But boosters dramatically increase protection against infection, which can help reduce the spread of the virus.
Gibraltar, 100% vaccinated with Pfizer since the spring, did not escape the summer outbreak.
And with 35% already given the booster from early October, they are having an even bigger outbreak now.
Three jabs, but the virus still spreads.
The insanity is remarkable.
100% of Gibraltar's ~40k residents were fully vaccinated by May 1, but infections took off again starting around Jul 1, as in many places invaded by the India variant.
The current, larger outbreak than in July coincides almost exactly with the commencement of its booster shot program after Oct 10. Over 14k booster doses have been administered so far.
95% of Gibraltar's 98 deaths to date had occurred already by mid-March, lending support to the idea that vaccination prevents bad outcomes, if not infection and spread.
Gibraltar is using Pfizer.
The insanity of this ought to be plain.
A jab every 6 months means 145 shots throughout an average lifespan of 78 years.
And have fun at Thanksgiving thinking your vaccinations through May still protect you and your loved ones this November.
You might as well be Nick Chevotarevich.
The ratio of Pfizer to Moderna administered in Canada is currently 3.5:1.
Canada disproves Eric Topol's alarms about Delta. He calls Delta so formidable and hyper-contagious that 90-95% vaccine coverage is required.
At a level far less than that, however, Delta came, and more importantly went, in Canada, as if the vaccines made not the slightest bit of difference.
Virus gonna virus.
In The Grauniad:
Noteworthy is Belgium with 74% fully vaccinated and one of the hardest-hit countries in the world, now at 79/100,000, currently 10th highest caseload globally. That alone tells us 74% isn’t enough, and that prior Covid (without vaccination, what some refer to as “natural immunity”) is unreliable for representing a solid immunity wall against the Delta variant. In fact, it has been projected for Delta that any country needs to achieve 90-95% of its total population fully vaccinated (or with recent Covid) in order to have population-level immunity that covers, providing relative protection, for the others.
Actually what it tells us is that the Pfizer vaccine, which is what Belgium overwhelmingly uses, does not stop the spread.
The CDC and Anthony Fauci have held since late in 2020 that the reproduction rate for COVID-19 of 2.5 means a 60% vaccination level should stop the pandemic.
The vaccines haven't done that.
The United States is 57.6% fully vaccinated to date, plus 13.9% who have survived infection to date, thus 71.5% "immune".
Yet here we are, into the sixth wave:
Almost 74% of the vaccine doses administered to date in Ireland have been Pfizer's.
FDA doesn't give a shit about saving lives in an emergency.
So what should we think of the FDA keeping the drug, called Paxlovid, out of the hands of the infected? The FDA’s advisory committee won’t meet to approve the Merck drug until after Thanksgiving, according to the FDA’s website . The meeting is an entirely virtual one, so this isn’t a matter of getting all the advisory committee members into one place. It’s just a matter of scheduling. The earliest we could get Paxlovid into doctors’ offices or pharmacies is mid-December.
More.
In a huge Qatar study of 907k, Pfizer effectiveness against infection fell to only 20% in months five to seven after the second dose, which is admittedly pretty shocking (but don't get distracted by the shiny object -- boosters!):
The results indicated that vaccine effectiveness against any SARS-CoV-2 infection was 36.8% (95% CI, 33.2-40.2) in the third week after the first dose, peaking at 77.5% (95% CI, 76.4-78.6) in the first month following the second dose. Effectiveness gradually waned thereafter, then dropped after the fourth month to reach about 20% in the fifth through seventh months, according to the researchers.
“These findings suggest that a large proportion of the vaccinated population could lose its protection against infection in the coming months, perhaps increasing the potential for new epidemic waves,” Chemaitelly and colleagues wrote.
More.
But these claims fly in the face of the Provincetown incident of July 4th, where there was mass infection among fully vaccinated individuals, a plurality of whom had received Pfizer. Loss of protection against infection appears to be coterminous with vaccination "protection", not something which occurs after month seven, for example. The median interval from completion of vaccination to symptom onset in that incident was 3 months, which means half of the infected symptomatic cohort had been recently vaccinated (6-86 days!):
Among fully vaccinated symptomatic persons, the median interval from
completion of ≥14 days after the final vaccine dose to symptom onset was
86 days (range = 6–178 days).
The Qatar study people, apparently:
The vaccine's weakening protection may be due to people's behavior, the study authors noted.
"Vaccinated persons presumably have a higher rate of social contact than unvaccinated persons and may also have lower adherence to safety measures," they wrote. "This behavior could reduce real-world effectiveness of the vaccine as compared with its biologic effectiveness, possibly explaining the waning of protection."
The studies were published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Do you think the campaign to scare everyone into getting vaccinated would have succeeded if that had been reported up front before the FDA gave emergency use authorization?
The chicanery here is very deep, but at least the big bad Delta variant bullshittery is disposed of:
The decline in efficacy for infection is “most likely due to waning and not caused by delta or other variants escaping vaccine protection,” Pfizer chief medical officer for vaccines Dr. Luis Jodar said.
It is claimed the two-dose regimen is 90% effective against hospitalization for six months.
But there is not one single word in this story about how vaccinated people still spread the virus.
Not one.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/04/pfizer-covid-vaccine-protection-against-infection-tumbles-to-47percent-study-confirms.html
Swedish health authorities on Wednesday suspended the use of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for those ages 30 and under, saying the move was done out of precaution.
The reason for the pausing is “signals of an increased risk of side effects such as inflammation of the heart muscle or the pericardium” — the double-walled sac containing the heart and the roots of the main vessels, Sweden’s Public Health Agency said in a statement. “The risk of being affected is very small.” ...
