A Bad Number in A Good Cause: A Scientist’s Plea About COVID Vaccine Numbers
I’ve lately been seeing a lot of tweets, news segments and articles talking about the success of vaccination and using COVID vaccine numbers like this:
Of the 164 million vaccinated Americans, less than 0.1% have been infected with the coronavirus, and 0.001% have died, according to data from the CDC.https://t.co/qPAJW35tIJ pic.twitter.com/yCveWpz7jb
— Axios (@axios) July 31, 2021
I am going to ask folks nicely: please please please please please stop putting out numbers like this. Without context, it is absolutely meaningless. It is exactly the same thing the COVID deniers did last year when, while the pandemic was just getting started, kept saying, “Hey, COVID has only killed a few hundred people, why are we panicking?” In fact, you could have reproduced this exact number for unvaccinated Americans if you ran it in April 2020.
The Delta infection has just hit our shores. It is still spreading. Fortunately, the vaccines appear to be effective in preventing infection, hospitalization and death. But more vaccinated people are going to get infected. More are going to be hospitalized. More are going to die. That’s simply a fact. And so, the numbers cited above will keep changing.
Now if you want to compare these numbers to unvaccinated Americans, that is useful information. About 100,000 Americans have died since we began mass vaccination and only 1000-2000 of those were vaccinated. The vast majority of those who died were not fully vaccinated. That’s useful information. But it’s also fraught. Because most of those deaths were due to the original COVID strain. Delta may change the math quite a bit so that a much larger percentage of deaths are among the vaccinated (and the percentage of the unvaccinated dying will rise anyway as more people are vaccinated due to a statistical illusion called base rate bias).
I used deaths as a comparison because the number of infections among the vaccinated is almost certainly useless. Vaccinated people are far less likely to develop symptoms and far less likely to develop severe symptoms. So, they are less likely to get diagnosed with COVID in the first place.
Look, the case for vaccines is clear. And I’m glad to see reports of vaccinations ramping up over the last week or so as people realize that we’re not out of the woods. But boasting that the vaccinated aren’t getting sick…yet…smacks of hubris. And if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s to be cautious in proclaiming victory.
In the meantime, in one of our “read it for yourself” things, I’ll link you to the CDC’s internal documents on the Delta variant. The short version is that Delta is far more infectious. And while the vaccinated are far less likely to get the disease, if they do get it, they are just as likely to spread it as the unvaccinated. Which is why masks are coming back. There’s also a good case to be made for booster shots, especially for those whose immunity comes from a prior infection instead of the vaccine.
It’s important that we continue to be cautious with COVID vaccine numbers. But we should also continue to know hope. We’re making progress. But the war isn’t over.
My own guess at this point is that Fox (and some other conservative media) have heard from the FTC. And the FTC pointed out to them that there are now civil and criminal penalties for saying untrue or misleading things about treatment and prevention of Covid-19. That puts Fox in a tough place. They have to tell their viewers that the vaccines are amazing, because they are. To some extent they have to put up numbers to demonstrate just how amazing because numbers are easily quotable. But their viewers are not statisticians or epidemiologists. So they run a story about ICUs filling up with unvaccinated people in Missouri, and they put up a graphic with numbers that say vaccinated have a hospitalization rate from Covid of 0.003%, and they hope the FTC will accept that.
Edit to add: Suddenly, Fox is all over illegal immigrants as a meaningful disease vector, because that’s the one right-wing talking point that the CDC hasn’t put out numbers about.Report
Last I checked, there were no such penalties, and the First Amendment would make such penalties unconstitutional.
Cite statute or federal regulation, please.Report
COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act of the 2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act, FTC page here. Chase down the cross-references for the civil and/or criminal penalties.Report
“affecting commerce”
As we know from past Supreme Court judgements, this phrase can be made to mean many things.Report
(Somehow my reply to this message disappeared. Ye Moderators have a problem and I’m very close to abandoning OT because of it. This is a new reply, somewhat expanded.)
