Pandemic of the Unvaccinated?
Are we, in fact, in a pandemic of the unvaccinated?
Let's ask another question: Does a tree falling in the woods make any sound if no one hears it?
While this is sometimes treated as an unanswerable question, the answer is fairly straightforward: No. Sound is heard. It must enter the auditory perception of a hearer to be sound. It is scientifically valid to say that the disturbances or vibrations that would have been sound to a hearer still occur, because this is predictive, but sound itself as a distinct signal requires a listener.
Are we listening? Are we actually listening for the sort of signal that would be required for us to know? The following essay will pursue that question to address the veracity of the idea that we are presently in a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and whether we can actually support such an assertion.
For one thing, it should strike any critical thinker as worthy of investigation that in other places with high vaccination rates and the same apparent variants, such an assertion is clearly not the case.
The cynic might say it’s because in places like the UK and Israel, for example, where most people are vaccinated, the goal is to sell boosters, but in the US, where vaccination lagged, messaging had to be more unambiguously in favor of first round efficacy early on. Americans are more cantankerous, after all. Admitting weakness might make them unruly.
While as an American I like the idea of Americans commanding an unusual level of unease from our rulers, I’ll leave that portion of the discussion aside. (In any event, it seems these days less and less to be the case.) More important is the question about the degree to which the cynic might be right. Were American authorities more defensive about the effectivity of the vaccines early on, and has that been reflected in decisions made as to the tallying methods? If so, what can we say is actually the case? Can we know?
The first red flag to the casual observer who was actually observing (already plausibly a very small group) in this department may have been the CDC’s May 1st decision to quietly stop monitoring breakthrough cases.
This, of course, was height of absurdity, considering that the primarily presented reason all but the most vulnerable were being urged to get the shot was for the speculative indirect benefit, which, it cannot be emphasized enough, was not actually substantiated by the trials. Why people were being rushed to take a novel medical technology in the first place for a purported justification that had no phase three support is beyond the bounds of any principled medical science. But that aside, the CDC was actively making policy decisions to omit any semblance of decent tracking as to how preventative of infection these vaccines were in the general population, therefore hindering anyone’s capacity to gauge that in real time.
There was no scientific justification for such a delinquency whatsoever. The mental gymnastics required to dress it up as anything but being organizationally uninterested in vaccination problems requires a stretch that involves just a bit too much contortion for this author, personally, but if the reader is more charitable, he is still free to read on.
More importantly, this was not the start of the problem. The problem preceded even this strange move away from accountability.
The consolation the CDC offered for the fact that it had decided to stop tracking the thing that is supposed to be the cornerstone of the pandemic, the proliferation of the virus, in those who had many times gotten the vaccine primarily under the optimistic hope that it might mitigate just that, was that it was still going to track hospitalization cases.
But this, unfortunately, was a toothless appeal.
Both the Bloomberg article above and CDC statements at that time and since assert that CDC numbers on breakthrough complications represent an undercount, as the surveillance system is passive and relies on voluntary reporting from state health departments.
What does that mean exactly? It means we have a massively different methodology for putting figures into the numerator of our fraction of breakthrough complications than we do for the denominator.
Put another way:
If I have a passive system for counting breakthrough deaths and hospitalizations, and I’m actively incentivizing case counts (as has irrefutably been done throughout the pandemic [see brackets below]), and I put the former as the numerator over the latter, then of course the vaccines are going to look like they’re working amazingly. And they’ll look that way at home even at the same time as the same vaccines are more clearly getting mopped up in Israel and the UK (although malfeasance has occurred there as well, but is beyond the scope of this article). How is that possible? Simple. Because the US was actively engaging in a lie of omission by not actively counting breakthrough cases or complications.
The result is easily comprehensible to anyone who understands ratios, and there has been virtually no will to remedy the problem from any of the agencies involved.
