Vaccine Failure and the Way Out | Hacker News Reader

Vaccine Failure and the Way Out

eugyppius.substack.com

12 pointsAmbolia10 comments

> If you peer deeper, you’ll generally find this: The vaccinated remain substantially protected against serious illness or death, but the unvaccinated are entering the hospital and dying at very high rates indeed, as if to compensate .... If this is just Delta being more dangerous, then we would expect countries with lower vaccination rates to be enduring truly staggering mortality right now, but they are not. In heavily vaccinated countries, Delta is raging with a rare fury among the unvaccinated, but in lesser-vaccinated countries it is doing nothing unusual. This means that the efficacy statistics are broadly unreliable. The exact reasons don’t really matter: Either the vaccines have the power to change the whole picture, or they don’t.

Perhaps the unvaccinated people in low-vaccination countries are unvaccinated due to low vaccine supply, and thus take non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI: masks, social distancing) seriously, while the holdouts in high-vaccine countries have opted out by choice and belligerently disregard NPI, causing the disease to run wild through their communities.

Japan is a big counterexample to this hypothesis. Sky-high compliance with the NPIs which are supposed to help reduce transmission, and also lots of transmission happening.

* Just about every significant mutation has arisen in a mostly unvaccinated country. The Delta mutation was identified in India.

* The missing variable is looking at the restrictions each country imposes. Israel and the UK are almost fully open as are parts of the US. Less vaccinated countries kept their restrictions.

When the Delta variant was identified most countries had not or had just started their vaccination program.

>If this is just Delta being more dangerous, then we would expect countries with lower vaccination rates to be enduring truly staggering mortality right now

Isn't this exactly what we are seeing? Mexico is among the lowest-vaccinated countries in the western hemisphere and leads the world with a 7.7% case fatality rate. Compare this to <2% for most developed, well-vaccinated countries. The African countries have by far the lowest vaccination rates in the world, but it's debatable whether their record-keeping on mortality is remotely accurate.

You'd need to factor in age and possibly some other lifestyle factors. Africa's poplation is markedly younger, which given how covid death rates are distributed can have a big effect.

Sure, but Mexico has a younger population than the US and over 4X the case fatality rate.

This blogger, in a previous post has the intriguing theory that Coronavirus has eradicated the flu, that the 1918 flu may have done the opposite, and introduced the flu as a thing and that any attempt to eradicate Coroavirus will bring the flu back with generally negative impacts.

He talks a good game, but I'm reminded of many, many blogs on climate change and renewable energy that we now know to be wrong. What mechanism is it that elevates eloquent cranks who happen to believe in politically helpful notions of the powerful to prominence.

... I mean, this just sounds like nonsense. There was very little flu last year, because measures against covid, while only somewhat effective against covid, were extremely effective against the flu (as you'd expect; the flu is less infectious). Notably, flu was lowest (or non-existent) where control of covid was also quite good; there's not much reason to think that covid _displaced_ the flu.

But the flu has animal reservoirs; it is, unfortunately, going nowhere.

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