You are talking about a totally unimportant statistic. The statistic which should be highlighted is the death rate from those who have had Covid is a massive 0.8%. If you factor in that 90% of the 0.8 % are over the age of 70 then the only conclusion you can possibly draw is that the world went absolutely insane to prevent the spread of a virus that is dangerous to virtually no one under the age of 70.
The world has been conned . As an exercise in how spreading fear makes the masses easy to control it was a blinding success.
The fatality rate in an unvaccinated population is around 1% and will be significantly higher than that if people can't access healthcare. This implies at least 680,000 deaths in the UK if everyone is infected. This is an outcome that few people would accept. From the outset, the UK government's policy was to prevent so many people getting Covid simultaneously that healthcare was inaccessible to many patients (Covid and non-Covid). This was done first with lockdowns and then with vaccines.
Ignoring the whiff of eugenics about your comment regarding the over-70s, it should be noted that more than 30,000 people under the age of 70 have died with Covid in the UK.
Your Maths is wildly inaccurate. For starters to say that the death rate in an unvaccinated population is 1% is at best a guess. You say that 1% of this guess equates to 680,000 people but that would infer that the virus would be dangerous to everyone when it is blindingly obvious that it isn’t.. I fail to see how pointing out the FACT that 90% of the 0.8% who died as a result of catching this infection has a whiff of eugenics.
To ignore the facts to suit an agenda was criminal. The variety of vaccines have not undergone the usual stringent tests that medications are supposed to go through purely to make it look like we were being proactive. The danger to children from the virus is virtually nil and yet the clamour to have them vaccinated is loud. Why ?
If vaccinations are indeed a good thing why not vaccinate those most in danger like we do with the flu jab.
Seasonal flu kills roughly 0.1 % of those who catch it. The WHO now says that 0.6% of those who catch Covid die and admit the disease prays on the elderly particularly rose over 70.
We are all victims of massive media manipulation that made us treat this thing like a dangerous plague. It is clear that to 99.4% of the population infected it isn’t.
Thank you for posting a study which confirms my figures. There are a lot of estimates attributed to various academics some of whom point out that their estimates are based on far from simple maths. The trouble with estimates is that they can be wildly inaccurate. For example the original budget set for HS2 was £55 billion and it is now estimated that the cost will be between 72 and 95 billion. The fact that a mathematical estimate factors in a £23 billion margin for error shows how meaningless it is. I would put money on it going over £100 billion but that is a different story.
The facts are all that should matter. The danger of this virus was massively exaggerated . We were all myself included coerced into taking a vaccine that did not prevent the spread and did not prevent you catching it. Why people are so convinced this was a good thing continues to elude me. Why anyone under the age of 50 was encouraged to take it is non sensical. As I said before as an exercise in showing how you can manipulate a population to accept ridiculous restrictions on your normal everyday life it was a phenomenal success. You only have to witness the amount of people who still wear masks to know this is true. Why do they wear them ? Is it to protect themselves from us or us from them ? I’m guessing it’s the latter. Each to their own however . Just because someone doesn’t agree with you it doesn’t make them a lunatic.
Given that covid outcomes are so heavily age stratified and the vaccines seemingly do not have any meaningful impact on transmission - can you make an argument that rolling out (and indeed coercing) the vaccines onto the whole population was still a good decision?
Have you read anything into the concept of "original antigenic sin" and why the idea of vaccinating a whole population with a narrow and out of date spike may cause more issues than it solves in the long run?
Does the ONS define unvaccinated as someone who has never taken a COVID vaccine? Or is it everyone who isn't two weeks post a second dose? If it is the latter, it will inevitably catch some of the cases of the verified harms of the vaccine and lump them incorrectly with the unvaccinated category.
In hindsight, would a better strategy have been to offer the vaccine to all over 65s and clinically vulnerable and let the rest of the population acquire immunity from a natural infection?
Coercing the population was never justified. Vaccine passports, mandates etc. never made sense. There could have been some justification for them if vaccine uptake had been very low, but that was never the case in Britain where 'vaccine sceptics' have always been a lunatic fringe.
