"Of all Covid patients in the ICU, about 80% are over 50 and most have risk factors such as high blood pressure, heart failure or diabetes."

The vaccinators are vaccinating the wrong people, Part 1491230471325.

Sisters of Mercy Hospital, Linz: 17 March 2020

A friend on Twitter points us to this letter to the editor written by an intensivist in Linz, Austria – printed on Sunday in Oberösterreichische Nachrichten:

Of all Covid patients in the ICU, about 80% are over 50 years old, and most have widely recognised risk factors such as high blood pressure, heart failure or diabetes. Of the patients younger than 50 who end up in ICUs with Covid, 80% are varying degrees of overweight. These statistics should be known to every Austrian and also to our decision-makers by now. Perhaps the planned vaccine mandates should be confined to these groups, and we should avoid raining vaccines down upon the entire population (including healthy children and adolescents). Perhaps a compromise like this would help to calm our heated social and political environment, which is urgently needed.

Mandate centrism aside, the basic point here is crucial: People who end up in hospital dying of Corona are overwhelmingly very old and very sick. If our press or our bureaucrats truly wished to solve the problem of overwhelmed hospitals, they would be investigating the demographic characteristics of severely ill unvaccinated patients, discovering trends in this group, and pondering ways to get vaccines to them. Reducing the likelihood of severe outcome in the very old and the very sick is the only conceivable application that our leaky, rapidly fading vaccines have.

Instead, medical bureaucrats are asking all of the wrong questions:

Dr. Tom Frieden @DrTomFrieden

We don't have enough data on who is getting severe breakthrough infections in the US, which is hampering our ability to prioritize vaccination, treatment, and protection to prevent deaths.

By definition, severe breakthrough infections happen in people who were always beyond the help of the vaccines. There is no preventing these outcomes. The only thing that could matter – again, assuming you want to reduce the burden on hospitals – is getting vaccines to the high-risk unvaccinated.

Lockdowns have implanted in the minds of policymakers everywhere, the unshakeable belief that by reducing spread overall, you can also save the elderly. Over a year’s worth of experience has shown that this is the wrong strategy, and yet vaccination policy continues to operate on the same premise, hoping to use vaccines in place of lockdowns to suppress SARS-2. This idée fixe is particularly unfortunate, because it is above all in stopping transmission that the vaccines have failed.

What nobody will recognise in all of this, is the simple fact that most infections don’t matter. Most people feel sick for a few days and recover without incident. Accepting for the sake of argument all the official doctrines about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, it necessarily follows that most vaccinations don’t matter either. Universal suppression policies are destroying our economies, our societies, and our lives, while also failing to do anything much about SARS-2.

UPDATE: It should go without saying that I oppose vaccine mandates of any kind; I don’t want mandates for the young and healthy, and I don’t want them for the old and sick either. What I am trying to address, here and in other posts, is an ongoing, self-reinforcing error of vaccine policy, which is focused on vaccinating everyone – particularly the young and healthy – after having done a poor job of offering vaccines to those most likely to die. This creates the illusion that the vaccines are vastly more effective than they are, and increases demand for universal vaccination within the bureaucratic ranks.

A thought experiment: Imagine a vaccine which is only vaguely effective against SARS-2 and which also puts one out of every 5,000 people in the hospital. A dumb vaccination campaign, which gave this vaccine only to the young and healthy, would appear to be extremely effective against SARS-2. (The injuries don’t show up in your Corona statistics, remember, so they’re effectively invisible). Until the campaign was expanded to include all of those sick and most likely to die, everyone would be singing the praises of this miraculous vaccine. This may well be the world we are in, right now.