Most of the main media articles these days are focusing on the same topics: return to normal life by full vaccination, boosters are important, new mutations are discovered on a regular basic making your life more miserable, the danger is in the air, unvaccinated are bad, yada, yada, yada.
But occasionally, we can read something like this: "Covid deaths in nursing homes back to pre-vaccines 2nd wave level, expert says".
Nursing homes were the first targets of the vaccination campaign here in the Netherlands, based on the idea to first protect the old people in dire need of such protection. And how did that work? According to the numbers, 1 in 5 residents died (22% reported deaths). This is basically the same situation as the previous autumn, when no one was vaccinated.
"We were also surprised by the result," said the professor (Cees Hertogh affiliated with Amsterdam UMC)
The declarations try to sugar coat the results: the figures emphasize the importance of a booster shot, "absolutely impossible to conclude" from the figures that vaccination would not work well for this group, etc.
Well, there are indeed a lot of variables and the lack of unvaccinated group control makes it even harder, but seriously, the same percentage as before vaccination? We also don't have the deaths distribution through the time, so we cannot see when most of them took place: in the end, when supposedly the efficiency is lower, or constantly throughout the whole period?
And then the ultra-known phrase "We've known from the start that vaccines are not 100 percent effective".
No, they are not 100% effective. But surely as hell, they're advertised as extremely efficient:
VE against COVID-19 hospitalizations was higher for the Moderna vaccine (93%; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 91%–95%) than for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (88%; 95% CI = 85%–91%) (p = 0.011); VE for both mRNA vaccines was higher than that for the Janssen vaccine (71%; 95% CI = 56%–81%) (all p<0.001).
Protection for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine declined 4 months after vaccination.
Source link. VE = vaccine effectiveness in preventing COVID-19 hospitalization.
Note that the median age of the subjects above is 27-31 (!!)
The above mentioned professor is actually part of the Outbreak Management Team, an important player behind all the corona related restrictions put in place by the government. His declarations are so innocent at this point:
"In nursing home residents, the effectiveness could be slightly lower because some of them have a weakened immune system. And we know the antibodies decrease over time."
Slightly?? So slightly, that we have 1 in 5 dead? So slightly, that we see no improvements since 1 year ago?
Although most of these statements were well known even before corona time, the way they promoted the vaccination in the first place makes it really muddy. A lot of details were hidden to make the whole campaign look as a huge success. The vaccines were seen as the perfect solution (or almost). In order to sell a product, you have to convince everyone there is the ultimate product, the only one that can bring the normal life back. They never said these things in the beginning:
- efficiency of the vaccination wanes over time, and more likely every 6 months you will need to do it again and again and again. Notice that even today the used term is booster (as in the third and final shot) and not repeated boosters.
- the efficiency of the vaccines is highly related to the age of the subject, and as a person over 60 you might be out of luck (since your immune system is weakened by age, if not by other factors).
- the vaccine can have some unpleasant side effects, like death and the probability increases with age.
- we advertise it as >90% starting efficiency, but it's probably more around 40-60%, as a regular flu-shot.
Most of the hidden details created false hopes for the old vaccinated people, who probably started to feel invulnerable to the virus due to the vaccination. For 22% of them that didn't work so far.
