Professor Tim Spector, who leads the ZOE Covid Symptom Study, has done a new video update on vaccines, which is worth a watch. The team has also published a new study (not yet peer-reviewed) about the vaccines and their effect on symptomatic Covid.
The data is broadly encouraging in terms of efficacy. (They don’t address safety, though a previous study did. They also exclude the period immediately after each vaccine dose, so the study tells us nothing about any post-jab spike in infections, which is disappointing.)
One interesting finding is that sneezing becomes more common as a symptom of Covid infection after vaccination than beforehand, which the authors suggest could be a result of our immune system reaction changing. They note this could make the disease more infectious owing to the additional aerosols produced.
A concerning finding was that the elderly (over-60s) were up to three (2.78) times more likely to be infected after being vaccinated (with one dose of any vaccine) if they were frail than if they weren’t. This is unsurprising perhaps, but still indicative of considerably lower protection for those already at higher risk from the disease. Furthermore, a quarter of the vaccinated frail elderly in the study who contracted the virus ended up in hospital, which is not a small proportion (though no figure was given for the hospitalisation rate of unvaccinated frail elderly people against which to compare it).
Vaccine efficacy was also reduced in the obese, another high risk group, and those with an unhealthy diet – see charts below. The baselines are people who are also vaccinated and otherwise similar, but without the particular characteristic mentioned, e.g. the point in the top right shows the additional risk of infection that the vaccinated frail elderly have versus the vaccinated non-frail elderly.
The authors note this means the vaccinated high risk, especially the frail elderly, are still susceptible to infection and serious disease. However, they did find that vaccination cut the general risk of hospital admission by 64% and increased the chance of being asymptomatic by 72% once infected. Infections in vaccinated people were also around half as likely to have more than five different symptoms. Similarly, in infections in vaccinated people, most symptoms were around half as likely to appear (see chart below).
A graph shown as part of this week’s video also gives us a glimpse into the vaccines working almost in real time.
The positivity rate for the unvaccinated here peaks around 0.095% while for the fully vaccinated it peaks around 0.025%. It’s tempting to estimate vaccine effectiveness from those figures (74%) but actually we can’t do that because the data is unweighted, so doesn’t take into account, for instance, that the vaccinated are generally older and the infection rate in older people is usually lower so the vaccine effectiveness would be overestimated. At such low prevalence, false positives also become a big problem, leading to vaccine effectiveness likely being underestimated due to a higher proportion of the infections in vaccinated people being false positives.
Nonetheless, the curves are at least the right way round, with infections in the vaccinated not rising anywhere near as much as those in the unvaccinated in the recent small hump.
This is relative risk, of course. Absolute risk when prevalence is this low is miniscule.
I confess I was rather hoping that the ZOE data would shed a bit more light on vaccine effectiveness than it has done to date. The team have done one study looking at effectiveness in terms of preventing infection, but only after one dose, and like so many of these studies it is confounded by the declining background prevalence so does not give a reliable estimate of vaccine effectiveness.
Which is frustrating because I still don’t feel I can point to a study and say there, that gives a really reliable estimate of how well the vaccines work. There are lots of tantalising hints the vaccines are working well, in terms of preventing infection and serious disease (safety is a separate matter). But it’s not clear exactly how well, once you take out the fact that infections decline anyway. The effectiveness in the high-risk frail elderly also continues to give signs of being lower than we might have hoped given how susceptible they are to the virus.
As Peter Doshi wrote in the BMJ in January – more data please.
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Michael Gove – Mr Scotch Egg. Something of the night about that bloke.
I always think of something slightly green and yellow hacked up and spat out when I hear the name Gove….
Shortly before masks were made mandatory he said they wouldn’t be
And Zahawi said vaccine passports are….”not the British way”, before introducing them in Nightclubs. He also told a woman concerned about an adverse reaction she had to “get the booster”….He is an utter scumbag!
He is is good company.
It’s called The Spectator.
Add to the carbon tax which is applied to businesses and passed on to consumers.
These taxes are Pigou Taxes designed to change behaviour.
Use less of everything.