[In addition to deliberately using COVID-magnanimous counting methods of cases at the federal level as established by Dr. Birx, hospital administrations have been receiving $13,000 for anything they count as a “less severe” COVID case https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/estimated-cost-of-treating-the-uninsured-hospitalized-with-covid-19/ regardless of comorbidities. Given ambiguity, which is ever-present in medicine, any hospital that doesn’t diagnose any case as COVID misses out substantially. COVID is also a notifiable disease, which means it is required to be reported. http://web.archive.org/web/20210906183212/https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/reporting-pui.html, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/reporting-pui.html, https://www.britannica.com/science/notifiable-disease]
Let me show you how this plays out, and I’ll demonstrate by the end of the article that we are, in fact, underestimating post-vaccine effects from illness significantly.
First, let’s take a look at a more recent Bloomberg article:
“Nearly All Covid Deaths in the U.S. Are Now Among Unvaccinated People”
Again, in May, the same publication included the CDC’s admission that such “numbers are probably an undercount, since their surveillance system is passive and relies on voluntary reporting from state health departments that may not be complete.”
The June article goes on to state that, “Only about 45 states report breakthrough infections, and some are more aggressive than others in looking for such cases. So the data probably understates such infections, CDC officials said.”
In other words, surveillance is so passive that 5 states appear not to have reported at all (did they have zero breakthrough cases or complications?). How on earth could one possibly treat this as a meaningful ratio out of the case count?
The article does its part to support the requisite narrative by singling out Arkansas, with low vaccination rates, where “cases are rising”. Why not pick on Rhode Island, which is one of the most vaccinated states, where cases are presently 8 times as high as they were this time last year? Or simply cut to the chase and admit that every state in the United States of America has several times the amount of COVID they did a year ago?
[Should I say that again, or is the bold-faced type enough?]
Obligatorily, the article goes on to try to bolster the success of the vaccination campaign with an epidemiologically vacuous statement:
“Deaths in the U.S. have plummeted from a peak of more than 3,400 day on average in mid-January, one month into the vaccination drive.”
Of course they have, because respiratory infections are seasonal.
(Also of note: COVID deaths and the case fatality rate have been demonstrably greater after the start of vaccinations than they were before them:
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/estimating-vaccine-induced-mortality)
In any event, how might these federal policies of not bothering to engage in active pharmacovigilance play out at the local level?
Let’s take Texas, for example.
On July 21, 2021, the Texas Tribune came out with what was effectively the same headline we’ve been seeing everywhere:
“Texas has seen nearly 9,000 COVID-19 deaths since February. All but 43 were unvaccinated people.”
However, the article managed to include this gem:
“DSHS doesn’t track the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations among vaccinated people statewide because hospitals are not required to report that information to the state.”
Now, I don’t love sharing emails, but I feel like the rules are somewhat different for journalists in their professional capacity, as they know that responding to inquiries is part of their job, and their correspondences tend to be assumed to be on-the-record conversation unless otherwise specified.
On July 23 I sent the author an email asking her, “If the breakthrough cases are not required to be reported, can you elucidate how the figures in the headline are a meaningful comparison?”
To which she responded within the hour, “I appreciate you reaching out. I understand your concern - it's mine as well.
I've been asking the agency to continue updating me on what they know. Though the data may not be as comprehensive as we would like, I believe there is still value in knowing what the trend is of what we do know.”
This validated to me that we were both under the impression that the unvaccinated figure in her headline corresponded to the data that the department admittedly “doesn’t track”. Otherwise, why would she have agreed that she shared my concern?
However, without further correspondence, I checked back on the article weeks later, as I was sending it to someone, and I often feel the urge to review things before I send them.
At the very bottom I noticed the following:
“To count deaths from the virus statewide, DSHS analyzes death certificates to find people whose cause of death was listed as COVID-19. Those records are then checked against immunization records to see if each person was vaccinated.”
