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Comment by nanis | Hacker News Reader

This assumes that the reasons the unvaccinated are unvaccinated are independent of why they might end up hospitalized due to a Covid19 infection.

If they were not vaccinated because they were not deemed healthy enough to be able to handle the side-effects of the vaccine, then their inherent susceptibility to hospitalization is higher and the favorable comparison mostly indicates that the vaccinated population is healthier not that the vaccine is effective.

The vaccine might be effective, but to establish its long term efficacy requires people of similar health status assigned to vaccinated/not vaccinated groups. Of course, the control arms of the vaccine studies were busted about nine months ago, so that is not possible.

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> If they were not vaccinated because they were not deemed healthy enough to be able to handle the side-effects of the vaccine

This is, in practice, _extremely_ rare. In countries with high vaccine acceptance, uptake in the over-80s group, where that sort of problem is most likely, is well in excess of 99%.

> uptake in the over-80s group ... is well in excess of 99%.

I am not sure N_vaccinated_over_80/N_total is germane to the issue.

>> out of 515 patients currently hospitalized with severe cases in Israel, 301 (58.4%) of these cases were fully vaccinated

That means, there are 214 hospitalized with severe cases of Covid19 who are not vaccinated. What matters is why those 214 people were not vaccinated. I am not sure any hints in that direction are available. According to the charts here[1], there is some indication that indeed the severe/unvaccinated combination is related to age but the data are presented in n/100K which means I would have to look up a bunch of numbers I do not know where to find to be able to impute something.

[1]: https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1425855705500864523

Dashboard which is data source is here. https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general . It's a bit in hebrew.

Those that are not vaccinated, in addition to standard mistrust, conspiracies and somewhat misplaced confidence that they won't get sick have also some original reasons "Israel is used like a lab rat for vaccine testing" and "1 year after vaccination you will explore"

Do you have a link to any data or analysis about this? This article only differentiates between over and under 50.

Except when you read the article, then it doesn't.

Interesting point. I'd think the correlation skewed the other way -- that anyone at higher risk would be more likely to get a vaccine. There aren't many people (as a percentage) who are so ill that a vaccine might seriously harm them.

You're not wrong, but you're vastly overestimating the possible effect here even if you are right about the reasons for being unvaccinated. And I'm quite certain you're wrong about that. The reasons are mostly the same as here - misinformed younger people.

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