Well? How about it? What does it mean?
When people say “we’re following the science!” or “we’re following the data!”, they’re fooling themselves. They’re following their opinions. Let’s say you observe 50,000 people dying of flu every year. What does that mean, in human terms? What is the importance of that number? What policy directions does it suggest? The number, in and of itself, tells you nothing. You have to attach value to it - your beliefs, your philosophical position - in order for it to mean something.
So: your numbers there. First observation is that the numbers for older people look rather implausible: 134 (per million) dead unvaxed for every 17 vaxed? If the vaccination rate for that group is 86%, that puts the vaccine efficacy (at preventing death by COVID) at around 87%. Same sort of figure comes out of the hospitalisation numbers for younger people (71% vaxed). That seems a lot higher than most authorities are claiming (40-70%).
But let’s take the data at face value. Well, in one month we’ve had 30/m working-age people in critical condition because of COVID. There are about 50m people in that age group, so 1500 of them had a nasty experience in hospital, and ~170 of them died (0.00034%). Of those, 80%+ had metabolic syndrome (as was always the case), a condition which is 100% preventable. 70% of the unvaxed in that age group walked out of hospital alive. To put all that in context, 10,000 people die in Germany every month as a result of smoking.
So is this an “epidemic”? Is it something that anyone needs to be very, very concerned about? You clearly think it is. But you can’t point to some immovable feature of the universe, some scientific fact, that defines it as such. It’s purely your opinion.
And then you have to ask: if this is important, can we do anything about it? And should we do anything about it? How expensive (in terms of life-hours and money consumed) will it be to make a difference? Can we spend that time and money more productively elsewhere? At this point we need to consider all-cause mortality, not just COVID deaths. The answers to these hard questions do not drop out of the numbers.
Finally: are there an increasing number of unvaccinated people ending up in hospital? If so, then it would suggest (but does not prove) that the vaccination programme is supporting the spread of unpleasant virus variants, exactly as you would expect. In some minds this would raise moral questions about the advisability of ignoring evolutionary biology when handing out vaccines. In other minds it would not, for various reasons (“the unvaccinated deserve what’s coming to them”, “the unvaccinated are stupid, and disposable in any case”, “vaccination is the best way to protect yourself so the unvaccinated should just get vaccinated”). But again, the numbers themselves don’t tell you what you should think.
Where have I done this? And why are you so obsessed with it?
I’m sure they all know a lot more about science that he does.
This.