Sympathy and Compassion Could be Waning

 For decades, the so-called "vaccine hesitant" have been at it.  Starting with Edward Jenner's cowpox vaccine against smallpox, it's been nearly steady since then.

One of the most egregious examples of misinformation, falsification and lies was Andrew Wakefield's fiction that the MMR vaccine caused autism in children.  Claims of "vaccine injuries" have been almost non-stop since then.  That was in 1998.  It took until 2011 for The Lancet to declare that the original study was fraudulent.

For almost the whole of the past 18 months, the anti-vaccine crowd has been pressing the charge against the prospective vaccines and, once available, the actual products.

For most of the past century, the anti-vaccine crowd have been able to hide behind the herd immunity created when a good majority of the rest of the population got their vaccinations.  Sporadic outbreaks still occurred here and there, most notably of measles.  Measles vaccinations have stagnated and anti-vaccine people have attacked with vigour.  In 2018, over 140,000 people died around the world from what is an easily preventable disease.  Most deaths were in children under 5 years of age.

It would not be to much to call this criminal.

Now we have COVID-19.  Anti-vaccine nitwits have recently claimed the current crop of vaccines contain poisons, microchips, will make you magnetic, affect your fertility, affect other organs in your body (usually at some unspecified time in the future), were developed by Bill Gates as a method of population control, will alter your DNA.....and that's only a small sample of the craziness they've been promoting.

As the 4th Wave sweeps across much of the world, particularly the USA and Canada, patience is wearing a bit thin with falsifications from the anti-vaccine crowd that are holding down vaccination rates and therefore enabling the development of more variants and even more deaths and economic disruption.

In an article recently posted in The Atlantic, conservative commentator David Frum makes a valid point: Vaccinated America Has Had Enough.  He claims that this could have been mostly over by now.  "Post Trump America has decided that vaccine refusal is a statement of identity and a test of loyalty."  (Trump, of course, was vaccinated back in January 2021).

Another conservative commentator I listen to regularly essentially said similar things.  This was in a podcast called Covid Compassion Fatigue, which can be heard here.  There was one brief point in the podcast where I was yanked back into consciousness by the comment that there was a "growing frustration with the unvaccinated and the politicians who enable them" (around 18:00).  Around the 27 minute point he asks who we should feel compassion for (children, healthcare workers) and that he just feels moments of "incandescent rage about the people who are fucking it all up".  And the following few minutes after that are particularly telling; life for a second summer with kids you're trying to protect.  And back to school, with masks, no field trips.... and because of adults and kids are paying the price.  If you want to hear a rant from the conservative ranks, this would be it.

Basically, it seems to come to this:

And we are getting very tired of it.

Lies, Dammed Lies and Statistics

 One of the numerical weapons the anti-vaccine cult has been using lately comes from so-called "breakthrough infections", where fully vaccinated individuals contract the virus.

One example comes from Israel, where one report claims that 97% of new cases are in fully vaccinated individuals.

However, the real story from Israel paints a different story.

Another comes from Iceland, where 82% of new cases are similarly from fully vaccinated people.

One fact-checked explanation here....

There is more information about the situation in Iceland here....

Of course, these numbers are being used by the anti-vaccine cult to bolster their claims that the vaccines are not only harmful (or at least harmful by some uncertain time in the future) but are also pretty much useless.

First, vaccines don't generally prevent infection.  If a person is exposed to a virus against which they have been vaccinated, that person's immunity can't really DO anything until the virus is inside that person's body.  In other words, the person has been infected.  Evidence shows, however, that the virus is generally cleared quickly and the person might not even show any symptoms.

What vaccines really do is prevent serious illness and death from specific pathogens.  They continue to do this very well.  It is true, though, that they are not like a Star Wars Force Field and they are unable to keep the pathogen from entering your body.

Second, no vaccine is 100% effective.  The current crop of COVID-19 vaccines seem to have efficacy rates in the range of 90+%.  It is to be expected, therefore, that some immunized people will still get sick and possible that a small number will die.  This will be more noticeable in the current situation where the virus is affecting billions of people all around the world.  The efficacy rates still stand, though.

