Bookmark this for next time you're called "anti-science"

Jun 29, 2023

The recent kerfuffle between Joe Rogan and RFK Jr. vs. Peter Hotez & co. has me thinking (lamenting) about the fact that, to this day, the common perception is that the COVID vaccines have worked very well against serious illness (i.e. hospitalization and death). While Inumero readers may be in a bit of a bubble whereby we think it’s impossible for anyone to have confidence in the vaccine’s efficacy against anything, I think if we look out in the broader world, we will see that is still the conventional wisdom, and obviously still what is being touted by the “experts”.

Below I will plot, for each US region, “Hospital Admissions with Confirmed COVID per 100K people” vs. % of Adult Population “fully vaccinated” (side note- I recently learned about custom shapes in Tableau, do you like the syringes used for vaccine line?). I have used hospitalizations rather than deaths because that reporting seems far more consistent (CDC death data includes many cases where a state essentially reports negative deaths, presumably as a way to correct past data).

Next time a friend or family member calls you a conspiracy theorist, anti-science, or something worse, and says, “The vaccines prevented a lot of people from getting very sick and going to the hospital”, perhaps your response can be, “Uh, where exactly did they do that?” and show them these charts.

Notes:

Data Sources
- Hospitalization Data (starts in July 2020): HealthData.gov
- Vaccination Data: CDC
The charts that follow show a line (left axis) of hospital admissions per 100K people with confirmed covid, and the syringes (right axis) show % adult population “fully vaccinated”, i.e. a dose of J&J or 2 of the mRNA vaccines.
I have labeled the vaccination level at the peak hospitalization point in the post-vax period.

Northwest

West

Southwest

Northern Rockies and Plains

South

The vaccination data looks weird here because Texas was not reporting this consistently initially. Following this chart is one with this region, minus Texas.