For the last year, liberals have demanded hysterically that everyone be vaccinated against covid. Many people who preferred not to be vaccinated, for whatever reason, have lost their jobs. Others have been denied access to restaurants and other public accommodations. But how well do the covid vaccines actually work?
Relatively soon after they became available, it became obvious that the vaccines do not necessarily prevent one from contracting, or spreading, covid. Fine, liberals said: the real point is that the vaccines prevent you from getting seriously ill so as to require hospitalization or even die. For a while, that claim seemed plausible. But more recent data indicate that whatever effectiveness the vaccines may have had at preventing serious illness is slipping away.
At Healthy Skeptic, “breakthrough” cases, hospitalizations and deaths are tracked over time for each age cohort. The data come from Minnesota, but there is no apparent reason why other states would show different results. You can see all of the charts at the link, but here are the key ones:
This is for the age group 50 to 64. It shows that around 78% of that group is fully vaccinated. Seventy percent of current cases are among the fully vaccinated, as are a majority of both hospitalizations and deaths:
So the protection provided by full vaccination is both modest and diminishing. Here is the same chart, but for ages 65 and up:
In this age range, where people are most vulnerable to covid, more than 90% are fully vaccinated. Unfortunately, 78% of covid cases, 71% of hospitalizations and around 70% of deaths are also among the vaccinated. So the protection isn’t zero–at least not yet–but it is weak.
A number of conclusions might be drawn from these data, but the most obvious is that no one should be fired, berated, excluded or otherwise punished for declining to be vaccinated against covid–especially since the potential adverse effects of vaccination are only now coming to light.
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