Booster failure in Ontario

Finally, there is information from Canada on booster effectiveness, and we can add Ontario to the list of places where it is negative.

This is from an epidemiological report that covers October 31 to December 30

As we can see from the above chart, VE for boosters is -26% in Ontario; admittedly, this seems better than than -50% VE from two doses of the vaccine. But it is important to note: we are lacking information on how many single dosed individuals are being added into the unvaccinated cohort (first 14 days) and how many with boosters are being added to the breakthrough cohort (first 14 days). If we were to account for those numbers, VE overall and booster VE would both look worse. Although, it is unclear if boosters would have lower VE than breakthroughs.

A couple other interesting takeaways from the epidemiological data from Ontario…

1. 63.4% of cases were symptomatic. Only 7.1% of cases were asymptomatic, and the remainder of cases were “unknown”.

2. Hospitalizations and deaths in this death were low (79 and 2); BUT, the percentage of vaccinated hospitalizations from other government datasets went from 37% to 72% (and currently increasing rapidly) over the same time period used in this report. While deaths have not been high (10-15 per day), the province is just beginning to see massive outbreaks in LTC homes.

3. From (2), the question then becomes, is this report missing hospitalizations and deaths in high numbers, are the vaccinated doing extremely poorly against other variants as well, or are we closer to the true rate of those being hospitalized and dying WITH the virus rather than FROM the virus?

4. Only 0.6% of cases were considered reinfections.

5. From (4), the rate of reinfections is much lower than the rate of infections in any group, proving once again that natural immunity is superior in every way. Unfortunately, the data point of interest (reinfections by vaccination status) is missing.