Long Vaccine

Some disorganised thoughts about what is happening and what is to come.

Everybody’s favourite and least excitable “epidemiologist”:

Eric Feigl-Ding @DrEricDing

⚠️DEATHS INCREASING—new data shows both Danish🇩🇰 excess deaths & deaths “due to (caused by) COVID” increasing—surging by ⬆️34% for total COVID deaths, & ⬆️26.6% for deaths “caused by COVID” in one week. 📍Most COVID+ deaths due to COVID. (This is 🇩🇰CDC own table) #CovidIsNotOver

In fact excess mortality in Denmark remains relatively low, on par with that in Sweden (where restrictions are similarly relaxed) and Ireland (where they’re stricter), and lower than Czechia (where they’re also stricter). It remains essentially impossible to find any correlation with pandemic measures and excess mortality in European countries.

This doesn’t stop Feigl-Ding from tweeting absolute lies like this, of course:

Eric Feigl-Ding @DrEricDing

MY GOD—Danish 🇩🇰 political leaders have completely lost their frigging minds releasing all #COVID19 mitigations — these are exponentially ⬆️ surging DEATHS not cases!!! This is what happens when a country’s leaders gaslights its own citizens. #CovidIsNotOver

No, the appearance of “exponentially surging DEATHS not cases!!!” is in fact an artefact of “exponentially” surging cases. A vast number of people have Omicron right now. The people who were supposed to hang my new curtains have Omicron, many of my work colleagues have Omicron, and a lot of Danes who are dying of other causes have Omicron. (Weirdly, I do not have Omicron.)

Deaths with and from Corona in Denmark. The colours, from top to bottom: Death with Covid; Awaiting Death Certificate; Not Yet Determined; Death from Covid.

The Omicron sub-lineage BA.2 now dominates in Denmark; it may be more pathogenic in immunologically naive hamsters than BA.1, but this finding doesn’t matter much, because as good as nobody in Denmark is immunologically naive any longer. Almost everyone there has been vaccinated or infected or both, and for such people, BA.2 remains a minimal risk.

With all of that out of the way: None of this means that nobody is dying of Corona in Denmark. Maybe a quarter of their official Corona mortality are deaths caused in some way by Corona. This is enough to produce their lightly elevated death statistics, given the very high prevalence of infection there.

The simple truth is that, since the rise of Delta in summer 2021, the vaccines don’t have any obvious transmission-suppressing effect. If anything, they seem to have infection-enhancing effects. And this is a problem, because there will never be any unvaccination.