Third, as vaccination rates increase in various countries, it is to be expected that some cases will be from vaccinated people because those are increasingly the only people left for the virus to infect.  To take an extreme position, if 100% of a population were vaccinated, it would be possible to see 100% of new cases in fully vaccinated people, simply because there are NO unvaccinated individuals left.

This leads to a statistical issue that the current reports seem to be unaware of, something called "base rate bias" or the "base rate fallacy".  An illustration is needed to explain and Wikipedia even has an article describing it:

Imagine a country of 1 million people where seatbelts are mandatory AND where almost everyone (95% - or 950,000) of people in vehicles wear them. You know that in some accidents, some will still die, although the death rate overall in vehicle accidents has fallen dramatically with the use of seatbelts. Suppose that out of 100 deaths, 75 wore seatbelts and 25 didn't. Of course, it could be reported that 75% of those deaths were people who were wearing seatbelts.  The anti-seatbelt group would claim that seatbelts aren't as useful because more people wearing seatbelts were dying than those who weren't wearing them.  This is an example of "base rate bias".  To understand the data correctly, consider the following:

⁠Seventy-five deaths are from the 95% who were wearing seatbelts (75 deaths out of the base number of 950,000 people who wear seatbelts) is a death rate of 0.0079%. 

Twenty-five deaths out of the 5% who weren't (25 deaths out of the 50,000 who don't wear seatbelts) is a death rate of 0.05%. 

In this admittedly contrived example, those NOT wearing seatbelts are dying at a rate of over 6 TIMES the rate of those wearing seatbelts. This is a difference of over 500%.  To state it a different way, unbelted individuals are over 6 times (over 500%) as likely to die as belted individuals.  Look again at the original numbers, 75 deaths belted, 25 deaths unbelted.  The problem lies in the base number used in the calculations.  

Some news reports are simply using the raw numbers to say that more vaccinated people are coming down with the virus than unvaccinated people.  As we can see, it's a misrepresentation of the data by not referring to the base numbers for each of the two groups of people.  And some people will believe it and use this to justify not getting vaccinated.  This is why misinformation is so dangerous.

The Delta Variant

 [As of early August....]

If there's one thing we ought to be getting used to, given the pace of things the past 18 months or so, it's change.  Canada, along with many (most?) other countries, is in the grips of the Delta variant.  What's known about this genetic variation of the SARS-C0V-2 virus?

The Delta variant was first seen in India last December.  Within weeks it swept through India and Great Britain before arriving in the USA and North America in general.  By the end of July, the Delta variant made up 80% of new COVID cases in the US.  According to Yale Medicine, the Delta variant is 50% more contagious than the Alpha variant which was 50% more contagious than than original strain of the virus.

The CDC published a summary about this variant on August 6th, 2021.  It's short and can be seen here:

One podcast I follow regularly is Science Vs, from Gimlet Media.  Although it's on a summer hiatus, they put out a podcast specifically on the Delta variant, complete with citations for pretty much everything.  I'd recommend a listen; worth the 20 minutes.

The Delta Variant - How Bad Is It?

There is a full transcript which can be seen here, including the list of citations.

Some takeaways from this podcast:

• Viral load in people infected by Delta might be the same in vaccinated and unvaccinated people
• This means that vaccinated people could likely transmit the virus
• It's not known if vaccinated people transmit the virus as efficiently as unvaccinated people.
• Some recent studies show that viral loads seem to decrease more rapidly in vaccinated individuals.
• When vaccinated people get infected, they don't get nearly as sick and are very unlikely to die.
• This means, that although Delta is concerning for vaccinated people, it's downright scary for unvaccinated individuals.
• The mutation responsible for all this can be found in the spike protein.
• Infections in kids are rising in the US, but it seems kids aren't getting as sick as they were earlier.  But it's an area of concern.

The obvious recommendations?  Get vaccinated if you haven't so far.  Go back to wearing a mask in certain situations like inside around more people.  Pay attention to the good practices that we learned about in the earlier days of the pandemic.