What?
Are you really comparing rat and mice studies to observational research in humans that is following actual cases? It's not "a guy in a lab". The research cited above spans millions of people.
You're making it seem like the 50% of all vaccinated are evenly spread among the entire population, or maybe you've convinced yourself that is how it works. More than likely there are hot spots and low spots for vaccinations, and so when covid eventually hits areas with low vax rates then deaths will go up. That's not a conspiracy, it's common sense.
And let's not mention that the death rate in the US at one point was several thousand per day. Certainly not that many now, is it?
Yikes man.
And here I thought better of your research ability
Jesus man lol you are really stretching here.
Let's break it down: during summer, the death rate and hospitalization rate dropped. This was expected. We notice the same for colds and flu. Naturally, as we come into winter, the cases, hospitalizations and deaths are going to increase. Again, this is expected.
In many states mask use was eased around May and June - so it goes without saying that there would be an expected increase in cases in the following months. You might dispute the effectiveness of masks, but I could not care less.
But let's get into the real crux of it all:
Vaccination rates are extremely different state to state, age to age, and demographic to demographic. Just looking at total data and trying to extrapolate it to a completely different data set just doesn't work, nor was that the intention of the data.
if 100% of the people on the east side of town are vaccinated, and 0% of the people on the west side of town are unvaccinated, the total % may be 50%, but in reality one side is far more protected (according to the data) than the other. That 50% is not dispersed throughout the population. If a disease then rips through the west side of town and kills 50% of its total population, you don't say "how could this be when 50% of the population is vaccinated", because in reality 0% of that specific population was vaccinated.
I mean, you can twist it any way you like if it makes you feel better and that is 100% fine - the only person you have to justify it to is yourself. But you can't post a forbes article and act like that has the same weighting as observational data tracking millions of people, because they are not the same. At all.
I'm not comparing mice studies to observational studies....I was making a general statement with some humor. Are you comparing a study with a "millions of people" has the same power as an observational study, easily conducted by anyone, tracking literally the entire population? The Forbes article was just an article written using the observational data tracking the ENTIRE population, so you are right, it cannot be given the same weight. The underlying data has far more weight than the smaller studies.
Do you really believe this is a distribution issue?
Do you REALLY believe that if state A has 30 million people, state B has 30 million people, and we have a total death rate of 70,000 per year, that if I vaccinate state A and not state B - the death rate in state B will double because they weren't vaccinated?
I mean A + B = C in this case....so if I remove A entirely - how can B = C by itself? B would have to increase of course.
Obviously it isn't this cut and dry - but this would be the ultimate extreme of your situation and you can certainly see that the logic doesn't hold true if taken to it's ultimate point, so why would it hold true at a less-than-ultimate point? I mean, if uneven distribution is the reason deaths have not gone down, than any increase improvement in distribution from a complete segregation would be an improvement.
And, if distribution is the issue, and thus vaccinated people are doubling the chance of death for unvaccinated people - what does that mean for the have's and have-not's? I would guess the wealthy, as usual, are able to obtain resources and the poor have a harder time doing so, so does that mean that getting a vaccine is unethical? You are taking the risk that everyone was carrying and shifting it onto a subset of the group to carry by themselves?
The charts you posted actually may support this issue - which should give you ethical pause over mandates.
Further, are you stating that Joe Biden, handed 3 vaccines as he took office - has now flubbed the deployment and ultimately only managed to shift deaths onto a subset of the population, while not impacting the actual death rate as much as he should have?
Again, the charts you posted seem to suggest Joe Biden has really screwed this up pretty badly. They've really shifted the burden onto the have-nots in this case. I thought that was the type of thing his party fought against?
But hey, let's look at some data. You know, like VT. Since 71% of the population is vaccinated there - more than any other state. Since vaccinations help, shouldn't the state with the highest vaccination see the largest decline in deaths (and possibly infections although I think we all agree by now the vax doesn't do much for preventing infection)?
This posted 20 hours ago - Vermont just had it's highest number of infections in a single day on Friday:
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3 people dead - about 1%. Now, if you compare this to the entire US population - 46,146,676 cumulative cases and 747,957 dead, yeah - that's an improved death rate from about just about 1.6% to about 0.9%. Not too shabby. It ALMOST cut the death rate in half...not completely ineffective...but not hugely effective in a low-population state.
Here's more on VT:
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Don't get me wrong, I'm comparing the same population now to the most similar population a year ago - except even that is flawed because the weakest would be most susceptible and should have died in the beginning so today's population should arguably be more robust. But we can ignore that.
Or you can take the entire data set from today and compare it to the entire data set a year ago (meaning the entire US in my particular case - although the entire world would be appropriate). It's not blinded by any means since, hopefully, people who thought they were getting vaccinated were actually receiving the vaccine, but the data all points in the same direction - the vaccine may be mildly effective but it isn't anywhere near as effective as we would like.
To be clear, I'm not against getting a vaccine - I actually think that the vast majority of people should get it. What I'm against is the lack of skepticism and complete hubris that we have on display. Anyone questioning this vaccine should probably be doing so. Anyone not questioning this is likely being foolish.
I also get the knee-jerk reaction to my stance is a little conditioned, because there are a lot of stupid people with anti-vax ideas that just don't make sense.
Anyway, you always make me think. Thanks for that. My time is a lot more limited than normal so I may not have much time to return to this; but I always appreciate the push back and ideas. You're not wrong; I just have a different filter.