First infection rate report of 2022 from UK Health Security Agency (opens in new tab)

This is the second - non mainstream media - thing I've consumed this week that theorizes that it's not a pandemic of the unvaxinated, or even the unboosted. It there any chance this is going to be acknowledged by leadership?

As a PhD, I am at a loss of how to interpret any if this. I hear from so many er docs that's unvaxxed people are having kinds of complications whereas varied individuals they rarely worry about... they get better and then discharge them. This report seems to ignore death rates but yet the author is so sure vaccines are hurtful. I simple don't get it.

Footnotes are excluded from his analysis and are important.

1 Comparing case rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated populations should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 infection. Vaccine effectiveness has been formally estimated from a number of different sources and is summarised on pages 5 to 17 in this report.

So the report warns to not do exactly what he is doing.

Interesting, but not surprising, how he doesn’t screenshot the rest of the table that shows hospitalisation and death per 100k is vastly higher in all age groups for the unvaccinated

It seemed suspicious to me that the vaccine seemed to increase the rate of infection. I had no idea how it would do that, so I looked at the report itself. My initial suspicion was some confounding factors.

> As with all vaccines, the safety of COVID-19 vaccines is continuously being monitored by the MHRA. They conclude that overall, the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh any potential risks (2).

> We present data on COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status. *These raw data should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness as the data does not take into account inherent biases present such as differences in risk, behaviour and testing in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.* Vaccine effectiveness is measured in other ways as detailed in the ‘Vaccine Effectiveness’ section.

> Vaccine effectiveness is estimated by comparing rates of disease in vaccinated individuals to rates in unvaccinated individuals. Below we outline the latest real-world evidence on vaccine effectiveness from studies in UK populations. We focus on data related to the Delta variant which is currently dominant in the UK.

Nearly every statistic in the report except for this one showed that the vaccine was effective against COVID19. Look for yourself: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

UKHSA explanation for this one statistic: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2021/11/02/transparency-and-data-u...

- people who are fully vaccinated may be more health conscious and therefore more likely to get tested for COVID-19 and so more likely to be identified as a case (based on the data provided by the NHS Test and Trace)

- many of those who were at the head of the queue for vaccination are those at higher risk from COVID-19 due to their age, their occupation, their family circumstances or because of underlying health issues

- people who are fully vaccinated and people who are unvaccinated may behave differently, particularly with regard to social interactions and therefore may have differing levels of exposure to COVID-19 COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report – week 1 36

- people who have never been vaccinated are more likely to have caught COVID-19 in the weeks or months before the period of the cases covered in the report. This gives them some natural immunity to the virus for a few months which may have contributed to a lower case rate in the past few weeks