Vaccine Effectiveness by Design
The argument that the vaccinations are effective at preventing transmission of the virus is becoming harder to maintain as more large scale, fully-vaccinated outbreaks become prevalent. I wonder if the vaccinated even batted an eyelash at the recent instance of a college football team having a widespread enormous outbreak.
With the heavy restrictions in California, especially at universities, it is pretty ironic that UC Berkeley’s football team had this outbreak. It reminds me of the gun control debate where the places with the heaviest restrictions on firearm use have the highest murder rate.
In this instance, it was not a matter of a few individuals on the team getting the virus. It was a huge amount of people:
I imagine this is not because the program was particularly vulnerable to catching the virus. Rather, so many positive cases were found because everyone was being tested. This works in conjunction with the fact that the people most likely to be tested, at least in my neck of the woods, are the unvaccinated (required for week 1-3 times a week at nearly every workplace). Sports programs are some of the few places that are regularly testing the vaccinated and reporting it.
Mostly, though, the vaccinated have been disincentivized to test.
In many places in Canada, at least, they have made testing extremely expensive, and in America, there was for a long period where the CDC recommended vaccinated people not to get tested if they were asymptomatic, yet unvaccinated people must get tested regardless of symptoms. That makes sense only if policy-makers are trying to rig the game in favor of VE.
A recent study from Lancet found no statistically significant difference in the spread within households (note: they did not mention that it was not statistically significant). Of course, the study was small and did show the vaccinated having a slightly lower rate of catching the virus within a household. In a larger sample, these differences may have been significant; though, one has to wonder about population characteristics (ie. children versus adults). I would guess that the small difference is closer to reality when it comes to VE than testing a non-random sample of the population and saying the vaccine is highly effective in the real world.
The fact of the matter is the data we have to work with is terrible. Part of that is because data collection is time consuming, costly, and difficult. But a larger part of that is by design. If there were no design, policymakers would strive to create a system where people are equally likely to be tested. They would avoid lumping the unvaccinated in with the vaccinated (ie. first dose less than 14-21 days rules). They would use rigorous controls to eliminate confounding variables when calculating VE. In other words, they would act completely counter to their current behavior.