Imagine the following scenario: Scientists develop a vaccine against a virus, test it and find that it reduces risk of hospitalization from infection by 75%. And yet, despite no change to the virus itself, the vaccine ended up dramatically increasing the number of hospitalizations, even though the 75% protection against hospitalization stood fast as a rock. How could such a thing happen?
Well imagine for a moment that the vaccine increases your risk of infection by 30%, because the sort of immune response it provokes in your body is similar to that in anyone else who receives the vaccine. This is the sort of risk that wouldn’t show up during clinical trials, as only a handful of people would have a similar immune response to you. For you as an individual to take this vaccine would now mean your risk of hospitalization from the virus has reduced by 67.5%, rather than 75%, as you have to account for the increased risk of catching the virus to begin with.
But now imagine you live in a relatively isolated society of a hundred million people. All hundred million citizens have received the vaccine. A hundred tourists show up in the country, bringing the virus with them before all travel is shut down. The average tourist exposed nine people to this virus. The average exposed person has a 10% chance of catching it upon exposure.
In the absence of the vaccine, we would see the following pattern:
1st generation: 100 cases
2nd generation 90 cases
3rd generation 81 cases
4th generation 73 cases
5th generation 66 cases
6th generation 59 cases
7th generation 53 cases
8th generation 43 cases.
In total after the 8th generation you would have had 586 cases (excluding the original tourists). After forty or so generations you’d reach the point where one person fails to infect anyone and the outbreak dies out.
Now imagine in our world, we increased the individual exposed person’s risk of catching it by 30%. Instead of every tourist infecting 0.9 people on average, they would infect 1.17 people on average.
What happens now is that after ten generations you would have 2620 cases in total among citizens of the country.
If the first scenario had a 10% risk of hospitalization, reduced to a 2.5% risk of hospitalization through vaccination in the second scenario, the prior scenario would lead to 58 hospitalizations, whereas the latter would lead to 65. And so although everyone individually managed to reduce their own personal risk by embracing the vaccine, after the tenth generation the vaccination campaign would have led to more hospital admissions. With a generation time of five days, your vaccine would have caused more hospital admissions within fifty days of the hundred tourists introducing the initial seed.
Why do I propose these numbers? Well, allow me to illustrate once more the problem we’re dealing with. The entire population has received vaccines that have long term negative efficacy against infection:
And my conviction is that the majority of people reading something like this, even people with Phd’s, will think to themselves: “Well it still works against hospitalization so I’m still better off because I got vaccinated” instead of thinking: “This is how you turn small waves that burn out on their own, into big waves that burn through the whole population.”
Does a 20 or 30% increased risk of infection really matter THAT much? The answer is that yes it does, if you realize the sort of numbers we’re toying with here.
We will say that Omicron has an r0 of 9 in a naive population. After an infection, your protection against reinfection is about 90%. These are both perfectly viable numbers, compatible with the literature. We will say 100% of the population has had an Omicron infection.
If a group of tourists were to show up who would reintroduce Omicron into the population, the r0 would now be 9 * 0.1 = 0.9. That is, any reintroduction of the virus into the population would infect a smaller group than the people who introduced it, who would in turn also infect a smaller group, leading to a small wave of infections.
Now we will say that after everyone lived through the first wave of this Omicron virus, a vaccine was administered that increased their risk of infection by 30%, as the Qatar study suggests is plausible in the long term. The r0 is now pushed up by 30%, from 0.9 to 1.17. Instead of naturally burning out before infecting the majority of the population, any reintroduction of the virus into the population would now lead to a growing wave, that ends up infecting everyone again.
If you completely take the studies at face value that claim vaccination reduces your individual risk of hospitalization by 80% or even 90%, that’s still not evidence that vaccinating everyone would reduce the total number of hospitalizations, because the nature of exponential growth means that slightly tweaking the r0 can make the difference between a tiny ~20% vaccinated Algerian Omicron BA.5 wave:
Or a sweet-baby-Jesus unprecedented 90% boosted Scottish wave of mass infection:
Note what we’re leaving out of the equation here: The obvious simple fact that we don’t want “mild” infections either. If you’re a true zero covid wokie, you shouldn’t be blindly swallowing the argument that it “still works to protect against severe disease”. If long term protection against reinfection is negative, the vaccine isn’t just bad: It’s an existential threat to mankind.
Personally, I’d be more than happy to concede that the vaccines may have reduced hospitalizations by a lot until late 2021. It’s a footnote compared to the total harm these vaccines will cause, if their long term impact on the population’s collective immunity proves to be negative.
This is the point I have painstakingly sought to make clear for over a year now. We can add all sorts of variables to our model to sink deeper into existential terror of course: Does a breakthrough infection in someone who already has been infected still help confer additional protection against the prospect of a third infection, or does it actually increase susceptibility? If you’re dealing with the latter scenario, which seems to be the case, then you can tip a population over into constant immunity depleting reinfections.
If you wish to give these vaccines to people, you would need to produce strong evidence that the long-term protection these vaccines give will continue to enhance whatever protection natural immunity incurs. If it happened to be the case for example that vaccinating a naturally immune person creates a “hybrid” form of immunity, of 70%, rather than 50% from vaccination alone or 90% from natural immunity, mass vaccination would easily be sufficient to mean the difference between herd immunity or constant waves of infection.
Evolution tends to endow every organism with the bare minimum traits it needs for its survival. For similar reasons, it’s possible to imagine our species was endowed with the collective immunological capacity to barely develop herd immunity against the Betacoronaviruses now plaguing us. If through some means we interfere with natural processes that aim to achieve that height of Darwinian achievement, we create an existential threat for ourselves: We’re the descendants of the people who did NOT have Betacoronaviruses constantly reinfecting them.
You don’t need the sudden emergence of a completely vaccine-evasive ADE variant with a 10-fold increased fatality rate to end up with a Geert van den Bossche type catastrophe. If you are a little more patient, you could achieve it simply with a vaccine that results in hybrid immunity of 80% protection against reinfection, whereas natural immunity offered 90% protection against reinfection.
If such reinfections were to trigger a positive feedback loop of further reinfections due to associated immune damage, you’ve now got yourself dealing with an existential threat. And again, this would all be perfectly compatible with Uncle Bob dying in the ICU in September 2021 because he didn’t “follow the science”. You can’t properly judge the effect of a vaccine like this within a year of its release.
Truly understanding how to deal with a virus of this nature requires understanding how corona viruses and vertebrates like us have had to interact with each other for millions of years. If you don’t learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it. That is what I aim on making my next post about.