Last week, the CDC announced a surprising finding: “Delta infection resulted in similarly high SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated people.” Public officials had known from the early days of vaccine development that vaccinated people could catch COVID-19, but the assumption had been made that they were not going to be spreaders of COVID-19.
It turns out that the delta variant is sufficiently different from the original Wuhan version of the virus that the vaccines work much less well. The CDC performed an analysis of COVID-19 cases arising from one public gathering in Massachusetts. They found that the gathering led to 469 COVID-19 delta cases among Massachusetts residents, with 74% of these cases in fully vaccinated attendees. Massachusetts is a highly vaccinated state, with approximately 64% of the population fully vaccinated.
There are other issues coming up as well. How long does the vaccine really last? Is the vaccine itself part of the reason that the virus is mutating as rapidly as it is? Are we making problems for ourselves by creating an army of people with very light cases of COVID-19 who can spread the virus to both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated without realizing that they have more than a cold? Aren’t we inadvertently killing off the least able of the virus mutations and allowing the most virulent to multiply?
My training is as an actuary, so I am familiar with modeling. I am also a “systems thinker.” I know that it is important to look at longer-term impacts as well as short-term impacts. If a person works in the healthcare field, it is easy to consider only the obvious short-term benefits. It takes some analysis to figure out that today’s vaccines may lead to stronger variants (such as delta) and the more overall spread of COVID-19.
In this post, I will explain some of the issues involved.
[1] Today’s vaccines provide only a fraction of the true level of protection required. Their actions are in many ways similar to applying weed killer at half the strength needed to kill the weeds or providing antibiotics at half the dose required to stop the spread of bacteria.
All of our lives, we have been told, “Be sure to complete the full course of the antibiotics. It is necessary to kill all of the bacteria. Otherwise, it will be easier for a few of the stronger bacteria not to be affected. If you stop too early, the bacteria that are least affected by the antibiotic will survive and reproduce, while the others will die. Stopping the drug too soon is a great way to achieve antibiotic resistance, quickly.”
Unfortunately, COVID-19 vaccine makers seem to have overlooked this issue. The respected BMJ published an editorial entitled, Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us. It makes the point:
Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said, “Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things . . . first, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital, and two, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.”
Yet the current phase III trials are not actually set up to prove either.
We were told that the new COVID-19 vaccines are “95% effective in preventing symptomatic disease,” but it turns out that this is far less adequate than what most people would assume. The vaccine is “leaky.” A big issue is that the virus mutates, and the vaccine works much less well against the mutations. The world can never reach herd immunity if immunized people keep catching new variants of COVID-19 and keep passing them on, as the evidence now suggests.
About Gail Tverberg
My name is Gail Tverberg. I am an actuary interested in finite world issues - oil depletion, natural gas depletion, water shortages, and climate change. Oil limits look very different from what most expect, with high prices leading to recession, and low prices leading to financial problems for oil producers and for oil exporting countries. We are really dealing with a physics problem that affects many parts of the economy at once, including wages and the financial system. I try to look at the overall problem.
Side Effects