I found that strange, because the verbiage didn’t ring any bells, and I figured I would have caught that before sending the author any email the first time around. Had I confused hospitalizations with deaths? Why hadn’t she told me? Dutifully, I checked the web archive, and sure enough, it hadn’t been there in the original version:
It appears the article was updated sometime between 3:30 and 8:00 pm the day of our email exchange earlier that morning. Here’s the article with the update, which makes no mention of the update having occurred:
The immediate problem with the update is that the Texas Immunization Registry, which requires consent for patient participation, is missing roughly 20 million people, which is the wide majority of Texans. Worse still, the program is largely populated by minors, and records are deleted if an express adult consent form is not completed and submitted by an individual’s 26th birthday.
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/immunize/immtrac/default.shtm
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/immunize/immunization-records.aspx
In other words, even if that’s really what’s being done, and it was not just a statement being used as a band-aid for the gaping hole in the methodology as I inferred it from the straightforward context of the article (that was then ostensibly endorsed by the author’s immediate sentiment of agreement with it), it’s not clear how this would make one iota of difference with respect to the issue at hand.
I emailed the author again, quoting the above section after formalities, and following with “Is that per DSHS? Were you informed how DSHS was accessing the immunization records of individual patients?”
I received a bounce-back email of “address not found”. Hoping I hadn’t been blocked, I decided to google the author and found that she had started work at a new paper towards the end of August. Her email address was prominently displayed after her journalist bona fides in her twitter byline. I forwarded my message to the email provided on twitter.
No response. Perhaps now at a new journal she considers herself off the job.
None of this is to pick on a single journalist (and for those reading this, please do not). It does, however, fit the pattern of the pandemic, which is that information is collected in precisely the way one would want to collect it for the sake of sandbagging people into getting these manufacturer-indemnified vaccine products. Explanations are horrendous, and requests for clarification are rarely answered.
The indemnification itself is extraordinary. How numerous and probable would the estimable lawsuits from these products have to have been such that these companies were able to argue behind closed doors that without total freedom from liability, they wouldn’t view it as a net-profitable-enough endeavor to get guaranteed purchases of billions of units of an unprecedentedly manufacturer-friendly form of vaccine?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906799/
What did they think the odds and percentages of ill-effects would turn out to be?
And if they didn’t even have to argue for it in those terms, all the more egregious the corruption.
The depths of that sort of wrangling will have to be saved for another article. The bottom line of this one is that states are not actually requiring reporting except of what the federal agencies require of reporting. And federal agencies aren’t requiring the reporting of anything that might inconvenience the narrative endorsing the vaccines.
As a reasonable demonstration of the minimum, let’s use the the 99.5% figure that’s mentioned both in the Texas Tribune article and in Forbes’s article using national data:
“99.5% Of People Killed By Covid In Last 6 Months Were Unvaccinated”
Consider that if the much-ballyhooed mitigation of symptoms reported from the trials really is supposed to be taken as indicative of these vaccines’ general ability to stave off things like death, which was exactly what we were sold on, statistics like this one would suggest that in real life, these vaccines are a standard deviation more effective than what was expectable from the trials.
And with a generally less healthy population and more variable environment.
It’s like magic. And by magic I mean it’s fake.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CTpxQqLFQCk/
Addendum:
I ran into the following article from Propublica while doing some referencing for the above. It's a perfect example of a publication putting on a show of wrestling with the absurdity (and the author likely truly being unnerved by it) without actually deviating from the narrative that the CDC counts are repeatable as long as they disclaim that they are "probably an undercount" and the unjustifiable belief that we're probably at least catching enough information to believe that we are seeing sizably less hospitalizations after vaccination, despite that that's not at all substantiated. I think it’s worth a mention:
The CDC Only Tracks a Fraction of Breakthrough COVID-19 Infections, Even as Cases Surge
Here are a few notable quotes with annotations:
“The CDC tracked all breakthrough cases until the end of April, then abruptly stopped without making a formal announcement.”
False. The CDC was never tracking “all breakthrough cases”. And by false, I mean false as per the CDC, which explicitly stated in a show of archetypal derriere-covering that its numbers “will represent an undercount” on account of the fact that the organization, by its own admission, never actively counted breakthrough cases. There has been nothing but passive acceptance of voluntary reporting from state departments, which means it was never prioritized, and that there was virtually none of it. On May first, the CDC just quietly codified this dereliction into their documentation as much as politically maneuverable, taking them off the hook almost entirely.