I've never seen any evidence for the second proposition and there has certainly been no evidence of it in this pandemic to date. Vaccines are not antibiotics and, as it happens, the virus has evolved in a less virulent, though more infectious, direction.
The ONS defines someone as unvaccinated if they've never had any Covid vaccines. It separates those who have had a vaccine <2 weeks and >2 weeks since the vaccine in the spreadsheet mentioned above.
The vaccine was offered first to the elderly and vulnerable. Preventing the rest of the population having access to it would have been unethical and 10,000s of them would have died in the subsequent waves.
Appreciate the responses Christopher. To reply in reverse order:
The ONS's own figures showed that between March 2020 and October 2021 3,774 people under 65 and with no underlying conditions died from COVID. That was pre-omicron when as you correctly state, the virus was deadlier. So I struggle to see how 10,000s would subsequently die in later waves. But I can accept an ethical debate of offering it to the population and letting them choose. I do think the take up may have been significantly lower without the relentless coercion though.
Good to see that the full dataset makes the distinction. For a long time, especially in the media, this was blurred.
Keep an eye on this one as the situation progresses.
I think you misrepresent the vast majority of sceptics relating to the mrna roll out. Sure there are some long standing, genuine anti-vaxxers in the mix who were always going to come out in the wash but the majority are far from lunatics and the number of rational people questioning the wisdom of the strategy is growing. Is everyone who will decline a fourth dose in the autumn a lunatic also?
“The ONS's own figures showed that between March 2020 and October 2021 3,774 people under 65 and with no underlying conditions died from COVID. That was pre-omicron when as you correctly state, the virus was deadlier. So I struggle to see how 10,000s would subsequently die in later waves.”
You’re making a distinction between people with underlying health conditions and those who don’t which wasn’t made in your original comment and which I find immoral. I think I’m right in saying that the majority of people in Britain have an underlying health condition and I don’t see any reason to value their lives less than those of anyone else. For half the period you mention, we had a vaccine, and we were in lockdown for nearly half of the whole period, so it offers no kind of counterfactual to what would have happened in an uncontrolled epidemic without a vaccine.
I don’t think someone who turns down another vaccine is a lunatic. Absent a particularly nasty variant, it probably wouldn’t be worth the while of anyone under the age of 50/60 to bother. If they start lying about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy, however, I would happily call them an anti-vaxxer and possibly a lunatic.
"In hindsight, would a better strategy have been to offer the vaccine to all over 65s and clinically vulnerable and let the rest of the population acquire immunity from a natural infection?"
I make the distinction quite clear in my first comment. At no point do I claim the lives of elderly or vulnerable people are worth less than anyone else. I think you have been having too many Twitter arguments and are lumping anyone with a nuanced viewpoint on this into your generic denier/ bad person category.
It also appears you are suggesting that for moral purposes when making medical decisions we should not take into account someone's underlying health? This is the most important time to make such distinctions.
The vast majority of those 3,774 deaths took place before the vaccine rollout reached that age group. And how many covid deaths in the healthy under 65 cohort do you really think lockdown managed to save? The troubling non-covid excess deaths now consistently showing in the UK are likely downstream of the lockdowns. Appreciate it is a separate point to the original article.
The unfortunate situation is that since the vaccine trial participants were unblinded, the data will always be foggy.
I don't think even Bourla or Bancel will claim the efficacy is still 94% though. Updating the formula away from the now extinct Wuhan spike may help somewhat. Still yet to find an explanation as to why this hasn't occurred.