The law referenced therein does not apply to Fox or to any other media; it applies only to “commercial speech”, speech (as advertising) in furtherance of a commercial transaction. Were it otherwise, it would forbid you and me from expressing what the government decides is deceptive speech. Which would be outright censorship and forbidden by the First Amendment.Report
Bill, sorry about that. We’ve had a problem in the last week or so with a particular commenter who jumps between names as easily as one changes socks. This has put some of the moderators to have a higher internal filter than they might otherwise have.
Anyway. Welcome! Great to have you here! Just please stick to the commenting policy and try to assume that the person you’re speaking to is wrong and can be reasoned out of their position rather than that they’re evil and can be shamed out of it.
Thanks! And stick around!Report
Apology not accepted. Shall I explain in detail or do you want to try to figure out on your own the several ways your apology is inadequate and offensive?Report
Golly. I can normally be a *LOT* more offensive than that. I mean, I wasn’t even *TRYING*.
Anyway, seriously. I’m sorry if some of your stuff got flagged unnecessarily. I now have you mentally in a different bucket than the person who has been jumping from name to name.
As for community expectations, there are a handful of fundamental assumptions that we have in our commenting policy that you can enjoy reading here.
Thanks for commenting and I look forward to disagreeing with you in the future!Report
I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors and I hope you find other places that will be receptive to your arguments that the government can’t or won’t apply laws in ways that you think would be unconstitutional.
Edit: Wait… was that M.A.? If so, it’s family reunion week.Report
“And while the vaccinated are far less likely to get the disease, if they do get it, they are just as likely to spread it as the unvaccinated.”
From the document you cited, “Early evidence in health care providers that vaccination may reduce transmission and attenuate illness”.
We *do not know* whether the vaccinated are as likely to spread the disease as the unvaccinated.Report
While I mostly agree with this post, I don’t agree “that Delta is far more infectious.” Unknown and unproven. From the author of a virology textbook:
“Just because a variant displaces another does not necessarily mean it is more infectious or more deadly to the people who become infected with it. As has been true for the past year and a half, human behavior is far more important in shaping the course of the pandemic than variant”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/opinion/covid-vaccine-variants.html
The only significant human behavior at this point is whether people are going to get vaccinated and/or get infected.Report
That article is a month old. The data out of CDC, Israel, UK and Singapore clearly show it’s more infectious.Report
He’s still repeating it:
“The delta variant is NOT in itself causing cases to surge in the US. That is being driven by unvaccinated people, failure to mask, and a return to physical interactions. ANY SARS-CoV-2 variant would behave in the same way.”
July 29, 2021Report
Why are you placing all authority on this one guy, and not…all the other virologists who are saying delta IS more infectious?
Is he the Viral Pope, speaking from his office, dictating truth to reality?
I mean he may be right, but when the experts are titled heavily one way — why would you imbue the dissenting voice with so much more authority than everyone else combined?Report
Haven’t listened to the entire podcast yet, but skipping to where they discuss the Delta variant on the This Week in Virology podcast,the panel agreed that there is no data, and it will take months to get that data. The CDC should have simply recommend masking because of increased cases and hospitalizations, but don’t blame it on any variant or use CT values.
My extrapolations: Public health officials have been hyping “mutant” variants since at least Christmas and are losing credibility, and it was completely unnecessary to risk further erosion of credibility here.
CT values identify the presence of RNA, but a virus can enter a fully vaccinated person, and though the virus is completely prevented from reproducing, the presence of RNA will still be detected. This type of test cannot inform us whether the vaccine is working.Report
While I mostly agree with this post, I don’t agree “that Delta is far more infectious.” Unknown and unproven. From the author of a virology textbook:
“Just because a variant displaces another does not necessarily mean it is more infectious or more deadly to the people who become infected with it. As has been true for the past year and a half, human behavior is far more important in shaping the course of the pandemic than variant”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/opinion/covid-vaccine-variants.html
The only significant human behavior at this point is whether people are going to get vaccinated or get infected.Report
I went grocery shopping.
