More medical science advances (often called breakthroughs) are being made (faster than ever this century) and as expected, there are casualties (collateral incidents, unforeseen SAE ‘s- serious adverse events, outliers) along the way during 2020-2022, as the advances shifted to high gear, so did the casualties.
Two years after the first lock-downs, more than 11.3 billion doses of COVID19 vaccines had been distributed. By the end of 2022, 12.7 billion doses have been administered across 184 countries and many Covid Tracker websites have closed. I am starting to feel closure with the WHO announcement 5-5-2023, about the end of global emergency status, after 3 years of uncertainty. This experiment on, not necessarily consenting, humans revealed that the vast majority of side effects are mild. At this point, 79% of the U.S. population has had at least one shot. In countries that reached the highest levels of vaccination, death rates plummeted. After years of contradicting policies, censorship and exaggeration of benefits, in March 2023, the FDA and CDC made it clear that the primary purpose of vaccines is to prevent severe disease and death. Decreases in infection and transmission and severity were predictable as pandemics transition to endemic regardless of vaccination of populations. I got a lot of flak for posting this fact on FB in 2020. Vaccines have their uses, but people don’t realize the measles were never a pandemic and the worst polio outbreak, 1952 in the United States, had only 58,000 cases reported, resulting in 3,145 deaths. There is hope that vaccines have other benefits that include preventing infections, long COVID-19, days of work missed, reduced transmission, etc. but so far there is no evidence to make those claims. Countries with universal vaccination campaigns all had COVID19 soar anyway. In fact, there is evidence that the vaccination campaign prolonged or intensified the pandemic. Denmark was 80% vaccinated and saw 15x increases in cases over the pre-omicron high of 2020, compare that to what happened in Bulgaria with only 30% vaccine uptake-had only a 2x increase in infections during the omicron resurgence. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/bulgaria#what-is-the-daily-number-of-confirmed-cases The data in this worldwide experiment is still being collected in 2023, immunocompromised people are still dying of or with COVID19, but those numbers are reduced for the vaccinated. Among adults hospitalized for COVID19, 96% had at least one underlying condition. Among kids hospitalized 51% had at least one diagnosed condition. Younger and healthier people are staying out of the hospital from COVID19 for three main reasons:-
- Hybrid immunity. Younger people are more likely to have been infected. People with both vaccination and infection history have protection that lasts longer.
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- Less likely to have comorbidities. Their immune systems are less taxed.
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- Robust immune memories, particularly T-cells. Their thymuses (the organs that give rise to T cells) haven’t gradually degraded and memory is longer than waning antibodies from B-cells.
Mark writes on ... 