The CDC Director Rochelle Wallensky famously said recently that the COVID 19 spread is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” This claim has been repeated by a number of health professionals, the media and politicians.
Is this true? Well, it is actually quite easy to find out. All you have to do is compare the vaccination rate in various countries to each other and then the countries with the lowest vaccination rates per capita should have the highest number of deaths per capita. It is most helpful to compare like countries to like countries, and we will get to that in this post.
Well, let’s dig into the numbers from this helpful web site.
I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but let me put up a graph that has been circulated a lot lately to show you that the claims that this is a pandemic of the vaccinated are complete nonsense.
Here are the vaccination rates in four countries:
And now we can look at recent deaths.
So, how is it possible that India, with a very low vaccination rate, has fewer deaths per capita than Israel, with a very high vaccination rate?
You see what I am saying about nonsense?
But to be fair, comparing countries as dissimilar as India and Israel is problematic, so let’s look at the numbers for countries that are more like each other.
Let’s compare comparable countries in Southeast Asia with similar populations and climates.
Vaccination rates, Southeast Asia:
Deaths, southeast Asia:
What the what?
Malaysia has by far the highest vaccination rate but also the highest death rate. Hmmm.
How about Central American countries and Haiti, which I throw in because it is one of the least vaccinated countries in the world and has some similarities to Central American countries?
According to the medical/media/political establishment, Haiti and Nicaragua should have by the far the highest death rates, right?
Oops. The least vaccinated countries in this comparison have — by far — the lowest death rates. It is actually quite remarkable.
To provide a more complete picture, let’s take a look at northern European countries, which all have high vaccination rates and low death rates.
Now let’s look at another region of the world, the Near East and Greece and Macedonia.
Armenia, with the lowest vaccination rate, should be a killing field compared to its neighbors, right?
North Macedonia, with an average vaccination rate for the region, has a much higher death rate than other countries in the region and specifically Armenia, which has a very low vaccination rate.
What can we conclude? When you look at the numbers worldwide and compare like countries to like countries, there appears to be no real correlation between vaccination rates and death rates. There is a very strange correlation in many cases between higher vaccination rates and higher death rates, but this is not the case worldwide, and I would say that correlation needs more study.
But we can definitively conclude that this is NOT a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Thanks for this good info.
I’m starting to circle around the idea that this is all grounded in two problems:
First, lots of people feel like “we” “have to do something!”
Second, many of those same people won’t admit when something’s wrong.
It’s coming down to pride, so far as I can tell. Pride that something can be done. Pride that “science” or “medical care” or whatever is adequate to fix all sickness. Pride that “top people” have not made a mistake. Pride that we can be the masters of our environment and surroundings. Pride that if only people would listen to you, “we” would “all be fine.”
It’s Pride all the way down. What this all needs is humility. The humility to accept that nobody has all the answers. The humility to recognize that government leviathans are the least-equipped institutions to help individual people. The humility to admit that the guy you voted for doesn’t actually know anything (or worse, is actively lying to you).
It’s sad, really.
Lattertarian, good point. I would add that we must have the humility to ask ourselves why we have gotten through past pandemics that were just as bad without resorting to masking and lockdowns, etc, etc. And we should have the humility to ask why countries like Sweden, Nicaragua and Haiti — which never had any mandates — are doing just fine. And we need to have the humility to realize that everybody will eventually get this virus, so the government mandates did nothing except cause unnecessary pain and suffering for so many billions of people.
One other important point: as a world, we have never had as much prosperity, access to health care and safety as we have today. When you look at the long arc of history, all other times have been filled with wars, famine and illnesses. The vast majority of people throughout history worked 18 hours a day just to have enough food to survive. Yet now we sit at home in our air conditioned and heated homes with computers, washing machines, full refrigerators and cars, and we worry endlessly about things like a virus with a 99 percent-plus survival rate. We have lost all perspective on the realities of life.
Those of us who read the Book of Mormon know that this is part of the pride cycle. Things are about to get very bad because we are so filled with pride, but the bad times will create humility, which will make us better people for a time…
I’m digging all the charts. You know, actual data.
MC, you might be surprised (but probably not) to see how enraged commenters get when you create cognitive dissonance by giving them data that challenges their paradigms. So much rage and hatred. Luckily readers of this blog will never see those comments, which are immediately deleted. 🙂