasing infection on those aged under 18 appears to be low; I hope that this reflects their robust innate immune system and isn’t simply because their recent vaccination means that there hasn’t been time for the increased risks to emerge.
The infections data for those aged over 50 paints a different picture. The only clear indication is that all age groups for any number of vaccinations have an increased risk of Covid, compared with the unvaccinated.
It is still unclear why the vaccine is resulting in increased risks of infection. There are several mechanisms that might explain it and really there should be much more research being done on this because they’ll determine the likely longer term outcomes of the vaccination programme.
The complication with the infections data is that there are concerns about reduced testing levels (including the likely-immient removal of free tests) and with the impact of reinfections. While reinfections are now included in the total, they’re only classed as reinfections if 90 days have passed since the previous test; whether 90 days is appropriate remains open to question.
The situation with testing is illustrated by the difference between official case number for the past month with people reporting symptomatic Covid to the Zoe symptom tracter – I’ve included graphs for both below; official data top, Zoe data middle. I’ve also included the latest ONS Infection Survey graph for England (bottom).
Note how official case numbers have dropped since the Christmas Omicron peak, while the Zoe Symptom Tracker is showing a second peak in the data. The ONS Infection Survey shows a pattern part way between the two. The impact of this complication on our analysis is unclear. It is of note that genomic analysis of a sample of test swabs suggests that the second peak in the Zoe data isn’t simply the BA.2 variant – that doesn’t seem to have infected large numbers in the UK (yet).
On the topic of variants, we’re now beyond the point where the arrival of Omicron variant would still be causing vaccine effectiveness to drop in our analysis – if it were simply an effect of Omicron having achieved more vaccine escape then the vaccine effectiveness should have flatlined over the past two or three data points, however the data suggest that more is going on – but is it continued and rapid antibody waning or something else? Consider the the data on variants published by the UKHSA:
The period covered by the latest report is highlighted in the red rectangle to the right of the graph. The continued decline in vaccine protection suggests that it is possible that variant Omicron BA.1.1 (and/or perhaps BA.2) has achieved further vaccine escape, compared with variant Omicron BA.1, and these variants might even be causing rapid reinfections in the short term. Again, more information is required to explain the disparity between the official and Zoe data.
Regarding vaccine protection against hospitalisation, the data are fairly consistent – three doses of vaccine still offer some protection against hospitalisation for all age groups, two doses appear to offer approximately zero benefit, while those having had only a single dose appear to have an increased risk of hospitalisation.
Note that unlike the infections data, the data for hospitalisations is rather robust, albeit complicated by the question of ‘with vs of’ Covid.
The data for protection against death is similar to the hospitalisations data; a fair amount of vaccine protection remains for those who have received a booster dose, two doses appear to give negligible protection and a single dose appears to offer negative protection (i.e., increases the risk of death). Note that I only included data for 40-80 year olds in this graph; the death rate in those aged under 40 is very low and gives ‘noisy’ results, while the data for those aged 80 or over is complicated by the very large range in vulnerability within the group.
It is important to note that although this last graph shows those with only one or two doses of vaccine to have an increased risk of death, the advent of Omicron has reduced the mortality rate of Covid significantly. The widespread ‘fear of Covid’ that is affecting so many lives is based on the information we had about the risk of the virus in early 2020; this level of fear isn’t appropriate in early 2022.
Amanuensis is an ex-academic and senior Government scientist. He blogs at Bartram’s Folly.
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I’ve put a large cardboard box out two weeks running, which they’ve refused to take; presumably because there’s a couple of tiny polystyrene balls at the bottom. I’ve now burnt box at back of garden and will no longer play their silly game of separating the trash. I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to stop playing.
Time to haul out another idiot politician to pay for the sins of our tyrannical bureaucrats.
It’s getting a very long list of them isn’t it?
I once put some rubbish in a rubbish bin, too.
I know, it’s a good job Marcus Aurelius knew isn’t my real name!
Good Lord!
Oh, not that either?
You’re a monster.
Now you tell us, Marcus!
As the saying goes “no good deed goes unpunished”. I would always recommend not binning anything with your intact name or address on it in case the garbage stasi want to trace it back to you. An indelible marker pen or shredding should do the trick.
At least, through incidents like these, people are starting to see how unhinged the environment movement has become.
Been doing that for years. Didn’t think I’d be worrying about the bin police though.
That said, this news should also be used to emphasise the risk of ID theft. Not only could someone go through the bins to identify you – this shows that someone actually did.
I went round, under the cover of darkness, covertly dumping bin bags full of stripped wallpaper in the neighbours’ bins in the street, the night before bin collection.
It’s when we first moved in and the previous owners were obviously fans of the ‘multi-layer’ approach to wallpapering over the decades. We ended up with our garden shed crammed full of these bags.
You’re meant to take it to the tip but we didn’t own a car then and we’d have had to pay through the nose for the council to take it away. It took several weeks but I got shot of it all. ‘Off-territory’ dumping for the win! Fortunately my neighbours are all very chill and helpful, one even suggested I do that, but god knows how much I’d have been fined in Brighton.
