The Week 49 UKHSA vaccine surveillance report dropped yesterday as expected. Once again eugyppius draws the missing graph for you:

Here we see the continued influence of the booster campaign in the United Kingdom, as negative efficacy disappears among 70 year-olds as well. Remember that these weekly reports present overlapping four-week averages, and that booster doses are generally administered in the oldest and most vulnerable cohorts first. Alas, because of fools like Ed Humpherson, it will be hard for the vaccinators to claim a victory here, because they spent the past six weeks telling all and sundry that the negative efficacy didn’t real.

Of course, the boosters are not a cure-all. They almost surely do nothing about transmission, and merely reduce symptoms, such that the vaccinated are much less likely to test positive. All of the hype about Omicron escaping the vaccines is overblown; the Delta strains that survived the great vaccination wave of spring/summer 2021 are quasi-escape strains already.

Now the 60-day death rate by vaccination status …

… and the 60-day death numbers by vaccination status:

I am often asked how these charts can be so radically different. The reason is that almost everyone in the vulnerable age brackets in the UK is vaccinated. So you can have much higher death rates among the unvaccinated, but vastly higher death numbers among the vaccinated. Imagine an extreme world, where only one person remained unvaccinated, and he died. In that world, the unvaccinated death rate would be an astounding 100%, while all deaths but one (the vast, vast majority) would be in the vaccinated.

Below the fold, some further highlights for subscribers.

eugyppius: a plague chronicle

UKHSA Vaccine Efficacy Statistics: Week 49

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial