Hospital Admissions Were 10% Higher Following the Vaccine Rollout

The last day of June 2023 marked the 1,200th day since the start of the ‘pandemic’. Since March 20th, 2020, Covid hospital admission data has been reported on the Government’s Coronavirus Dashboard. In the first 600 days there had been 496,693 Covid hospital admissions in England. Oddly, in the second 600 days, there were 548,676 Covid hospital admissions. That’s right, hospital admissions were 10% higher in the period after vaccine take-up in the vulnerable groups had passed the 95% level.

It’s almost as if 230 million vaccine doses, the imposition of countless non-pharmaceutical interventions and spending £500 billion on ‘Covid support’ programmes made no difference to hospital admission numbers.

But, of course, things that run against the ‘narrative’ are commonplace and usually go unremarked. I confess that as time passes, I forget just how bonkers it all was. For example, in addition to our own Sages, we had Albert Bourla, Chairman and CEO of Pfizer, along with Gates, Biden, Fauci, et al., telling us throughout 2021 that vaccines stopped transmission. I’m sure, like me, you’ll still hear people say, “But they never said that vaccines would stop transmission.” Then please tell me, what was the point of a vaccine passport if it was understood that vaccination didn’t stop transmission? Like so much else, it’s been memory-holed.

Just as a quick reminder, here’s Our World in Data’s chart for ‘confirmed cases’. Bearing in mind that the vaccine rollout was largely complete by the summer of 2021, isn’t it odd that cases peaked in January 2022 at over three times the previous high?

Figure three shows two charts from Our World in Data. On the left, we have cumulative vaccine shots. On the right ‘new cases’ per million of population.

November 11th, 2021, marked the 600th day since the start of the pandemic. By then we’d injected 160 doses of vaccine per 100 of population. Among the elderly and vulnerable, over 95% were reportedly ‘fully vaccinated’, and most had received at least one booster shot. As cases peaked on January 5th, vaccine doses had reached 199/100 of population. Clearly, vaccines didn’t do much to stop transmission!

However, this article isn’t about ‘cases’; it’s about hospital admissions. Once it was understood that vaccines did nothing to stop transmission, the narrative shifted: “Vaccines might not stop transmission, but they stop you being hospitalised or dying.” I, along with many others, including the ONS, have demonstrated that vaccination made no ‘real-world’ difference to your chances of dying of Covid. An article I wrote in the Daily Sceptic published on July 27th, 2022, pointed out that: “ONS data on deaths by vaccination status show that of the 5,678 Covid deaths in April and May 2022, 93% were of vaccinated people.” Given that significantly less than 93% of the population were vaccinated, this wasn’t a great result for vaccine supporters. But, until now, I hadn’t looked at hospital admissions.

As figure one (above) illustrates, there were more Covid hospital admissions after the vaccine rollout than before. But, so the narrative goes, people hospitalised after vaccination were hospitalised ‘with’ Covid, not ‘because’ of Covid. Let’s test that one.

When Sajid Javid replaced Matt Hancock as Health Secretary in June 2021, he was keen to differentiate between hospital patients admitted due to complications from Covid and those who were admitted primarily for something else but who incidentally tested positive for Covid. The results can be viewed here. There are four reports, starting from June 18th, 2021, with data going up to the end of May 2023. Figure four presents the data as a chart.

Looking at the grey line related to the percentage scale on the right, we can see that the percentage of admissions ‘primarily’ due to Covid hovered around the 75% level from June 18th, 2021, until early December 2021. Through the winter of 21/22, this percentage declined dramatically until it stabilised at around 35% in April/May 2022. So, what happened through late 2021 and early 2022 that caused the number of Covid hospital admissions to go from ‘primarily’ admitted due to Covid to where Covid was an incidental diagnosis for 65% of them? Was it vaccination? No. Vaccines had been rolled out a year earlier back in winter/spring 2021. It was Omicron.

As figure five shows, Omicron went from 1% of all cases on December 6th, 2021, to 99% of all cases by January 31st, 2022. Clearly, the change in the proportion of patients hospitalised due to Covid over the period covered by these NHS reports didn’t reduce due to vaccination but due to the milder nature of the prevailing Covid variant.

Any impact the vaccines may have had on hospital admissions occurred prior to Sajid Javid’s drive to collect data on the reason for admission. From when these data started being collected, on June 18th, 2021, figure four shows us that about 75% of hospital admissions were ‘primarily’ due to Covid. The critical question is, can we get data on the primary cause of hospital Covid admissions prior to that date?

A paper produced by SAGE on behalf of the Government looked at nosocomial infections up to the end of July 2020. It estimated that about 75% of Covid admissions were ‘for’ Covid rather than ‘with’ Covid. Covid hospital admissions varied significantly with seasonality and whatever other factors affect rates of transmission, but it seems likely that the ‘primary’ diagnosis of Covid stayed fairly stable at around 75% right through 2020 and 2021, up to the point in December 2021 when Omicron arrived.

Clearly, the main takeaway is that as with ‘cases’ and deaths, it was the arrival of Omicron rather than the rollout of vaccines that made the difference.

But you have to admit, it’s a great pub-quiz question: when were there more Covid hospital admissions, in the first or second 600 days of the pandemic?