The Herald Sun yesterday ran an analysis, Full impact of booster jabs on serious illness revealed, of Victorian statistics boosting boosters as a necessary part of COVID vaccination. The deputy chief health officer, Prof. O’Brien, even went so far as to characterize them as three dose vaccines; it’s not really a booster, so much as the third dose of a single regimen.
Within the article, the Health Editor promotes, with the use of a variety of statistics, the efficacy of the boosters. We are told:
Those with two vaccine doses have been 7.6 times more likely to be in ICU than someone who had three doses
Someone who was unvaccinated was more than 34 times more likely to be in ICU than someone who had received three doses
Those who are not vaccinated at all are 4.5 times more likely to be in ICU than someone who had received two doses
Setting aside that we are looking at the boosters at their full powers, in their first 2-3 months, before any significant waning in efficacy emerges, and where the 2 doses are now significantly waning in their efficacy being at least 3 months or more after the 2nd dose, we need to keep in mind that requiring ICU is a mere fraction of the number of positive cases that require hospitalization. The proportion varies from 10-15% of those hospitalized. Luckily, he included the likelihood of hospitalization according to vaccination status:
Since the Omicron wave ramped up on January 1, only one person in every 200,000 to receive a Covid booster has required hospitalisation, compared to 4.6 people in every 200,000 who have had only two shots. More than 6.1 people in every 200,000 unvaccinated Victorians have had to be hospitalised due to Covid since January 1.
The figures are breathtakingly low across the board. An unvaxxed person has a 1 in 33K chance of being hospitalized with COVID. And if we carry over the risk of being admitted to ICU for someone unvaxxed it would be in the order of 1 in 300K.
But, look, if you are in the business of peddling COVID porn, moving more Pfizer, etc. through vaccination centres, and justifying vaxx mandates, exaggerating the benefits of vaccination by continuing to employ relative risks, and not accounting for age, sex, health status when it is well within the Health department’s power to do so, why would you mention the staggeringly low risk of hospitalization for the unvaxxed from Omicron? And the even lower risk of ICU or death? Because it won’t attract eyeballs, won’t move more Pfizer, undermines the vaxx mandates, and so on. It would, essentially, confounded the entire COVID narrative. And so, they reach for the pillow.
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