Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words

That Vaccinated Coworker is Not Even 10% Less Likely to Give You Covid than an Unvaxxed Coworker

County health data shows only 9.7% benefit to vaccines in preventing infection

February 3, 2022 - Vaccines to protect against Covid-19 became available to the general public in April, 2021. Since than over 7 million residents of Los Angeles County have taken the full dose of some form of the vaccine. The initial promise was a protection of 95% or greater from infection by Covid-19.

We thought it would be interesting to see how that promise has panned out and what the true effectiveness is in instituting vaccine mandates that exclude unvaccinated individuals or require them to pretest for Covid as if they are more likely to be carrying the disease.

Since June, when County health officials began releasing such data and when large numbers of people became vaccinated, there have been 1,316, 607 new cases of Covid-19.

579,591 of those cases, or 44%, occurred in vaccinated people.

During this 8-month period, the number of fully vaccinated individuals rose from an initial 3,736,175 to 7,027,619 on January 25. The average number of vaccinated people in the county during this period, then, was 5,381,897.

So, with 44% of Covid cases occurring in vaccinated individuals, who comprised an average of 53.7% of the population (of a little over 10 million), vaccines only provided an extra average benefit of 9.7%.

Vaccine mandates never made much sense. If vaccines were supposed to be so good at preventing infection, why should anyone care if they came into contact with an unvaccinated individual? And if vaccines were not doing a good job of preventing infection, such that the vaccinated needed to worry about encountering the novel coronavirus, then it didn't do them much good to stick around only other vaccinated people, who were in the same boat of potential infectiousness.

Either everyone should take a Covid test before entering that restaurant or stadium or going to work - or no one should. Making a distinction between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated regarding their potential infectiousness is a lie. There is almost no difference.

 
 

Reader Comments(1)

Tails877 writes:

Nobody cares about the infection rates of the common cold because it doesn't cause serious illness or death. The most important metric of a vaccine is not whether it prevents infection, but whether it prevents serious illness or death...The CDC notes that even the smallpox vaccine is only 95% effective...In another article you note how deaths from Omicron are 90% less than for Delta, for a similar number of infections, yet you fail to realize that this in part due to the vaccine. Why are you unable or unwilling to make the connection?