More Evidence for Vaccine accelerating Omicron infection?
Why did infections rise dramatically in recent weeks among the vaccinated?
In the process of updating my UK Dashboard with data from the latest report, something just jumped off the screen at me. Here are the cases per 100K for each report (each report covers a 4 week span), red bars are unvaccinated & green are fully vaccinated, segmented by age group:
Focus on the right side of these charts, going from Weeks 47-50 to Weeks 49-52 (the UK skipped a week of reporting over the holidays). See how the green bar grew much faster than the red bar in every age group. In the 70-79 and 80+ age groups, the unvaccinated were more likely to be cases in weeks 47-50, but in weeks 49-52 they are less likely to be cases. For all the groups between 18 & 69, the vaccinated were already more likely to be infected, but that gap grew by a crazy amount between the last two reports. For the youngest group, it still appears infections are more common in the unvaccinated, however their rates stayed relatively flat over the last two reports, while the vaccinated group got infected at almost 3x the rate in weeks 49-52 as they did in 47-50. Honestly, with a jump that size I almost wonder if there was an error in the data they are publishing.
At quick glance, I don’t see anything in the report that indicates whether this major change coincides with Omicron taking over as the dominant strain in the UK, but the timing is certainly suspicious. If that is the case, then I would hypothesize is that what we are seeing above is further evidence of possible negative VE against infection for Omicron.
Additional resources:
El Gato Malo discusses negative VE in Ontario, Canada. BTW- If anyone knows how I can earn the esteemed designation as a gatopal, that would be my crowning achievement of this substack.
Eugyppius discusses other evidence from UK
Out here in the People's Republic of California, the data is completely opposite of the UK, Denmark and German data, data that shows negative vaxx efficacy.
I think Calif Dept of Public Health is playing with the numbers to game the charts, but I won't bore you with my amateur analysis details. Link below for the curious.
https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/#postvax-status
Thanks again for the great recap.
I don't know how to make you a gatopal but you deserve it!
FWIW, here's my attempt to cover the same thing: https://noline.substack.com/p/ukhsa-week-2022-01
By the way, in Denmark, their version of the CDC literally admits that efficacy is negative. They publish an efficacy number, per brand (Pfizer/Moderna) and per age group. Fascinating stuff - https://noline.substack.com/p/denmark-ssi-report-week-2022-01