I got two of the big packs of the good toilet paper. The *BIG* big packs.
I’m sure that everything will be okay, given how Delta ripped through Israel and Europe.
But still.Report
I just got a call from a guy I was supposed to meet today, in person.
He (fully vaccinated) caught Covid last week at a family function. Whether it was from an unvaccinated person or not will probably never be known.
But the takeaway for me is that this is very real, and still with us and that I should stay masked, vaccinated or not.Report
Is Delta more infectious? Hard to compare to the original strain in an virgin population, but the numbers show that it is certainly more infectious in our current population then the original strain right now.
Is Delta more deadly? Again, we don’t have a virgin population, but the with universal testing available we can clearly see that the rate of infection is rising much more then the hospitalization rates did vs. earlier strains – meaning that in our current population it is creating far fewer serious cases.
Do the vaccines prevent infection? The data has been changing rapidly as Delta becomes more prominent – beware datasets that have a large component of pre-Delta numbers as they show a significantly different result. The CDC data from Provincetown shows that vaccinated people only saw about 7-9% decrease in infection rates vs. unvaccinated. Many have pointed out that this is a small study capturing somewhat extreme mixing behavior that might represent a worse-case scenario. Unfortunately it is eerily consistent with some of the latest data from Israel. I can’t find the link now but I saw a breakdown of vaccination rates by age group vs. new cases by age group. Similar to the Provincetown CDC data the blended average of reduced cases among the vaccinated (relative to their proportion of the population) was under 9%. As the Delta variant becomes more dominate or is replaced by Lambda this number can be expected to drop even further.
These developments don’t change the fact that the data is still consistently showing substantial risk reduction of hospitalization (still above 60% in every dataset I have seen). It does however dramatically undermine the argument that vaccination protects anyone other then the person being vaccinated. The vaccinated are nearly as much of a risk of passing the virus as the unvaccinated at this point.
Still not receiving much press however is that those who have had a prior COVID infection are protected from infection at a rates well over 90%. So much for the high antibody production rates from the vaccine being an indicator of greater protection than natural immunity. It looks like we will be going through this until the virus burns its way through most of the population, vaccinated or not.Report
It looks like there’s more and more reason to believe in a lab leak.
Report
Ordinarily I’d note that this is some Republican dude’s report, not the committee’s, that this is not a committee with expertise in virology or epidemiology or, you know, anything related to diseases, and that the dude who headed the committee and the dude whose tweet you posted are, er, not reliable sources on this (or any) topic, or even that actual experts don’t appear to be taking this report at all seriously, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.Report
But he has a blue check!
As for the actual experts taking this report seriously, it’s dated August 2021? And I’m guessing that it wasn’t released yesterday because yesterday was Sunday?Report
Yeah, I’m sure the responses I’ve seen have been as much related to the sources as the positive ones.Report
Pielke has a blue check because he’s been verified, which just means Twitter is reasonably certain of his identity. And he is a scientist, though way out of his discipline lane with this one.
He’s also dodging a statement right above the one he highlights that’s of some importance:
Which means in a month or so we will have the IC report – and Republican politicians have an interest in making hay of this before that report comes out.Report
Preponderance of evidence is a low legal threshold.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/preponderance_of_the_evidence#:~:text=Preponderance%20of%20the%20evidence%20is,that%20the%20claim%20is%20true.
Its great and all in civil lawsuits, but even there it doesn’t prevail all the time. And most scientists (regardless of discipline) would find it so statistically suspect as to be almost meaningless.
Are Chinese officials obstructing the investigation – most assuredly. Does that mean there’s anything nefarious going on here? Hardly.Report
“It is the opinion of Committee Minority Staff, based on the preponderance of available
information….”
send tweet.Report