Sir Patrick Vallance, the United Kingdom’s chief scientific adviser, has announced that 40% of people admitted to hospital with Covid-19 i...
Sir Patrick Vallance, the United Kingdom’s chief scientific adviser, has announced that 40% of people admitted to hospital with Covid-19 in the UK have had two doses of a coronavirus vaccine. At first glance, this rings very serious alarm bells, but it should not. The vaccines are still working very well.
There are several factors at play that explain why such a high proportion of cases are fully vaccinated.
Covid-19 vaccines are extremely effective, but none 100% so. This itself is not surprising – flu vaccines are not 100% effective either. Yet in the US alone flu vaccines are estimated to prevent millions of cases of illness, tens of thousands of hospitalisations and thousands of deaths every year.
The Covid-19 vaccines are doing the same in the UK right now – all one has to do is compare the curves from the winter wave with those from this summer.
As cases are rising, hospitalisations and deaths are rising too, but not at anywhere near the same level as they were in the winter. In the second half of December 2020 – a time when UK case rates were similar to what they are now – about 3,800 people were being admitted to hospital with Covid-19 each day. The average now is around...