I tend to think that taxation should be limited to a series of mechanisms that enable the cost of providing non-excludable services that make sense for a state to provide – defending our borders for instance (lol). I don’t know when they started to be a social control mechanism. Sadly that now seems to be accepted as legitimate.
It won’t change until we have a government that forces people to take responsibility for their lives and not expect the government to mollycoddle them.
I hope things will swing back to that, just maybe not in our lifetimes.
I think life is ultimately better for people if they try to be as self sufficient as possible.
Whoever wrote the headline must be guessing. In the real world, it’s likely that the trade will change things to mitigate the extra costs in various ways, ranging from smaller containers (inflationary for the consumers), or at the other end of the scale, larger ones might be more efficient (higher off the shelf costs, but lower unit prices for the customer). If they’re clever they might take the opportunity to increase the profit margin at the same time across the store. After all, selling a kilo of carrots in a plastic bag for 10p at Morrisons the otter day wasn’t a charity donation!
However it’s handled it won’t be good for consumers or for the economy. If firms absorb the cost it will affect their profits which will hurt people who have shares in those firms, a lot of those shares will be owned by pension funds, or firms will employ fewer people or pay them less or cut corners in some other way. That’s socialism for you!
This tax is not intended to be good for consumers or the economy which is precisely why Kneel is introducing it. Furthermore, as this is being introduced at the start of the year I suspect it is in effect a marker outlaying what is to come through the rest of the year. Kneel and his bosses are not messing about, they fully intend to bankrupt the country in 2025. People need to wake up. This government is openly committing treason against the population and they will not give up until they are made to. Sadly, I do not believe peaceful discussion will suffice, we are long past that point. It is us or them.
But they want to get us to Stakeholder Capitalism by 2030, part (or most) of the Great Reset. When most people who think of the Reset (those that don’t think it’s all a conspiracy) they think Agenda 2030 on steroids. Green everything, but forget the Stakeholder aspect.
Vobes did a good interview in Stakeholder Capitalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QspdOcEwa3s
Sadly most people have bought into these ideas. It’s quite common for people to think of “evil” and “capitalist” in the same sentence.
However it works out it is economically illiterate and morally reprehensible.
I used to get shopping bags for free, which would be used as rubbish bags. Then, when they introduced the bag tax, I happily paid because I found the bags useful, but they decided my bags were killing sea life (even though I live in the middle of the country), so they stopped selling them and now I have to pay for bin liners, so still throw away a plastic bag, only now the money goes to the supermarket rather than charity, as it did for the plastic bag charge. Now I will have to put my raw meat and unwrapped fruit and vegetables into the supermarket trolley, where, no doubt, some delightful child will have been stood with their grimy shoes prior to me using the trolley. The food will have a much shorter shelf life, creating more waste. Surely public health and waste reduction must take priority over this lunacy.
Public Health is not a consideration of Kneel and Co, well except in as much as it can be ruined – physical and mental.
The sooner a householder dies, the sooner another immigrant scumbag can be given a home.
Jim Dale on TV now sat under an air conditioning unit. Wanker
Oh and if that electrical item with an opening and closing flap underneath it that looks like every air conditioning unit in every office I have worked in, is not by some chance an air conditioning unit but is some clever heat exchanger and energy saver, I humbly apologise for maligning Mr Dale and reducing any high esteem that people may have held him in before my comment.
Glad I am watching the football and not that ignorant twat, Dim Dale.
And there was Rachel from Accounts bleating nonsense about her actions having pushed up inflation and along comes something else to keep it rising steadily. It may seem wrong but I am now hoping to see the UK in recession to cause the Student Union government to melt down.
These inflationary pressures don’t just force up prices but they lead to food being produced with cheaper and cheaper costs and this is more serious in some ways. For one thing it is hidden and it is also likely to lead to food becoming less healthy and nutritious. And the quality wasn’t too good to begin with. Maybe they won’t have four people fighting over a bag of flour. They will just adulterate and cheapen it to such an extent that all four plebs still feel satisfied even as their life essence is being drained away.
Old films will remind them how far their society has fallen, unless they ban them too.
The Uni-Party: deliberately making poor people even poorer ….. at the behest of, and to suit, the mega-wealthy.