There are a number of highly qualified clinical researchers sounding vaccine caution, some of whom say they have been vaccinated themselves, some not. They suggest all cause mortality is showing higher than usual death rates from a number of causes including heart related conditions and cancers in younger people, and additionally reduced fertility in both males and females and higher than usual rates of emergence and re-emergence of autoimmune conditions and conditions such as shingles caused by dormant viruses in the body since mass Covid vaccination, and they provide scientific explanations of the reasons why they believe vaccine harm may be involved. The vaccines being questioned are the MRNA versions which are the only ones used in the US and now the preferred (and much more expensive) ones here in the UK. The suggestion is that repeated doses make these latent longer term issues more likely. Against this background, and the reality that most people now have some level of immunity acquired either by vaccination or infection or both, do you not believe we should exercise much greater caution about promoting repeated doses, particularly in young people, until significantly more research and evidence gathering has been undertaken by parties not beholden to the big pharmaceutical companies. Pretty much all these companies have been previously fined multiple times for malpractice, Covid has been a bonanza, the gift which keeps on giving. I don’t believe in conspiracies but I do believe in greed leading to adverse events being swept under the proverbial carpet.
It seems from the latest leaked messages between Hancock and Johnson etc that they knew that the risk from this virus was negligible to the majority of us and yet we were all subjected to the nonsense of masks vaccines and myriad stupid rules of congregation. Was the ruination of the world economy intentional? I struggle to come up with an alternative answer.
Thanks for the explanation. What I am still not clear on is what factors are at play to reconcile the age standardised data to the raw data *by age band* that was quoted by Zuby and others.
Is it simply that the 10 year age bands are too wide and therefore age is still a factor *within* those bands?
The dataset in the ONS spreadsheet does not appear to have sufficient detail to recalculate the age standardized chart that you and the ONS quoted, so presumably there is an additional dataset somewhere that supplements this one, that would provide the answer?
Part of it will be that the ONS has a more sophisticated age-standardisation system than simply looking at the vaccine status of people in (for example) their 60s. People are less likely to be vaccinated at age 60 than age 69, for example. The ONS is also looking at 'person-years' ie. years of life lost, which will be higher for unvaccinated people if they are younger than average. The ONS also adjusts for gender, and possibly other factors.
You are talking about a totally unimportant statistic. The statistic which should be highlighted is the death rate from those who have had Covid is a massive 0.8%. If you factor in that 90% of the 0.8 % are over the age of 70 then the only conclusion you can possibly draw is that the world went absolutely insane to prevent the spread of a virus that is dangerous to virtually no one under the age of 70.
The world has been conned . As an exercise in how spreading fear makes the masses easy to control it was a blinding success.
The fatality rate in an unvaccinated population is around 1% and will be significantly higher than that if people can't access healthcare. This implies at least 680,000 deaths in the UK if everyone is infected. This is an outcome that few people would accept. From the outset, the UK government's policy was to prevent so many people getting Covid simultaneously that healthcare was inaccessible to many patients (Covid and non-Covid). This was done first with lockdowns and then with vaccines.
Ignoring the whiff of eugenics about your comment regarding the over-70s, it should be noted that more than 30,000 people under the age of 70 have died with Covid in the UK.
Your Maths is wildly inaccurate. For starters to say that the death rate in an unvaccinated population is 1% is at best a guess. You say that 1% of this guess equates to 680,000 people but that would infer that the virus would be dangerous to everyone when it is blindingly obvious that it isn’t.. I fail to see how pointing out the FACT that 90% of the 0.8% who died as a result of catching this infection has a whiff of eugenics.
To ignore the facts to suit an agenda was criminal. The variety of vaccines have not undergone the usual stringent tests that medications are supposed to go through purely to make it look like we were being proactive. The danger to children from the virus is virtually nil and yet the clamour to have them vaccinated is loud. Why ?
If vaccinations are indeed a good thing why not vaccinate those most in danger like we do with the flu jab.
Seasonal flu kills roughly 0.1 % of those who catch it. The WHO now says that 0.6% of those who catch Covid die and admit the disease prays on the elderly particularly rose over 70.
We are all victims of massive media manipulation that made us treat this thing like a dangerous plague. It is clear that to 99.4% of the population infected it isn’t.
It’s not a guess. All you have to do is work out how many people have it and how many people die from it a few weeks later. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/207273/covid-19-deaths-infection-fatality-ratio-about/
Using the same simple maths you can also work out how many people get hospitalised by it, ie. around 3-5%.