I am a master. I’ve got rid of TONS of waste like this. The council employee at the tip told me to do it when I looked aghast at the prospect of having to pay AGAIN for the council to take a few old bricks. Thing is, my neighbours don’t know about this… arrangement… so like you say, darkness and stealth are key
We put an old car engine in a wheelie bin once, back in the 1990s the bins were much bigger. Council truck groaned a bit when it compacted it but there it was, gone..
When wheelie bins were first introduced, as long as it fitted in the bin, you could put it in. True, dat. That was the whole point of them. The only time one wasn’t emptied was when I filled it with garden rubble…it was so heavy it was almost impossible to wheel the bin, so had to take some out and spread it out over a few weeks!
Well I just call it using your initiative. I feel like as the years go by there seems to be more and more rules for us to abide by. The vast majority being totally pointless.
We’ve got some used beer bottles that aren’t made of glass so can’t be recycled. They’re mega heavy and appear to be made from stone or granite. They’ll be getting off-loaded 2 or 3 at a time down at the bins in the car park at the top of the street.
I figure that as long as I don’t do a secretive dump in the dog poo bin I’m not actually doing anything wrong..
There is actually a bin for dog poo———–It’s called a politicians mouth.
I got rid of a bath by chopping it up and putting a bagfull of it in my bin for each collection. Eventually got rid of it over many weeks. This between the time that councils started charging for DIY domestic waste (by claiming it wasn’t domestic’) and the recent change which stops them imposing these charges.
This has turned into quite the “Dumpers Anonymous Confessional”, hasn’t it? You bloody axe maniac you! Or were you more of a Leatherface, in your weapon of destruction choice?
I am pretty sure that they don’t recycle anything like what they claim. I suspect most ends up in landfill. So they have us jumping through all these hoops for nothing. GREEN has to be the most insidious and disgusting political ideology ever imposed on an easily manipulated public, who thought they were living in a free country. —–Once their gas central heating is ripped out and they have 10 plastic bins in their garden some people might actually wake up one day and say “Eh, what is going on here exactly”?
I find the last part of this story particularly vexing. £400 fine for litter picking. My wife does at least an hours litter picking most days. She has early onset AD. If she is fined for putting something in the wrong bin there will be hell to pay.
#excited is trending in the legal community.
My solution is to dig holes and bury it. Keeps you fit digging and yields topsoil to go in raised beds.
I am jusy continuing the practice of the former owner of my home, who was a haulage contractor for a large nearby chemical company. They paid him to take it away and he tipped a lot of the useful bits and pieces in the back garden. For the last three decades it has yielded much useful stuff for an enterprising cheapskate like me.
For a fist full of rubble?
We found an old coal fire back boiler buried in our garden – didn’t know what it was at first.
Hunger games type behaviour, may the odds always be in yr favour.
In Essex visits to waste disposal sites (“recycling centres” in swamp language) requires prior reservation giving phone number, email addreess and vehicle registration number. I have found the staff who check admission allow some leeway on time which is just as well because local roads are often choaked.
Staff in the centre are very interested in metal waste, so much so I wonder if they sell it privately. There is no assistance available for heavy items.
This seems to me just another way of monitoring the public.
Council waste tips have always been obliged to take metal. Yes, I strongly suspect that the staff scavenge and sell-off the good bits. I’m a bit of a car renovation nut – the local guys have got used to me dumping old driveshafts and suchlike.
This level of micro surveillance and stupidity has not yet reached Scotland, as far as I am aware. The response from the typical Jock would likely be far more colourful than awa’ and bile yer heid….
It is sad then that the typical Jock could not manage “awa’ and bile yer heid….” when the Scamdemic and associated nonsense were being rolled out.
No personal criticism intended.
It’s high time everyone told their councils to F themselves. This is rule without consent.
The level of the fine constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment, totally out of order.
How can it even be a crime to put waste in a bin, it’s not industrial quantities of waste, it was one piece of cardboard.
The Highland Council (SNP) is similarly anal about street litter bins, all sorts of threats and incitement to snitch, horrible notices.
Could the FSU help to challenge this or help organise an appeal for funds.
“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”
Thomas Sowell
With respect, the people of Brighton shouldn’t complain.
They voted for the greenists.
PS maybe try some direct democracy and sneak out at night and plant some cardboard boxes in the greeny’s bins?
We will soon have a bin that goes out once a year for toe nail clippings. Try not to put it out on the wrong day though or the toe nail wardens will slap you with a heavy fine.
One for the left foot and one for the right.
Years ago (before I retired) after each meal in the company’s dining room we meticulously separated out plastic and polystyrene cups placing them in special containers. One day I happened to be in the service yard where I witnessed the two separate containers being emptied into the back of the same dust cart! After that I made a point of placing plastic cups in the polystyrene container and vice versa.
Simple solution: don’t pay the fine. Inundate the council for evidence of any contract and shower them with FOI requests. Basically, tie them up in legal knots. They’re just out to rob you after all.