Why are the majority of Covid deaths now among vaccinated people?

There’s been a lot written about the fact that six in ten Covid deaths are now among vaccinated people. Does this mean that vaccines don’t work? Obviously, if that’s true, it fits in very nicely with a certain political narrative (not mine, to be sure).

However, my college roommate Mike Howard, just retired as a philosophy professor at the University of Maine, sent me the link to this article, which explains why more detailed analysis of the numbers shows just the opposite: that being vaccinated and boosted provides the best protection possible from dying if you catch Covid. Here are a few of the reasons why this is the case:

First, older people are much more likely to be vaccinated than younger people, and they’re also much more likely to die if they get Covid. That in itself gives a big bias to the numbers. The real question is how many more older people would die if they weren’t vaccinated, and the answer is clearly “a whole lot”.

Second, if you’ve been vaccinated but haven’t had a booster within the past year, you don’t have much immunity left from your vaccination. So you have to get the booster. And now it looks like we’ll need to get a Covid booster every year, just like some of us get a flu shot every year. Of course, the difference is that Covid is still much more deadly than the flu, so if you’ve gotten along without the flu shot so far and don’t think you need one, you shouldn’t assume you don’t need a Covid booster (and by the way, “booster” is really a misnomer. There’s no chemical difference between vaccination shots and boosters).

Third, as we all know, vaccination doesn’t prevent Covid infection, nor does it prevent death from Covid. So the fact that the percentage of people who die of Covid and are vaccinated has risen is in large part just a reflection of the fact that the percentage of people who are vaccinated has risen since vaccinations were introduced. Think about it: If 100% of the population were vaccinated, would every death from Covid be evidence that the vaccines don’t work?

Obviously not. But, to test that idea, you would have to compare deaths from Covid in a vaccinated population with deaths in an unvaccinated one. If the numbers of deaths were the same (and if the number of cases were the same), you could say there’s no advantage to vaccination. Of course, nobody can conduct such an experiment, but the US very graciously “consented” to do the next best thing two years ago: demonstrate that a population with a relatively large percentage of unvaccinated people will have a much higher death rate. And guess what? The US has the second-highest Covid mortality rate (after Brazil) of any large country. The experiment was successful!

By the way, this means I need to apologize to all the unvaccinated people in the US who have died of Covid. I had thought they were just being stubborn in not getting vaccinated, but now I know they had selflessly volunteered to be part of the control group in this huge experiment. It cost them their lives, but it advanced science, which I’m sure will be a great comfort to their families…

Also, I want to point out that Mike has been one of the foremost advocates of Universal Basic Income for decades – and now it looks like the idea is gaining a lot of momentum (in fact the child tax credit implemented during the worst of the pandemic, but unfortunately not renewed last year, was in many ways a test – quite successful – of that idea). Mike recently published a good article on UBI on Scientific American’s online service.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.