“Only half the states provide some data on COVID-19 illnesses in vaccinated people.”
Exactly. There was never active counting of breakthrough cases thanks to a total absence of vigilance at the federal level.
“In Texas, where COVID-19 cases are skyrocketing, a state Health and Human Services Commission spokesperson told ProPublica in an email the state agency was “collecting COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough cases of heightened public health interest that result in hospitalization or fatality only.””
The gaul of this statement is tremendous. Your data arm does not track hospitalizations, as expressly relayed in the Texas Tribune.
You could interpret this as technically true if you assume “cases of heightened public health interest” means whatever haphazardly rolls across the tally desk because someone in the system rattled a bunch of cages about it, which speaks to just how terrifyingly bad this system is, but if that statement was meant to taken as suggesting that vigilance was being engaged in, it was meant to mislead.
It’s a farce, ultimately.
The article says that South Carolina makes its figures public, and that Utah is being transparent, but nothing indicates that they are actually performing the granular counting that would be required to make that meaningful.
In fact, the only real example the article finds of what appears to be responsible pharmacovigilance comes from a single county in Nevada:
“Some county-level officials said they track as many breakthrough cases as possible even if their state and the CDC does not.
For instance, in Clark County, Nevada, home of Las Vegas, the public health website reported that as of last week there were 225 hospitalized breakthrough cases but 4,377 vaccinated people overall who have tested positive for the coronavirus.
That means that less than 5% of reported breakthrough cases resulted in hospitalization.”
No. That’s just over 5%.
And the general percentage of COVID-19 cases that end up hospitalized for the same county?
Just over 6%. http://web.archive.org/web/20210825215450/http://covid.southernnevadahealthdistrict.org/cases/ (As of September 2021, and also in the earliest available date in the web archive, December 22, 2020 as well: http://web.archive.org/web/20201222083305/http://covid.southernnevadahealthdistrict.org/cases/)
Yikes. That’s not going to sell Americans on the tall tale of the magic vaccinations.
Like all articles from legacy media on the topic (and Propublica isn't legacy media), this one too made sure to put on an air of bewilderment and impartiality without actually admitting that the CDC is engaging in a practice that would certainly be called lying if it was being performed by a country we didn’t like (imagine if North Korea designed a medication for something, didn’t bother with active surveillance of the cases where it didn’t work, and then proceeded to promote the resulting trivial figure in its headlines as a ratio against the zealously calculated disease totals so as to argue that it was of unparalleled efficacy. Are you kidding me?). Propublica performs this balancing act, as they all did, by interspersing sleazily persuasive language somehow missing the point of similitude required to make a meaningful comparison (“means that less than 5%…” which again, was already mathematically wrong to begin with) with a couple of quotes of cautious disagreement from sterilized experts and anecdotes from a person or two they’re nobly sympathizing with, so you know they’re doing their best to give a voice to everyone (which in this pandemic era is nothing short of hilarious). You can almost see their munificent hands patting the interviewees on the back. This particular one closes with a quote from one of the women who was a breakthrough case, who we’re supposed to be very understanding of, while implicitly also believing that she is a rare occurrence who is probably letting her experience crowd out the bigger picture:
““Everyone has a right to know how many breakthrough cases there are,” she said, “I was under the impression that if I did get a breakthrough case, it would just be sniffles. They make it sound like everything is under control and it’s not.””
Best to learn they’re full of it early, Sara.
Not trying to rag unduly on Propublica either. This was the most critical piece on the abomination we're seeing that I found; it actually was willing to use contentious phrasing like "flying blind" which is laudable because it's true. And I will always be grateful to them for exposés like the following, written before the whole world had to pretend that our agencies, whatever their flaws, were ultimately on our, and not Big Pharma's, side:
https://www.propublica.org/article/fda-repays-industry-by-rushing-risky-drugs-to-market
Enjoy the biomedical dystopia, everyone.
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