U.S. and European regulators caution, however, that both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines appear linked to a rare reaction in teenagers and young adults — chest pain and heart inflammation. ...
New preliminary Nordic analyzes indicate that the connection is especially clear when it comes to Moderna’s vaccine, especially after the second dose, the agency said. ...
The Swedish agency said the vaccine from Pfizer is recommended for these age groups instead.
More.
Cases and deaths Apr-Sep 2020 were 7.074m and 0.2025m respectively, for a cfr of 2.863%.
Cases and deaths Apr-Sep 2021 were 12.979m and 0.1463m respectively, for a cfr of 1.127%.
The C19 case fatality rate year over year Apr-Sep 2021 was therefore down over 60%. Total deaths period over period were down almost 28%. The theory that the so-called Delta is more transmissible yet less deadly seems to hold up. The virus has evolved to spread, at the expense of its ability to kill.
That there were comparatively FAR more cases in the 2021 period, nearly 6 million more cases, despite a mass vaccination effort is remarkable. How could that be?
The powers that be are blaming the unvaccinated.
But the timeline of events indicates that the vaccinated are implicated in the latest surge in cases, and therefore also in the deaths, which at over 57k in September are almost as bad as in April 2020.
CDC removed its mask guidance for the vaccinated in mid-May, which the president and vice-president both lauded with great enthusiasm.
And by June 1, 50% of the US population had received at least one dose of a C19 vaccine.
Vaccinated people took off their masks and enjoyed their summer.
Meanwhile Anthony Fauci had indicated on at least two occasions, in December 2020 and again in April 2021, that we would start to witness a decline in cases after achieving that level. But daily new cases just seemed to shrug their shoulders for a month instead, skipping along in a tight range for all of June. Then in July they began to soar, just as the India variant became dominant.
It's important to emphasize how fantastically wrong Fauci was about this.
In December 2020 Fauci had merely said a 50% vaccination level would need to be reached before an impact on the infection numbers would be observed, but by late April, with cases in another steep decline, he really doubled down on his claim and amplified it:
"When you get to somewhere between 40 -50%, I believe you’re going to start seeing real change, the start of a precipitous drop in cases .”
Instead of that precipitous drop he was about to get 9.8 million new cases in Jul-Sep vs. 3.1 million in Apr-Jun.
The dirty truth in all this is that the wildly growing numbers in the vaccinated population unknowingly spread the virus for 2.5 months, from mid-May through July, before the CDC reversed itself on mask guidance at the end of July after the Provincetown, MA, study showed that the virus was spreading like wildfire among vaccinated people. A Texas prison inmate study has shown the same thing since then.
Many vaccinated people have continued to spread the disease since the CDC reversed itself, however, as numerous incidents of masklessness involving celebrities and government officials demonstrate. My own veterinarians saw no need to wear masks when I took my cats in for appointments in early and late August. The late August one even asked if that was OK with me, which was hardly part of the new guidance. Mask wearing by vaccinated people, especially professionals, should have been de rigueur in close quarters in public by then.
With Pfizer vaccine effectiveness falling off to undetectable levels by month seven, we have an awful lot of people walking around who think they are bulletproof when they are not. They are instead dangerous to public health.
The surge in cases beginning in the seventh month of the year proves it.
Six months after receiving the second dose of the two-shot vaccine from Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE, many recipients no longer have vaccine-induced antibodies that can immediately neutralize worrisome variants of the coronavirus, a new study suggests. ... neutralizing antibodies that can block infection against coronavirus variants such as Delta, Beta, and Mu were undetectable at six months after the second dose.
More.
AP Obama talks up the John Maynard C19 Booster Shot:
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-middle-east-public-health-coronavirus-vaccine-9ee6e5d46d29c08bf7610b39713b025e
Most adults had received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine by March, causing infection levels to plummet and allowing the government to lift nearly all coronavirus restrictions.
But in June, the highly infectious delta variant began to spread. After studying the matter, experts concluded that the vaccine remained effective against the virus, but that its efficacy waned roughly five months after the second shot.
In late July, Israel began distributing booster shoots to at-risk citizens, including those over 60. Within weeks, it expanded the campaign to the general population.
More than 3 million of Israel’s 9 million citizens have gotten a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine, according to the Health Ministry. ...
The Israeli Health Ministry said the FDA decision “gave validity to the third vaccine operation” underway in Israel, which “decided to act responsibly and quickly in order to treat growing infections.” It said statistics show the booster dose has “restored protection.”
Israel tonight ranks 8th worst in the world for C19 cases per million, and about 50th for deaths per million (in the top 25%). There were just over 50 in hospital in mid-June, but tonight there remain well over 1000 hospitalized for C19 after peaking at 1444 at the end of August.
But the FDA could still decide to pull the trigger anyway.
Asked what has brought Israel to peak transmission even as the country has already provided third doses of vaccines to 1.5 million citizens, Rahav, who has become one of the best known faces of Israel’s public health messaging, sighed, saying, “I think we’re dealing with a very nasty virus. This is the main problem—and we’re learning it the hard way.”
“It is a combination of waning immunity, so that inoculated people get reinfected, and at the same time the very transmissible Delta variant,” Rahav said, adding that Israelis lacked the discipline to revert to mask usage as the numbers began rising. “But it is not an Israeli problem,” she added. “It is everywhere.”
In other words, they have no idea why.
More.
63% of the country is fully vaccinated with Pfizer, which has now rushed into a booster shot program giving a third dose to about a million to date.
