The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part III: The Pandemic of the Unvaccinated 

Remember the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”?

That was the phrase Biden used on Sept. 9 of last year in a speech at the White House. He said: “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. And it’s caused by the fact that… 80 million Americans have failed to get the shot.”

It was a phrase he got from CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who, two months earlier, said: “We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk. Communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well.” She also claimed that 97% of the hospitalized COVID patients were unvaccinated.

That became the rallying charge for the administration and the major media. The implication was clear. Vaccination skeptics were not just endangering their own lives but endangering the lives of everyone they came in contact with.

And that had a logic to it. When the vaccines were rolled out, we were told that they would be highly effective in protecting us from contracting the virus. And if we couldn’t contract it, we couldn’t spread it. So, we all had a moral obligation to be vaccinated. Right? Case closed.

But that 97% figure never felt right to me. For one thing, if the vaccines worked as promised, shouldn’t it be 100%? And even allowing for 3% “due to error,” that number seemed too low to me. I knew several people that had been vaccinated and were infected and heard about several more.

Could it have been misinformation? Disinformation? Unresearched speculation? But if so, why? We will probably never have a convincing answer to that question. But one thing we do know is that the vaccines failed to protect vaccinated individuals from contracting COVID, and it did not prevent them from spreading it. If you got your information from the mainstream media back then, this would have been a complete shock to you. But, in fact, this was known by anyone that was actually “following the science.”

“We can no longer say this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Kaiser Family Foundation Vice President Cynthia Cox, who conducted an analysis of the numbers, told The Washington Post a few weeks ago. The analysis showed that people who had been vaccinated or boosted made up 58% of COVID deaths in August. And the rate has been on the rise. 23% of deaths were among vaccinated people in September 2021, and the vaccinated made up 42% of deaths in January and February of this year.

So, what’s next?

The latest info begs the question: If the vaccines are not effective in protecting us from catching COVID and protecting us from spreading it, are they any good at all?

And the answer to that, the new argument goes, is that vaccines won’t prevent you from getting the virus – but if you get it, the symptoms will be much less severe.

Is that true? I hope so. But I did a preliminary look at the data supporting this claim, and I have some questions. I’ll get to that in a future issue.