Thank you for posting a study which confirms my figures. There are a lot of estimates attributed to various academics some of whom point out that their estimates are based on far from simple maths. The trouble with estimates is that they can be wildly inaccurate. For example the original budget set for HS2 was £55 billion and it is now estimated that the cost will be between 72 and 95 billion. The fact that a mathematical estimate factors in a £23 billion margin for error shows how meaningless it is. I would put money on it going over £100 billion but that is a different story.
The facts are all that should matter. The danger of this virus was massively exaggerated . We were all myself included coerced into taking a vaccine that did not prevent the spread and did not prevent you catching it. Why people are so convinced this was a good thing continues to elude me. Why anyone under the age of 50 was encouraged to take it is non sensical. As I said before as an exercise in showing how you can manipulate a population to accept ridiculous restrictions on your normal everyday life it was a phenomenal success. You only have to witness the amount of people who still wear masks to know this is true. Why do they wear them ? Is it to protect themselves from us or us from them ? I’m guessing it’s the latter. Each to their own however . Just because someone doesn’t agree with you it doesn’t make them a lunatic.
It doesn’t confirm your figures. It directly refutes your figures. If you can’t read a simple press release then go comment elsewhere.
You have a problem I think with percentages and anyone who disagrees with you. Happy to comply with your request..
A few thoughts:
Given that covid outcomes are so heavily age stratified and the vaccines seemingly do not have any meaningful impact on transmission - can you make an argument that rolling out (and indeed coercing) the vaccines onto the whole population was still a good decision?
Have you read anything into the concept of "original antigenic sin" and why the idea of vaccinating a whole population with a narrow and out of date spike may cause more issues than it solves in the long run?
Does the ONS define unvaccinated as someone who has never taken a COVID vaccine? Or is it everyone who isn't two weeks post a second dose? If it is the latter, it will inevitably catch some of the cases of the verified harms of the vaccine and lump them incorrectly with the unvaccinated category.
In hindsight, would a better strategy have been to offer the vaccine to all over 65s and clinically vulnerable and let the rest of the population acquire immunity from a natural infection?
Coercing the population was never justified. Vaccine passports, mandates etc. never made sense. There could have been some justification for them if vaccine uptake had been very low, but that was never the case in Britain where 'vaccine sceptics' have always been a lunatic fringe.
I've never seen any evidence for the second proposition and there has certainly been no evidence of it in this pandemic to date. Vaccines are not antibiotics and, as it happens, the virus has evolved in a less virulent, though more infectious, direction.
The ONS defines someone as unvaccinated if they've never had any Covid vaccines. It separates those who have had a vaccine <2 weeks and >2 weeks since the vaccine in the spreadsheet mentioned above.
The vaccine was offered first to the elderly and vulnerable. Preventing the rest of the population having access to it would have been unethical and 10,000s of them would have died in the subsequent waves.
Appreciate the responses Christopher. To reply in reverse order:
The ONS's own figures showed that between March 2020 and October 2021 3,774 people under 65 and with no underlying conditions died from COVID. That was pre-omicron when as you correctly state, the virus was deadlier. So I struggle to see how 10,000s would subsequently die in later waves. But I can accept an ethical debate of offering it to the population and letting them choose. I do think the take up may have been significantly lower without the relentless coercion though.
Good to see that the full dataset makes the distinction. For a long time, especially in the media, this was blurred.
Keep an eye on this one as the situation progresses.
I think you misrepresent the vast majority of sceptics relating to the mrna roll out. Sure there are some long standing, genuine anti-vaxxers in the mix who were always going to come out in the wash but the majority are far from lunatics and the number of rational people questioning the wisdom of the strategy is growing. Is everyone who will decline a fourth dose in the autumn a lunatic also?
“The ONS's own figures showed that between March 2020 and October 2021 3,774 people under 65 and with no underlying conditions died from COVID. That was pre-omicron when as you correctly state, the virus was deadlier. So I struggle to see how 10,000s would subsequently die in later waves.”
You’re making a distinction between people with underlying health conditions and those who don’t which wasn’t made in your original comment and which I find immoral. I think I’m right in saying that the majority of people in Britain have an underlying health condition and I don’t see any reason to value their lives less than those of anyone else. For half the period you mention, we had a vaccine, and we were in lockdown for nearly half of the whole period, so it offers no kind of counterfactual to what would have happened in an uncontrolled epidemic without a vaccine.
I don’t think someone who turns down another vaccine is a lunatic. Absent a particularly nasty variant, it probably wouldn’t be worth the while of anyone under the age of 50/60 to bother. If they start lying about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy, however, I would happily call them an anti-vaxxer and possibly a lunatic.
"In hindsight, would a better strategy have been to offer the vaccine to all over 65s and clinically vulnerable and let the rest of the population acquire immunity from a natural infection?"
I make the distinction quite clear in my first comment. At no point do I claim the lives of elderly or vulnerable people are worth less than anyone else. I think you have been having too many Twitter arguments and are lumping anyone with a nuanced viewpoint on this into your generic denier/ bad person category.
It also appears you are suggesting that for moral purposes when making medical decisions we should not take into account someone's underlying health? This is the most important time to make such distinctions.
The vast majority of those 3,774 deaths took place before the vaccine rollout reached that age group. And how many covid deaths in the healthy under 65 cohort do you really think lockdown managed to save? The troubling non-covid excess deaths now consistently showing in the UK are likely downstream of the lockdowns. Appreciate it is a separate point to the original article.
The unfortunate situation is that since the vaccine trial participants were unblinded, the data will always be foggy.
I don't think even Bourla or Bancel will claim the efficacy is still 94% though. Updating the formula away from the now extinct Wuhan spike may help somewhat. Still yet to find an explanation as to why this hasn't occurred.
South Africa is an answer to your key questions about OAS
There are a number of highly qualified clinical researchers sounding vaccine caution, some of whom say they have been vaccinated themselves, some not. They suggest all cause mortality is showing higher than usual death rates from a number of causes including heart related conditions and cancers in younger people, and additionally reduced fertility in both males and females and higher than usual rates of emergence and re-emergence of autoimmune conditions and conditions such as shingles caused by dormant viruses in the body since mass Covid vaccination, and they provide scientific explanations of the reasons why they believe vaccine harm may be involved. The vaccines being questioned are the MRNA versions which are the only ones used in the US and now the preferred (and much more expensive) ones here in the UK. The suggestion is that repeated doses make these latent longer term issues more likely. Against this background, and the reality that most people now have some level of immunity acquired either by vaccination or infection or both, do you not believe we should exercise much greater caution about promoting repeated doses, particularly in young people, until significantly more research and evidence gathering has been undertaken by parties not beholden to the big pharmaceutical companies. Pretty much all these companies have been previously fined multiple times for malpractice, Covid has been a bonanza, the gift which keeps on giving. I don’t believe in conspiracies but I do believe in greed leading to adverse events being swept under the proverbial carpet.
Have you changed your mind on this yet ?
It seems from the latest leaked messages between Hancock and Johnson etc that they knew that the risk from this virus was negligible to the majority of us and yet we were all subjected to the nonsense of masks vaccines and myriad stupid rules of congregation. Was the ruination of the world economy intentional? I struggle to come up with an alternative answer.
What is a "smiley"?
https://quillette.com/2021/01/16/rise-of-the-coronavirus-cranks/
Thanks for the explanation. What I am still not clear on is what factors are at play to reconcile the age standardised data to the raw data *by age band* that was quoted by Zuby and others.
Is it simply that the 10 year age bands are too wide and therefore age is still a factor *within* those bands?
The dataset in the ONS spreadsheet does not appear to have sufficient detail to recalculate the age standardized chart that you and the ONS quoted, so presumably there is an additional dataset somewhere that supplements this one, that would provide the answer?
Part of it will be that the ONS has a more sophisticated age-standardisation system than simply looking at the vaccine status of people in (for example) their 60s. People are less likely to be vaccinated at age 60 than age 69, for example. The ONS is also looking at 'person-years' ie. years of life lost, which will be higher for unvaccinated people if they are younger than average. The ONS also adjusts for gender, and possibly other factors.